In 1931, Constantine Cavafy wrote a poem about arrogance, civilisation, and the blind spots of the victorious. Read it once, and it is about legacy vendors sleeping through a revolution. Read it again, and it is about us.

The First Reading: Except the Lacedaimonians

In March 2026, we can rewrite Cavafy’s inscription with almost no effort:

“The developers, the engineers, and the entire technology industry — except WordPress.”

WordPress powers 43% of the web. It has been the Sparta of the internet for two decades: dominant, self-sufficient, convinced that nothing of consequence can happen without it. A global expedition without WordPress in command? Not to be taken very seriously.

And yet.

Except WordPress at the AI revolution. Except WordPress when agents started building applications through conversation. Except WordPress when vibe coding turned a product idea into a deployed system in an afternoon. Except WordPress when the entire concept of “building a website” began to feel like asking someone to build a horse-drawn carriage in 1910.

The parallels with Cavafy’s Spartans are precise. The Spartans didn’t refuse Alexander’s expedition because they were weak. They refused because they believed their way was the only serious way. They had won eternal glory at Thermopylae — by losing. They had defined military excellence for centuries. A campaign led by a Macedonian upstart? Beneath them.

WordPress won’t ignore AI entirely — no legacy vendor can afford to. But bolting an API call to the user’s preferred LLM onto a twenty-year-old architecture is not adaptation. It is a cosmetic gesture. A single, breathless, half-hearted step that changes nothing fundamental. The CMS war was won. Web publishing was defined. The idea that the entire paradigm might shift underneath? Not serious. Not yet.

“That’s certainly one point of view. Quite understandable.”

And so, except WordPress, the world moved on. React, Next.js, serverless architectures, headless CMS platforms, AI-generated frontends, agentic workflows that can scaffold an entire application from a conversation. The Persians of legacy complexity were wiped out — not at Arbela, but in a thousand Slack channels and GitHub repositories where developers quietly stopped choosing the old way.

WordPress is not alone in this. Substitute any legacy vendor that confused market dominance with permanent relevance. The enterprise software giants charging six figures for what an AI agent now does in minutes. The consulting firms selling methodology when the client can now ship the product before the proposal is written. The cybersecurity vendors still selling signature-based detection in a world of polymorphic, AI-generated attacks.

They are all Spartans now. Proud. Capable. Irrelevant to the expedition.

The Second Reading: We Emerged

Now read the poem again. Not as a commentary on the Spartans. As a commentary on us.

“And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition, triumphant, brilliant in every way, celebrated on all sides, glorified as no other has ever been glorified, incomparable, we emerged: the great new Hellenic world.”

Listen to the cadence. The accumulation of superlatives. Triumphant. Brilliant. Celebrated. Glorified. Incomparable. Cavafy stacks them deliberately, excessively, until the praise becomes its own warning.

Now listen to us.

We emerged: the AI-native builders, the vibe coders, the hybrid human-machine teams, the agents, the prompt engineers, the new world. We carried our new common language — not Greek, but Python, not the Koine, but the prompt — as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians. As far as the edge of space itself.

Talk about WordPress after that!

Do you hear it? The same intoxication. The same blind confidence. The same implicit assumption that because we won, we will keep winning. That because we disrupted, we cannot be disrupted. That because we are the new world, we are the final world.

Cavafy’s Hellenistic speakers — the Alexandrians, the Antiochians, the Selefkians — did not know they were about to be swallowed by Rome. They genuinely believed their “flexible policy of judicious integration” and their common language made them invulnerable. They confused cultural reach with structural resilience. They confused the spread of their language with the security of their civilisation.

We are making the same mistake.

The Flexible Policy of Judicious Integration

That line from the poem — “our flexible policy of judicious integration” — is perhaps the most devastating. It describes exactly what we celebrate today: the ability of AI systems to integrate with everything, to adapt to any context, to be “flexible” and “judicious.”

But flexibility without understanding is not wisdom. It is compliance. And judicious integration without security architecture is not sophistication. It is an attack surface.

Consider what we have built in the name of this flexibility:

• AI agents with access to production databases, because it was faster than building proper interfaces
• Vibe-coded applications deployed to production without security review, because “the AI wrote it, it must be fine”
• Prompt-based systems handling sensitive data with no concept of authorisation, because adding proper access controls would slow down the demo
• Entire business processes delegated to LLMs that can be manipulated by anyone who understands how to phrase a request

We carried our common language as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians. We also carried our vulnerabilities, our assumptions, and our blind spots exactly as far.

Rome Is Coming

In Cavafy’s poem, Rome is never mentioned. That is the point. The speakers don’t see it. They are too busy celebrating the reach of their language and the brilliance of their conquest. They are composing inscriptions about the Spartans while the legions are already marching.

Our Rome could take many forms:

• A security catastrophe born from millions of AI-generated applications with no human review. Not one breach — a systemic, industry-wide failure that makes the SolarWinds incident look like a dress rehearsal.
• A quality collapse when the vibe-coded systems hit edge cases their creators never imagined, because the creators never understood what they built.
• A regulatory backlash when governments — the EU is already leading — decide that the speed of AI deployment has outpaced any reasonable framework for safety, and impose restrictions that make the current AI Act look permissive.
• A trust crisis when users discover that the systems they depend on were built by people who couldn’t explain how they work, using tools that don’t understand what they produce.

Or perhaps — and this is the truly Cavafian possibility — our Rome is something we haven’t imagined yet. Something that will seem obvious in retrospect but that our current triumphalism makes invisible.

Talk About Lacedaimonians After That

The genius of Cavafy is that both readings are true simultaneously. The Spartans were arrogant. Their refusal to join Alexander’s expedition was a mistake born of pride. And the Hellenistic world that emerged was genuinely remarkable — a civilisation that spread Greek language and culture across three continents.

Both things are true. The Spartans were wrong to sit it out. And the victors were wrong to think their victory was permanent.

WordPress is being left behind. The AI revolution is real. The applications being built today are genuinely remarkable. We are creating a new world.

And we are also, in our intoxication with what we have built, laying the foundations for whatever comes next to sweep us aside.

The question is not whether we are the Hellenistic world. We obviously are. The question is whether we have the self-awareness to see our own poem being written about us, in real time, and to build accordingly.

Cavafy knew. He always knew. The poem is not a warning about the Spartans. It is not even a warning about the Hellenistic world. It is a warning about anyone who reads it and thinks: yes, but that could never happen to us.