And now, what will become of us without the barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. - Konstantinos P. Cavafy

Ideal voices and beloved
of those who have died, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes, within our dreams, they speak;
sometimes the mind can hear them in our thoughts.
And with their sound for an instant return
sounds from the early poetry of our lifelike music in the night, faraway, that fades.

How much we’ll tell down there, how much, and how very different we’ll appear. What we protect here like sleepless guards, wounds and secrets locked inside us, protect with such great anxiety day after day, we’ll disclose freely and clearly down there.

And in Spain Galba secretly musters and drills his army — Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.