Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living alone on the frontier who has not dreamed of a barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequences of too much else. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe.

~ J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians