In the video above, Lau­rie Ander­son describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, giv­en that it con­tains an emper­or, sen­a­tors, and ora­tors, though Cavafy him­self said that none of them are nec­es­sar­i­ly Roman. The uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion the poem describes, in which a state’s elite turn out in their fin­ery despite hav­ing noth­ing to do but await the tit­u­lar bar­bar­ian inva­sion, cer­tain­ly has­n’t been lost on its inter­preters. J. M. Coet­zee, for exam­ple, set his nov­el Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians on the edge of an unnamed “Empire.” Ander­son also men­tions think­ing, while con­sid­er­ing the poem’s evo­ca­tion of gov­ern­ment dead­lock, “Hang on, this sounds famil­iar” — and none can deny that com­par­isons between the Unit­ed States and the declin­ing Roman Empire have been in the air late­ly. That, in part, inspired the per­for­mance that fol­lows, in which Ander­son and a ver­i­ta­ble Greek cho­rus inter­pret both “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Itha­ca” (which you can also hear read …