“The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians.”

— Tzvetan Todorov

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Tzvetan Todorov 9

Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary cr… 1939–2017

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“Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

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Source: Waiting for the Barbarians (1904), l. 26
Context: Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

“We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”

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“In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: This and That and the Other (1912), Ch. XXXII : The Barbarians , p. 282
Context: In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

“Rome was ruined more by neglect of agriculture, and giving no attention to useful trade and commerce, than by the invasion of barbarians.”

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Source: Essays on Husbandry (1764), p. 11; Cited in: Joe Bord (2009) Science and Whig Manners: Science and Political Style in Britain, C.1790-1850.

“Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

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Uncle Vanya (1897)

“Again, therefore, the wretched remnant, sending to Aetius, a powerful Roman citizen, address him as follow:—"To Aetius, now consul for the third time: the groans of the Britons". And again a little further, thus:—"The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us, we are either slain or drowned."”
Igitur rursum miserae mittentes epistolas reliquiae ad Agitium Romanae potestatis virum, hoc modo loquentes: ""Agitio ter consuli gemitus Britannorum""; et post pauca querentes: ""repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur"".

Gildas De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

Igitur rursum miserae mittentes epistolas reliquiae ad Agitium Romanae potestatis virum, hoc modo loquentes: "Agitio ter consuli gemitus Britannorum"; et post pauca querentes: "repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur".
Section 20.
These "Groans of the Britons" were sent to the Roman military leader Flavius Aetius in Gaul, in response to the invasion of Britain by the Angles and Saxons.
De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain)