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Vickers - Otium
Vickers - Otium
Scholars are ashamed of otium. But there is something noble about leisure
and idleness. - If idleness really is the beginning of all vice, then it is at any
rate in the closest proximity to all virtue; the idle man is always a better
man than the active. - But when I speak of leisure and idleness, you do not
think I am alluding to you, do you, you sluggards? -
Nietzsche I
An earlier, and much shorter version of this essay, was the Annual Lecture of the Society for
Renaissance Studies, on 29 January 1988. I t is dedicated to Paul Oskar Kristeller.
’ Nietzsche, Memchliches, Allzumemchlzches. 1.284, ‘Zu Gunsten der Mussigen’, in Friedrich
Nietzsche, Samtlzche Werke, ed. G . Colli and M. Montinari (15 vols, Berlin, 1967- ) II (1967). 132.
’ T h e works cited here, in sequence, are: E . M. W . ‘Tillyard, Some Mythical Elements in English
Lzterature (London, 1961), 82; John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Maruell. His LzJe and Writings (London,
1978), 48; Michael O’Loughlin, The Garlands of Repose. T h e Literary Celebration oJ Cmic and
Retired Leisure (Chicago. 1978), 121-2; George de F. Lord, ‘From contemplation to action:
Marvell’s poetical career’, in Lord (ed.) Andrew Maruell. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, 1968), 55-73, at p. 57 (first published in Philological Quarterly, 1967); George d r F.
Lord, ‘Innocrnce and experience in the poetry of Andrew Marvell’, Br L i b r J , 5 (1979), 129-50, at
p. 131; J. B. Leishman, The Art qf.MarueZl’s Poetry (London, 1968), 303-4, 308; Don P. Norford.
‘Marvell and the arts of contemplation and action’, E L H , 41 (1974), 50-73, at p. 54; John S .
Coolidge, ‘Marvell and Horace’, Mod Philol, 63 (1965), 111-20, at p. 117;John M. Potter, ‘Another
porker in the Garden of Epicurus. Marvell’s “Hortus” and “The Garden”’, Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900, 11 (1971), 137-51, at pp. 140-1; Maren-Sofie Rglstvig, The Happy Man.
Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal, Vol. I : 1600-1 700, 2nd, rev. ed. (Oslo, 1962).
75-80, and passim; Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Maruell and Renazssance Pastoral (Cambridge, Mass.,
1971), 155: Harry Berger, ‘Marvell’s “Garden”: still another interpretation’, Mod Lung 4, 28 (1967),
285-304, at p . 286; Lawrence V. Hyman, Andrew Marvel1 (New York, 1964), 72; Frank Kermode,
‘The argument of Marvell’s “Garden”’, Essays Crit, 2 (1952), 225-41, at pp. 296, 303; Leishman, op.
czt., 20-2; Lord, op. cit. (1968), Introduction, 8 ; Lord, op. cit. (1967), 55; Isabel Rivers, T h e Poetry
of Conservatism, 1600-1745 (Cambridge, 1973), 102.
’ Jonson, Epz‘rammes, X W . ‘To Sir Henrie Savile’, 11. 25-6; The Complete Poetry of Ben
Jonson, ed. W. B. Hunter, Jr (Garden City. NY, 1963).
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 3
While Christian contemplation provided a legitimate way of life, it was
always in danger of being scorned by the vita activa, and its defendants
took care not to present the Christian as a being isolated from family or
society - indeed, the whole concepts of charity and the reciprocal exercise
. ~ persona
of social and religious duties prevented any such i ~ o l a t i o nThe
in ‘The Garden’, judged by these criteria, is guilty of hedonism, selfish-
ness and the arrogant rejection of God’s will. His otium is anything but
admirable, and stands in sharp contrast to Marvell’s thirty years of public
service, as Latin Secretary, MP for Hull, representative of the Trinity
House and confidential agent for two administrations.
On the active and contemplative lives in the Renaissance see, e.g., H . Baron, T h e Crisis of the
Early Italian Renaissance. Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in the Age of Classicism and
Tryanny, rev. vol. I (Princeton, NJ, 1966); E. F. Rice, T h e Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1958); C. Trinkaus, Adversity’s Noblemen. T h e Italian Humanists o n Happiness
(New York, 1940); F. Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago, 1954);
B. Vickers (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation. Betrachtungen zur Vita activa und Vita contemplatim
(Zurich, 1985), especially the contributions by P . 0. Kristeller, Victoria Kahn and Letizia Panizza.
Some useful doctoral dissertations include C. A. L. Jarrott, ‘The English humanists’ use of Cicero’s
De officiis in their evaluation of active and contemplative life’ (Stanford University, 1954: University
Microfilms no. 54-9,500); J. J . Cogan, ‘ “For contemplation hee and valor form’d”: the dichotomy of
the active and the contemplative lives in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Parudise Regained, and Sam-
son Agonzstes’ (Marquette University, 1976; U. M. no. 76-21,472); F. E. Nicola, ‘The active and the
speculative modes of life in classical antiquity and in the quattrocento humanists’ (University of
California, Berkeley, 1976; U.M. no. 77-15,689).
For corrective criticism to the notion of Marvell as apolitical see, e.g., Caroline Robbins, ‘A
critical study of the political activities of Andrew Marvell’, Ph.D. diss. (London University, 1926);
Dona1 Smith, ‘The political beliefs of Andrew Marvell’, U Toronto Q, 36 (1966-7), 528-40; John M.
Wallace, Destiny His Choice: T h e Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968); Annabel Patter-
son, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ, 1978); Hilton Kelliher, Andrew Maruell, Poet B
Politician 1621-78, British Library Tercentenary Exhibition Catalogue (London, 1978); and
Warren L. Chernaik, T h e Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell
(Cambridge, 1983).
‘ Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W . Glare (Oxford, 1982), 1 1 , 1277-8. T h e otium entry
distinguishes ti main senses, (1) unoccupied or spare time; (2) freedom from business or work, leisure;
(3) relaxation from pain, toil, etc; (4) public peace and tranquillity; (5) the state of doing nothing:
inactivity; idleness; also, leisureliness; ( 6 ) a temporary cessation, respite. This is to give an
anachronistic, modern interpretation, based on our notion of leisure. T h e entry for otiosus similarly
downplays the pejorative associations.
4 Brian Vickers
o t i u m has largely negative associations, only removed by some specially
qualifying epithet o r noun-phrase. Now t h a t the Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae has reached t h e letter 0, with an excellent entry on o t i u m (by
Eva Baer) running t o some twelve columns, we have a n authoritative
record of its range of meanings, both positive a n d negative.’ T h e m a i n
heading defines t h e conception as ‘I. usu originario de quolibet statu
quieto, vacuo’, which is then divided into A. animantium (the major
entry) and B. r e r u m . A. is then subdivided into (1) hominum; (2)
n u m i n u m d i m n o r u m et diaboli; (3) animalium. For h u m a n beings there
a r e two m a i n sense-groupings, t h e first being: ‘a potius negatur actio, fere
i. q . vacatio, cessatio a b actionibus, occupationibus, negotiis sim.; .
quolibet respectu: (1) exempla varia selecta . . .; . certo quodam res-
pectu’. T h e n follows this division:
’ Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, IX,2, fasc. viii (Leipzig, 1981), cols 1175-87. Older studies that
have been superseded by the Thesaurus entry include Ernst Bernert, ‘Otium’, Wurzburger
Jahrbucher fur die Altertumwissenschaft, 4 (1949-50), 89-99; W. A . Laidlaw, ‘Otium’, Greece d
Rome, 15 (1968), 42-52. Fritz Schalk’s study, however, ‘Otzurn im Romanischen’, repr. in Vickers
(ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation, 225-56, valuably documents the diffusion of both meanings,
favourable and (especially) pejorative, into French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 5
The second main heading is of things connected with otium:
rerum (sc. quibus ipsis motus quidam vel actio tribuitur; certiora quaedam
attulimus; hic illic etiam cum contemptu dictum):
1. in usum hominum adhibitarum: a. instrumenti vice fungentium; b.
aliarum.
2. ad ipsos homines pertinentium: a. corporis, membrorum sim.
3. rerum naturalium: a. venti, maris sim. de malacia’ (in comparatione maris
et animi); b. stellarum, lucis. . . .
The text cited here, Seneca, Epist., 67.14: ‘in otio inconcusso iacere non est tranquillitas:
malacia est’, is disputed (unnecessarily, in my view, given the metaphor of a calm or ‘dead sea’ with
which Seneca begins), some scholars reading ‘malitia’.
’ Bernert, ‘Otium’, 89 note: ‘auch der Gegensatz zu otiosus [ist] niemals negotzosus, sondern
occupatw . . .’.
l o Andre’s first publication in this field was Recherches sur l’otzum Romazn (Paris, 1962 =
Annales Littdraires de l’llniversitd de Besanpn, vol. 52), of which the first section (pp. 5-25)
discusses ‘Les origines de I’otium: conjectures itymologiques et rialitis simantiques‘, and the second
(pp. 27-81), ‘Otium, retraite et conversion 2 la sagesse chez Sineque’. His major study is L’otium
duns la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines a l’dpoque augustdenne (Paris, 1966). Other
relevant publications are ‘L’otzumchez Valere-Maxime et Velleius Paterculus . . .’, Rev Etud L, 44
(1966), 294-315; ‘Le De Otzo de Fronton et les loisirs de Marc-Aurele’, Rev Etud L , 49 (1971),
228-61; Les lozszr~en GrBce et Rome (Paris, 1984); and ‘La sociologie antique du loisir et son ap-
port 2 la riflexion moderne’, in Vickers (ed.), Arbezt, Musse, Meditation, 35-63.
6 Brian Vickers
legitimate goal in the alternating rhythm of work and relaxation. I
Although later Greeks, especially bilingual writers like Plutarch and
Polybius, might use schole' in the pejorative sense of 'idleness' or 'time-
wasting', this is a kind of back-formation from the negative side of
otium. I * The etymological and semantic researches of Andre' and others
have established that otium was never a translation of schole', but derived
from specifically Roman contexts. '' The formation of negotium (or nec-
otium) shows that the first concept formulated in Latin was otium: 'in the
beginning was leisure', so to speak.14 Yet 'leisure' was always a relative
concept, 'correlative', as Andrk puts it, with 'work' or 'employment'.'5 It
always needed either justification or more specific definition.
The first recorded use of the term is in a fragment from a soldiers'
chorus in Ennius' Iphigenia (c. 190 BC), whose preservation we owe to
that philologian's ragbag, the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (c. 150 AD) -
he cites it as an example of the usage of the word praeterpropter
(19.10.12).16 The soldiers are unoccupied, resting and bored, wanting to
return home. They distinguish between otium negotiosum, leisure with a
satisfying occupation, which takes place in the city, around the hearth,
and otium otiosum, unoccupied and pointless leisure, such as their pro-
longed stay in the countryside, which they find disorientating. '' Andre'
argues that otium originally had military, not pastoral associations, refer-
ring to the enforced inactivity that coincided each year with the dead
months of winter (especially January and February), unsuitable for war,
farming or fishing." This early sense of otium, then, linked it with the
time which the individual, free from demands of the state, could devote
to his private affairs, looking after his estate or patrimony, a concept
which became legitimized subsequently in the form otium privatum =
n egot ium .
The great early exemplar of the fruitful use of otium was Marcus Por-
cius Cat0 (234-149 BC), farmer, lawyer, orator, general and moralist. As
the embodiment of the old Roman virtues of industry, thrift, frugality,
Cat0 pursued a long campaign against the vices of luxury, self-
indulgence, pleasure and, inevitably so, idleness. '' Cato's attack on
" See, e.g., F. Solmsen, 'Leisure and play in Aristotle's ideal state', Rheznzsches Muscum f u r
Philologie, N.F. 107 (1964), 193-220; Andre 1962, 12-16; Andre 1966, 55 n. 6, 61 n . 25, 149-50.
l 2 Andre' 1966, 35n., 60.
* ’ AndrC 1966, 29-30, 62 (although I feel that here and elsewhere AndrC‘s statement that Seneca
‘rehabilitated’ otiosw or some aspect of otzum begs the question of how many people who read
Seneca changed their minds as a result).
” Ibzd. 40-9 (although I must record some disquiet at the way in which AndrC slides over the
awkward fact that Cato, as reported by Gellius, does not actually use the word otium, but finds it
‘latent’in his text, or ‘in process’, its absence ‘significant’:51, 53).
” Ibid. 49-56. See Noctes Attzcae, 6.3.14, 13.25.14: ed. cit., 11, 14-15, 494-5.
’‘ Noctes Attzcae, 11.2.6;ed. cit., 11, 302-5. Gellius (16.1) records another speech by Cat0 oppos-
ing labor and voluptas. See also Cato’s speeches as chronicled by Livy, 34.2, 39.40.11-12.
’’ And78 1966, 30, 45; Cicero, Pro Plancio, 66.
’’ De off., 3.1.1.; repeated in slightly different terms, De rep., 1.17.27.
8 Brian Vickers
vices of otium, inertia, luxuria, torpedo, avaritia. Otium was always a
threat or a danger to this mentality. As the entry from the Thesaurus has
already shown, Roman generals seem to have been obsessed with the fear
that their armies might degenerate if given too much leisure, and spent
every spare minute building roads or improving fortifications. 2 7
The widely expressed fear was that otium, if indulged in, would bring
with it a chain of other vices. These attitudes recur, as Andre‘ and others
have shown, in Roman comedy, often in an inverted form. Plautus
( c . 251-184 BC) had served in Cato’s army from 195 BC onwards, and ex-
presses many of the values of the mos maiorum by the attitudes and
vocabulary associated with his parasites (and never with his heroes or
heroines). 2 8 These resourceful embodiments of pleasure and ease, dedi-
cated to the vita otiosa, either speciously claim to be involved in officium
and negotium, such as Curculio the parasite, or the old man Lysimachus
(in Mercator - who uses the term to justify an amorous interlude), or else
flaunt their dedication to otium and voluptas, such as Ergasilus (in Cap-
tivi‘), Periplectomenus (the Miles Gloriosus) and the old man Demiphon
(in Mercator - who thereby violates the Roman code for the moral
behaviour of the elderly as summed up by Cicero in De senectute and De
officiis). Plautus also uses his slaves to expose the pejorative sense of
otzum, linking it with such terms as zgnavia, inertia, desidia (the young
man in Bacchides is said to live a life of desidiabula - ‘the realm of Cock-
ayne’, perhaps), and those concomitants of laziness, shadow and softness.
In addition to showing his disreputable characters degrading otium and
amoenitas (which parasites and courtesans use as a euphemism for sexual
pleasure), Plautus includes diatribes by spokesmen of Roman morality.
Alcumena (in Amphitryon) expresses the constant Roman hostility of vir-
tus to voluptas. The father in Bacchides denounces modern vice,
associated with shade and concealment, while several characters attack
the voluptuary Lesbonicus in Trinummus. In the Palliata, otium appears
an unqualified good to the parasites and ne’er-do-wells, but dangerous
and decadent to all decent people: like Petrarch’s garden of Venus (in his
Trionfo d’Amore), which ‘par dolce a i cattivi, e a i buoni agra’ (‘seems to
the wicked, sweet, and bitter to the good’29).
Lest the moralists’ attack on otium as the cause of all evil, found in
many Roman proverbs (otia dant vitia; mens otiosa in mille furias inczdit;
homines, d u m nihzl agunt, male agere d z s c ~ n tseem
) ~ ~ to be one-sided, let
us recall that the word could also have the perfectly legitimate connota-
tions of pax and p i e s , which to a state recovering from the Punic Wars
” Ibid. 80.
’* Andre 1966 discusses Cicero at great length, indeed several passages several times over,
somewhat muddling his chronology: see pp. 29-30, 33-4, 37-40, 42, 45-6, 53, 58-60, 114, 121-2,
136-81, 210-22, 229, 243-6, 251-8, 267, 276, 279-334, 335, 337, 373, 386, 397, 421, 438. See also
Ch. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate
(Cambridge, 1950), and ‘Cicero’sCum Dignitate Otium: a reconsideration’,JRom Stud, 44 (1954),
1-13; J. P. v. D. Balsdon, ‘Auctoritas, dignitas, otzum’, Classical QUUTteTly, n.s. 10 (1960), 43-50;
Georg Pfligersdorfer, Politik und Musse. Zum Proomium und Einleitungsgesprach von Ciceros De
Re Publica (Munich, 1969); W. K. Lacey, ‘Boniatque imprObi’,,Greece@Rome, 17 (1970), 3-16.
Less valuable is Marianne Kretschmar’s dissertation, Otium, studia litterarum, Philosophie und bios
theoretikos im Leben und Denken Ciceros (Wurzburg, 1938).
” De lege agraria, 2.37.102 (pacem, tranquillitatem, otium). See also ibid. 2.4.9 (‘What is so
welcome to the people as repose, which is so pleasant that both you and your ancestors and the
bravest of men think that the greatest labours ought to be undertaken in order to enjoy repose some
day, especially when accompanied by authority and dignity’); Pro Sestio, 49.104; Wirszubski 1954, 4
and notes 29-31.
I‘ See De domo sua, 12-13, 53.137; Ad Att., 14.2.3; De leg. agr., 2.37.102-3; Balsdon, ‘Auc-
tontas, dtgnitas, otium’, 49; Wirszubski 1954, 4-5: Andre 1966, 296-8.
Cited in n. 32 above, both of whom site the phrase firmly in its political context. Older studies,
now largely superseded, include E. Remy, ‘Dignitas cum otio’, La Mwe Belge, 32 (1928), 113-27; P.
BoyancC, ‘Cum dignitate otium’, Rev Etud Anciennes, 43 (1948), 5-22, repr. in P. BoyancC, Etudes
SUT l’humanisme cickonien (Brussels, 1970), 114-34; A. Grilli, ‘Otium cum dignitate’, Acme, 4
(1951), 227-40. The phrase recurs in Ad Fam., 1.9.21, to Lentulus (December, 54 BC).
10 Brian Vickers
course, but it represents a harmony where the political organism is func-
tioning as a unit, and it is anything but selfish. Where otium was often
linked with the sib2 uuere of Epicureanism, that devotion to the in-
dividual’s tranquillity which necessitated a total and self-centred
withdrawal from politics, otium c u m dignitate was based on the moral
imperative, so frequently expressed in Cicero’s philosophy, of the need to
act for the good of one’s fellow men. The locus classicus for this concept is
a passage in the speech Pro Sestio, 138-9,36where he describes the self-
imposed burden of the principes optimatium:
men of this kind have many adversaries, enemies, enviers; they face
many dangers, suffer many iniquities, must bear and submit to great
toil. But my entire discourse is concerned with virtue, not with sloth;
with dignity, not with pleasure; with those men who consider them-
selves born for their country, for their fellow citizens, for praise, for
glory, not for sleep, and banquets, and delight. For if there are men
whose motive is pleasure, and who have entirely given themselves up to
the seductions of vice and the gratification of their desires, let them re-
nounce public offices, let them stay away from the commonwealth, let
them be content to enjoy their leisure that they owe to the exertions of
brave men. But those who desire to be reputed good by good men,
which alone can be truly called glory, ought to seek tranquillity and
pleasures for others, not for themselves. They must toil for the advan-
tage of the community, must incur enmities, must often face storms
for the sake of the commonwealth, must fight with many audacious,
wicked, and sometimes even with mighty opponents.
From that extended antithesis we can see all the negative connotations of
otium from which Cicero is studiously guarding himself: desidia, volup-
tas, somnus, convimum, delectatio, mtium, lenocinium.
In attempting to legitimize his own political activity, then, Cicero in-
voked otium as a desirable goal of politics while disowning its pejorative
associations. When the upheavals of Roman politics threw him out of
office and favour into an enforced retirement, otium was once again called
on, this time to legitimize his inactivity, sometimes in the formula
honestum otium. Consciously modelling himself on those great Roman
figures, Cat0 and Scipio Africanus, Cicero justified his inactivity in public
life by the fruits of his otium, the series of works in philosophy and
rhetoric which kept his name famous long after the infighting of Roman
politics disappeared into dust and footnotes. In the prooemium to De
oratore he recorded his envy for those men of old who could enjoy otium
c u m dignitate, whereas his strenuous career had allowed ‘no enjoyment of
’‘ I cite the translation by Wirszubski (1954 article, 1 0 - l l ) , which is rather more pointed than thr
version by R. Gardner in the Loeb edition. The central section of the argument is Pro Sestio, 45.97-
49.105, recapitulated at 65.136-66.139. Compare similar statements on the duty of devoting one’s
energies for the good of others in De republica, 1.1.1-1.8.13, and De officzis, 1.7.20-1.7.22.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 11
leisure’ (fructus otii): now, however, ‘every moment of leisure’ shall be
dedicated to his writing (1.1.1-3). In the prooemia to two other major
treatises, De republica, and De officiis (Book three), he evaluated his own
situation by contrast with that of Scipio. In the latter he describes how,
‘kept by force of armed treason away from practical politics and from
practice at the bar’, he is now ‘leading a life of leisure’ ( o t i u m perse-
quimur), and since he has left the city, wandering in the countryside, he
too is alone (3.1.1). But if he resembles Scipio in this, their two types of
otium differ. Scipio’swas voluntary, ‘for he, to find leisure from his splen-
did services to his country, used to take a vacation now and then and to
retreat from the assemblies and the throngs of men into solitude, as into a
haven of rest’. Cicero’s otium, however, ‘is forced upon me by want of
public business, not prompted by any desire for repose’ (nostrum a u t e m
otium negotii inopia, n o n requiescendistudio constitutum est: 3.1 .2). Yet
- and here Cicero begins to turn the comparison to his own advantage -
he has learned from philosophy to extract good from evil, and so ‘I am
turning my leisure to account - though it is not such repose as the man
should be entitled to do who once brought the state repose from civil
strife - and I am not letting this solitude . . . find me idle’ (3.2.3). The
opposition there, otio fruor against solitudinem languere patior, shows
the dangers of ‘languishing’ or being ‘listless’in a solitary state.
However, Cicero concludes (somewhat insincerely we may feel), Scipio
earns the higher praise, for ‘no literary monuments of his genius have
been published, we have no work produced in his leisure hours (opus
otiz), no product of his solitude’, which proves that his pure mental activity
was sufficient to keep him ‘never unoccupied, never lonely’ (nec otiosum,
nec solum: 3.1.4). Cicero, however, lacking sufficient ‘strength of mind
. . . by means of silent meditation’ to forget his solitude, has turned all his
‘attention and endeavour to this kind of literary work’. He, then, unlike
Scipio, has something to show for his leisure, and something that will
benefit his fellow men. As we know from some famous passages in De
ofJicZis,” Cicero believed that the gift of reason and speech, ratio et
oratio, laid a duty on man to communicate his knowledge to his fellow
men in speech or writing, and in these apologies for his retirement he
fulfils his own injunction. Once again he will be a public benefactor, en-
joying otium if not c u m dignitate then c u m honestate: this is an otium
honestum, he claims, a virtuous leisure. 3 8 Having earlier in life voluntarily
I’ 1.16.50-1; 1.26.92; 1.44.56. See also &fin., 2.14.45-6; Pro Marcello, 25.
Is For other uses of the term otium honestum see B r u t w , 2.8: ‘It was to me a particular sorrow,
that after a career of conspicuous achievements, at an age when it was my right to take refuge in a
harbour, not of indolence and sloth, but of honourable and well-ordered ease’ ( t a m q u a m in portum
confugere deberet non inertiae neque desidzae sed oti moderati atque honestz) - that then civil
violence should have broken out. See also A d Fam., 4 . 4 . 4 (45 BC),4 . 9 . 3 (46 BC), 5.21.2 (46 BC),
7.33.2 (46 BC: honestissirno otio perfrut]; A d A t t . , 1.17.5; Pro Sulla, 9.26. A rare comment on the
pleasurable aspect of study is in Twculan Disputations, 5.36.105, ’Quid est enim dulcius otio lit-
terato?’, but the context shows that he means utile as much as d u k e : ‘For what is more delightful
12 Brian Vickers
abandoned the ‘fruits of leisure’ in study that he could have enjoyed more
than other men ( e x otio fructus: De rep., 1.4.8), in order to serve the
state, Cicero now turns this enforced idleness to the benefit of others. He
was ‘languishing in idle retirement’ ( c u m otio langueremus), he explains
in De natura deorum (1.4.7), when he decided that the task of ‘expound-
ing philosophy to my fellow countrymen was actually my duty in the in-
terests of the commonwealth’. In the first dialogue of the Academica he
explains that, being ‘released from taking part in the government of the
country’, philosophy has become ‘the most honourable mode of amusing
my leisure’ (otii o blectationem hanc honestissimam iudico), an occupa-
tion which suits his age, or else is the nearest to being praiseworthy, ‘or
else is the most useful means of educating our fellow citizens’, and is in
any case, he says rather candidly, the only occupation he can now pursue
(1.3.11; similarly 2.2.6). That somewhat gloomier note shows the extent
to which, in these public treatises, he is putting on a brave face, turning
himself into another example of Roman mktus, like Scipio or Cato. In his
private correspondence Cicero is a good deal more scathing about his
idleness. ’
The negative connotations of the term are always present in these
apologiae pro otio S U O . Other men, however, far from having otium
thrust upon them, seek it out and indulge in it at the expense of others.
Both in his philosophical and political controversies Cicero delivered
bitter diatribes against those who chose a life of ease, equating such otium
with voluptas, desidia, inertia and every other vice. In his early textbook
of legal rhetoric, De inventione, Cicero advises how to advance one’s own
cause by discrediting the other side: ‘they will be brought into contempt if
we reveal their laziness, carelessness, sloth, indolent pursuits or luxurious
idleness’ (1.16.22: si eorum inertia, neglegentia, ignama, desidiosum
studium et luxuriosum otium proferetur). Epicurus and his followers
receive sustained denunciations, sometimes gently, as in De oratore,
where one of the speakers attacks them for their dedication to voluptas,
but refrains from disturbing their repose in their own ‘charming gardens’
(3.17.62-3: sed in hortulis quiescet suis ubivult . . . recubans molliter ac
delicate). Elsewhere Cicero shows more anger, especially in De finibus,
with its concentrated attack on the consequences of the Epicurean advice
to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This principle is a form of selfishness
than leisure devoted to literature? That literature I mean which gives us the knowledge of the infinite
greatness of nature, and, in this actual world of ours, of the sky, the lands, the seas’.
39 Compare Ad A t t . , 11.14.1,where he describes himself as eneruatus [in] hoc otzo, quo nunc
tabesczmus: ‘For my part I have so lost my manly spirit that I prefer to be tyrannized over in peace
and quiet such as is now rotting our fibre than to fight with the rosiest prospect of success’ (c. April
59 BC); trans. D. R . Shackleton Bailey, Czcero’s Letters t o Atticus (Harmondsworth, 1978). 99.
Andre 1966 comments that tabescere expresses the idea of ‘mort vivante‘ ( 3 4 ) , ‘cet &at de vide mor-
bide’ (222). Earlier that month Cicero had described himself as ‘so in love with idleness [complexus
otium] that I can’t tear myself from it . . . I find any excuse for idleness good enough’ ( A d A t t . ,
11.6.1-2).
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 13
destructive of society. The man who lives for himself, Cicero affirms,
denies the family, the state, virtue, honesty, gratitude, and puts in their
place egoism, a hedonism worthy of beasts and a perversion of all the vir-
tues. 40 The Tusculan Disputations continue the assault, opposing virtue
and philosophy against Epicurean hedonism, which, Cicero sadly notes, is
spreading through Roman society: ‘we have corrupted our souls with
bowered seclusion, luxury, ease, indolence and sloth, we have enervated
and weakened them by false beliefs and evil habits’ (5.27.78: nos umbris,
deliciis, otio, languore, desidia a n i m u m infecimus . . .). In contemporary
politics two of Cicero’s enemies embodied Epicurean vice, Piso, the tool of
Clodius, and Catiline. Piso is insulted as Epicure noster, ex hara pro-
ducte, n o n ex schola (‘my worthy Epicurus, though product of the sty
rather than the school’: I n Pis., 16.3), and is condemned as the last word
in luxuria, libido, voluptas (27.66-7). To Cicero Catiline represented a
summation of all human vice, so he presents Rome’s contest with him in
terms of a battle between good and evil: ‘on this side fights modesty, on
that shamelessness; on this chastity, on that wantonness’, and so on, op-
posing honestas to turpido, continentia to libido, ‘aequitas, temperantia,
fortitudo, prudentia, virtutes omnes certant cum iniquitate, luxuria, ig-
navia, temeritate, cum vitiis omnibus’ (2 Cat., 11.25). Catiline’s followers
are ‘cowards . . . drunken . . . sluggards. . . . These men, I tell you,
reclining at their banquets, embracing harlots, stupid with wine [who
languidi], stuffed with food, crowned with wreaths, smothered with
unguents, weakened by vice, belch forth in their conversation the murder
of good men and the burning of the city’ (ibzd. 5.10). Idleness encourages
all the other vices.
The conspiracy of Catiline was interpreted in similar terms by another
writer thrown into otium litteratum by the revolutions of politics, Sallust,
a supporter of Caesar who found himself, after the tyrant’s assassination,
reduced to writing histories. Although of an opposite political persuasion
to Cicero, Sallust felt obliged to make the same apologiae for his enforced
idlenes~.~’ In the prooemium to T h e W a r with Catiline he writes (in terms
that were to be echoed by Renaissance apologists for poetry) that ‘It is
glorious to serve one’s country by deeds; even to serve her by words is a
thing not to be despised . . .’ (3.1). Where Cicero had presented his
public career as a wholly admirable sacrifice of the self for the good of the
commonwealth, Sallust condemns himself for having as a young man
taken part in public life, being ‘led astray and held captive by ambition’,
his ‘desire for preferment’ leading only to ‘ill repute and jealousy’ (3.3-5).
Once his ambitio mala had been defeated by political vicissitudes,
however, and he ‘found peace’ in deciding to abstain from public affairs,
his resolution echoed Cicero’s exactly: ‘it was not my intention to waste my
42 Ibid. 381.
43 Ibid. 434-54. I have benefited from D. Packard, Concordance to LZq (4 vols, Cambridge,
Mass., 1968). Livy’s indictment of otium as the setting for vice which led to the rape of Lucretia is
repeated by Ovid in Fustes, 2.724ff cf. Andre 1966, 451.
16 Brian Vickers
powers’ (25.7.1 1: vir inquieti animi et minime otium, quo turn diutino
senescere videbatur, patientis), started a conspiracy. It is among a group
of young princes, who ‘frequently spent their leisure in feasting and
mutual entertainments’ (1.57.6) that the wager arises which leads to Tar-
quinius’ rape of Lucretia, with all its fateful consequences.
To the early Roman militaristic ethos city life could only seem idle.
Thus senators urged that if moneys captured from the enemy were given
to the army, then the plebs would not have to pay so much war-tax, ‘nor
would the hands of idle city-folk [manus otiosorum urbanorum], greedy
of pillage, pluck away the rewards of valiant fighting-men’ (5.20.6). A
Roman consul invites city-dwellers who ignorantly criticize his military
policy to join his army: ‘if anyone is reluctant to do this and prefers the
leisure of the city [otium urbanum] to the hardships of campaigning
[milztiae Zaboribus], let him not steer the ship from on shore’ (44.22.14).
In early Rome the whole citizenship had been soldiers of necessity, but
the peace following their victories was often seen in negative terms, a
source of danger. Numa Pompilius was concerned lest the people’s
‘dispositions, which the fear of enemies and military discipline had hitherto
restrained, should grow licentious by tranquility’ (1.19.4: ne animz . . .
luxuriarent otio, ‘luxuriate’ implying the undisciplined growth of plants,
producing excessive foliage but no The next king of Rome, Tullus
Hostilius, ‘thinking that the state was growing languid through inactivity
[senescere otio], sought on all sides for an occasion of stirring up war’
(1.22.2). In ‘prosperous times’, Livy writes, political measures are carried
out ‘without spirit and in leisurely fashion’ (23.14.1 : segniter otioseque
gesta), and he frequently contrasts otium with military energy.45War is
healthy, as one speaker puts it, a remedy against peace: ‘a nation wasted
away in a state of peace could be aroused from its stupor only by the din
of arms’ (33.45.7: marcescere otisitu queri cimtatem et inertia sopiri nec
sine armorurn sonitu excitari posse). Other passages express the same
anxiety lest peace and idleness should corrupt the populace (otio lascivire
plebem, 2.28.6; ex copia deinde otioque lascimre rursus animi, 2.52.2;
segniter, otiose, neglegenter, contumaciter omnia agere, 2.58.7).
If otium is dangerous to the city, how much more threatening it is for
an army. Dissension is equally liable to arise, as it does in the campaign
fought by Scipio in 206 BC, ‘owing to the usual licence resulting from long
inaction’ (28.24.6: licentia ex diutino, ut fit, otio conlecta). An earlier set
of rulers ‘knew that military discipline had grown slack from easy living
and idleness’ and resolved to enlist new armies (40.1.4: luxuria et otio
‘‘ Andre 1966, 437, 33. The contrast was still operative for two of Shakespeare’s servants, who
knowingly pronounce that ‘This peace is nothing but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-
makers’. 1 S e w . ‘Let me have war, say I , it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s sprightly,
waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy, mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insen-
sible . . .’ (Coriolanus, 4.5.219).
Andr6 1966, 439.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 17
solutam disciplinam militarem). The careful general, in order to ‘prevent
his troops from growing slack through idleness’ (40.21.1: ne otio miles
deterior fieret), sets his army to scale a mountain, or build a road
(39.2.6). Hannibal is the type of prudent leader, who crosses the Pyrenees
‘in order that his troops might not become demoralized by delay and in-
action’ (21.24.1: ne mora atque otium animos sollicitaret). Winter is the
most dangerous time, when the soldiers ‘are being supported in idleness’
(44.20.4: in otio militem a li) , The need of finding something to occupy
the army is so widely understood that one of the leaders of a conspiracy
against the tyrant Nabis can advise him to ‘take such steps as not to per-
mit what troops he had to grow soft in idleness under roofs’ (35.35.9: non
sineret sub tectis marcescere otio), the tyrant’s subsequent appearance
at military exercises giving the conspirators the chance to kill him
(35.35.19). The power of otium to corrupt body and mind is registered so
strongly by Livy that he introduces a new word to qualify it, marcescere
(or marcere), to wither, droop, become feeble, a ‘strikingly poetic’ term
not found in Caesar and Cicero, and only in Livy’s third and fourth
decades.46The effect of inaction can be seen on Hannibal’s soldiers, who
normally ‘delighted more in booty and rapine than in quiet and repose’
(22.9.5: otio uut requie), but who, in 218 BC, were unable to fight since
‘the soldiers while convalescing felt more keenly than ever the distress aris-
ing from the hardships they had undergone; for rest coming after toil
[ o h m enim ex lubore], plenty after want, comfort after filth and wet,
produced all manner of disorders . . .’ (21.39.2). Any notion of ‘reculer
pour mieux sauter’, or of easing the bow from being constantly stretched,
seems foreign to Roman military thinking.
Livy’s most sustained analysis of the corruptions of idleness is his ac-
count, in Book 23, of the fate of Hannibal’s army exposed to the delights
of Capua, a town in Campania notorious for its softness and indolence.
Cicero once rejected a proposal to settle a colony there as unsuitable,
Capua being ‘a place which, owing to the fertility of its lands and the
abundance of all produce, is said to have given birth to pride and cruelty’
(Leg. ugr., 1.6.18 - the Capuans were said to watch gladiatorial combats
while feasting). ‘What is to be guarded against’, Cicero asked, ‘in establish-
ing colonies? If it is luxury, Capua corrupted Hannibal himself’ (1.7.20),
for the ‘arrogance and intolerable fierceness’ found elsewhere in Cam-
pania yielded, in Capua, to ‘the most indolent and slothful ease’ (2.33.91:
inertissimum uc desidiosissimum otium perduxerunt). Writing his history
of the Second Punic War a generation later, Livy gave further credence to
what has been called ‘the myth that Hannibal’s soldiers were demoralized
ending in -escere are known as inchoatives, i.e. pointing to the beginning of an action, or process.
Besides marcescere we find similar formations elsewhere in Cicero (hebescere, lunguescere), Livy
(senexere) and Sallust (torpescere). The form obviously expresses the feeling that such behaviour,
once indulged, will lead inexorably downwards.
18 Brian Vickers
by wintering in Capua after the battle of Cannae’.47After that battle (216
BC), where he inflicted on the Romans the worst defeat they had known,
Hannibal was held back by the courage of the small Roman force holding
the town of Casilinum, outside Capua (23.17-18). Frustrated, he retired
into winter-quarters at Capua, where, according to Livy,
he kept under roofs for the greater part of the winter troops that had
been hardened long and repeatedly against all human hardships, but
had no experience or familiarity with comforts. And so those whom no
severe hardship had conquered were ruined by excess of comfort and
immoderate pleasures and the more completely ruined the more eagerly
they in their inexperience had plunged into them. For sleep and
wine, and feasts and harlots, and baths and idleness, which habit
made daily more seductive, so weakened their bodies and spirits that it
was their past victories rather than their present strength which there-
after protected them. . . . (23.18.10-13)
Here the old Roman virtues, with their fear of self-indulgence, softness
and physical pleasures, express full disapproval of otium and its con-
comitants which grow more attractive, yet more enervating every day
(. . . et otium consuetudine in dies blandius ita enervaverunt corpora
animosque).
The result of this winter of ease and indulgence is that Hannibal sets
out again from Capua as if ‘with a different army, not a trace of the old-
time morale survived. For they came back most of them ensnared by
harlots’ and so debilitated that they collapsed on the march, or simply
deserted (23.18.14-16). When he renews his attack on Nola the following
spring the Romans hold out bravely, and their leader Marcellus exhorts
them to greater efforts against an enemy who was disintegrating,
‘weakened by Campanian luxury [marcere Campania luxuria], exhausted
by wine and harlots and every kind of dissipation the whole winter
through. . . . Gone was that force and energy, lost the strength of body
and spirit with which they had crossed the ranges of the Pyrenees and the
Alps. . . . Capua had been Hannibal’s Cannae’, that place caused the
ruin of ‘warlike courage, military discipline, past fame, and future hope’
(23.45.1-4). Hannibal in turn rebukes his army for their collapse: their
arms and standards were the same, ‘but as for the soldier, he had cer-
tainly led one man into winter quarters at Capua, and out of them a dif-
ferent man. . . . “Is the sword now blunted? Or are your right hands
l 7 Laidlaw, ’Otzurn’,44. F. G . Moore notes in the Loeb edition, vol. VI of the Livy series, p. 62,
that Strabo (5.4.13) confirmed this explanation for their decline, but that Polybius (11.19.3) denied
it. Seneca, describing Baiae, a ‘fashionable and dissolute watering-place’ near Naples, as the Loeb
editor terms it, concludes that ‘we should toughen our minds, and remove them far from the
allurements of pleasure. A single winter relaxed Hannibal’s fibre; his pampering in Campania took
the vigour out of that hero who had triumphed over Alpine snows. He conquered with his weapons,
but was conquered by his vices’: E p . , 5 1 . 5 .
Leisure and idlefiess: the ambivalence of otium 19
benumbed?” ‘ ( a n dextrae torpent?: 23.45.6-10). But more than their
hands are paralysed, and the army suffers a crushing defeat. Treating the
same topic in his Punic W a r , Silius Italicus ascribed Hannibal’s failure,
more precisely, to the intervention of Venus, goddess of tiu urn.^^
I1
From this brief survey we might well conclude that the majority of
Romans would have taken great pains to defend themselves from any
suspicion of indulging in ease and sloth. One group, however, flaunted
their otium, took it, indeed, as a defining characteristic of the state in
which they found themselves, being in love. For the writers of Latin
elegiacs - Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus, Ovid - otium is at times the
condition of paralysis in which love has plunged them, at other times the
vacancy which love will fill.49The lover accepts all the pejorative terms
linked with otium by the moralizing historians, orators and philosophers
- desidia, ignavia, inertia, segnitia - and glories in them as the proof of
his state, happy or miserable. So Tibullus begins his collection by
pointedly rejecting the acquisition of wealth, preferring poverty and ‘a
quiet path of life’ ( m e mea paupertas vita traducat znerti), and opposing
to the activity of others his own state of complete passivity:
It’s right that you should go to war on land and sea, Messalla,
So that your house can display the enemy spoils:
But the claims of a beautiful girl hold me fettered;
In fact I sit as a porter at her stubborn door.
A good reputation, Delia, is none of my concern - provided
I’m with you, I’m happy to be known as feckless and
What seems outrageous to lookers-on, from the vita activa, is for the lover
a state to be prayed for ( t e c u m / t u m mod0 sim, quaso segnis inersque
vocer). Propertius, too, lays himself down before his mistress’ doors,
‘adventuring naught’ (ante fores dominae condar oportet iners: 3.7.72).
The juxtaposition of ‘love-in-idleness’,as a Shakespeare character calls it,
with the uncomprehending world of public life, is also found in Proper-
tius, 1.12:
his translation.
‘’ Woodman 1966. See also (less penetrating, but with useful additional references to the
Hellenistic historians‘ use of truphd, luxury, to account for decadence in states) Eduard Fraenkel,
Horace (Oxford, 1957), 211-14. On truphi in Polybius see also Andre 1966, 195-6, 371.
Tusc. Disp., 5.6.16: ‘when a man in frivolously excited, and in a transport of empty dclight and
reckless extravagance [laetztza exsultans et temere gestzens], is he not all the more wretched . . .?’
Those men ‘are happy whom . . . no lusts inflame, no vain transports of delight dissolve in the
melting lassitude of pleasure.’ Compare also Cicero’s attack on ‘exuberant pleasure’ (volupta.c grs-
tzens) or ‘joyexcited beyond measure by the idea of some great present good’, as a disturbance of the
soul (3.11.24-5). since ‘extravagant and exuberant delight’ in the expectation of pleasures ‘is
disgraceful’ (exsultans gestiensque laetitza turpzs est: 4.31.66.).
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 23
pleasures, provided that he does nothing immoral, and in good time
abandons these vain and ‘empty desires of youth’ with proper disgust: ‘let
him at length turn to the interests of home life, to activity at the bar and
in public affairs’ (Pro Cael., 18.42). Catullus’ recoil on himself, and on
otium, is exemplary.
Ovid too, in his turn, denounced otium in his Remedia Amoris, or at
any rate identified it as the precondition for love. Whether this work is to
be taken as a mock-serious palinode o r as a straightforward warning
against love in the moral-hortatory tradition of the monita, is a moot
point.59The cardinal rule for avoiding the pains of love is: shun otium!
Fac monitis fugias otia prima meis 136
Haec, ut ames, faciunt, haec, quod fecere, tuentur;
Haec sunt iucundi causa cibusque mali
Otia si tollas, periere Cupidinis arcus, 139
Contemptaeque iacent et sine luce faces.
Quam platanus vino gaudet, quam populus unda,
Et quam limosa canna palustris humo,
Tam Venus otia amat; qui finem quaeris amoris, 143
Cedit amor rebus: res age, tutus eris.
Languor, et immodici subnullo vindice somni,
Aleaque, et multo tempora quassa mero
Eripiunt omnes animo sine vulnere nervos:
Adfluit incantis insidiosus Amor.
Desidiam puer ille sequi solet, odit agentes: 149
Da vacuae menti, quod teneatur, opus.
In Peter Green’s lively translation:
No leisure - that’s rule
Number one. Leisure stimulates love, leisure watches the
lovelorn,
Leisure’s the cause and sustenance of this sweet
Evil. Eliminate leisure, and Cupid’s bow is broken,
His torches lie lightless, scorned.
As a plane-tree rejoices in wine, as a poplar in water,
As a marsh-reed in swampy ground, so Venus loves
Leisure: if you want an end to your loving, keep busy -
Love gives way to business - and you’ll be safe.
Listlessness, too much sleep (no morning appointments),
nights at
The gambling-tables, or on the bottle - these
Inflict no wounds, yet ruin your moral fibre, open
19 Andre 1966, 227-9 takes it in the latter sense, basing himself on Karl Prinz, ‘Untersuchungen zu
Ovids Remedia amoris’, Wiener Studien, 36 (1914), 36-83, and 39 (1917), 91-121; 259-90. To me it
seems rather a matching work in the rhetorical tradition of in utrumque partem dikerere, full o f wit
and ingenuity. On Ovid’s use of parallel arguments, pro and contra. see A. S. Hollis, ‘The Ars
amatoria and Remedia amoris’, in Ovid, ed. J . W . Binns (London, 1973), 84-115, at 1Cnff.
24 Brian Vickers
A way for insidious Love to breach your hearts.
Cupid homes in on sloth, detests the active - so give that
Bored mind of yours some really absorbing work . . .
(136-50)
Public business, the law courts, the army (traditional enemy to otzum):
any of these should do the trick! Here Ovid - who had himself rejected all
these occupations in the vita actzva - joins the moralists, who had seri-
ously recommended work as the antidote to love.6oReaders who enjoyed
Ovid’s casting of the Ars amatoriu in the form of the classical didactic
poem will have appreciated the wit with which these admonitions are
developed, and the flippancy with which apparently serious instances are
cited:
Quaeritis, Aegisthus quare sit factus adulter?
In promptu causa est: desidiosus erat.
(161ff: ‘Why do you think Aegisthus / Became an adulterer? Easy: he was
idle - and bored . . . / Love was better than doing nothing. /That’s how
Cupid slips in; that’s how he stays.’) Not only idleness must be avoided:
solitude too, where the lover by definition is unoccupied, must be shunned:
Quisquis amas, loca sola nocent, loca sola caveto!
Quo fugis? in populo tutior esse potes. (579-80)
(‘Lonely places, you lovers, are dangerous: shun lonely places, /Don’t opt
out - you’ll be safer in a crowd.’)
Ovid can, seemingly, both celebrate and denounce this Janus-faced
concept. A related word sharing the same ambivalence as otium, depen-
dent on context, is umbra. Shadow, the shade of a tree or simply being
indoors, outside public life and activity, is the traditional resting-place of
the smitten lover, who is often found in a reclining position (as in the line
from Ovid quoted above: mollierant animos lectus et umbra meos).
Where the open air, sun, heat and dust, the sweat of exertion, are the
necessary and honourable conditions for the work of the farmer, the
soldier, and the orator, in much Latin literature to prefer shadow is
the mark of idleness, indulgence, and who knows what other vice.6’
Already to the Greeks life lived in shadow was a life unprepared for war
and military discipline, the life of an effeminate or anti-social man.62
In just the same way the Romans regarded the vita umbratilis as debilitat-
ing, and equated umbra with mollitia, desidza, segnitia, ignavia. All
‘O Andre 1966, 229, cites Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.74ff. On Cicero’s Greek sources see
Max Pohlenz, ‘Dasdritte und vierte Buch der Tusculanen’, Hermes, 41 (1906), 320-55, esp. at 345ff.
‘’ A useful survey is Volkmar Holzer, Umbra: Vorstellung und Symbol im Leben der Romer,
Ph.D. diss. (Philipps-Universitat zu Marburg/Lahn, 1955). T h e article by P. L . Smith, ‘Le ntw in
Umbra: a symbolic pattern in Vergil’s Eclogues’, Phoenix, 19 (1965), 298-304, has some sensitive
comments on pastoral and love-poetry.
‘* Holter 1955, 80--99.
Leisure and idleness: t h e ambivalence of otium 25
honourable activities in public life took place in sole et pulvere, as Horace
reproached young Sybaris for neglecting his knightly exercises on the
Campus Martius:
Why does he whom sun
Nor dust could ever deter effeminately shun
The heat-baked exercise-ground?”
The white-skinned man has never been exposed to hard work: Mollitia
urbana atque umbra corpus candidumst, one Plautus character observes
of another (Vindularia, 35ff: ‘Your skin’s all white from the soft,
sheltered city life you’ve led’). In every branch of the vita activu the op-
position sun: shadow was one between public life, manliness, virtue, hard
work on the one hand, and on the other private life, effeminacy,
selfishness, idleness and vice. In rhetoric, so important to Roman public
life, boys were trained in the shade of the declamation-school but emerged
into the sun of the forum64- a contrast that still held good for Milton,
long after the Roman forum and the orator had ceased to be.65In the
pithy formulation of Cicero, arguing that the virtues of the soldier exceed
those of the lawyer or orator, cedat . . . f o r u m castris, otium militiae,
stilus gladio, umbra soli6‘ (Pro Mur., 30: ‘Let the forum yield to the
camp, leisure to military life, the pen to the sword, and shade to sun’).
Shadow is not a negative in every context, of course. For farmers and
shepherds, as for their cattle, a tree could provide welcome relief from the
midday sun, and in pastoral poetry the shepherd/poet may legitimately
rest in the shade while his flock is feeding - since he has very little else to
do. Virgil uses the word umbra or its derivatives some seventeen times in
the Eclogues, almost always without any pejorative overtones.” In the
Odes, 1.8.4ff; trans. James Michie (Harmondsworth, 1967; repr. 1970). On Roman disapproval
of shade (to express which umbratzcw was used as an insult) see Andre 1966, 93, 410ff; Holzer 1955,
100-110 and passim.
6 4 On the contrast shade /sun in the rhetoric schools see Holzer 1955, 111-22, and Wesley
Trimpi, ‘The meaning of Horace’s Ut pictura poesis’,/ Warburg C, 36 (1973), 1-34, at pp. 10-16.
61 ‘
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies
out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for,
not without dust and heat’: Areopagitica (1644), in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed.
M. Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), 728.
66 Holzer 1955, 112, equatesforum, otium, stzlus, umbra as ‘Metaphern des burgerlichen Lebens’,
but they are clearly the attributes of one group of professions in the retired life, which is being
declared inferior to public life.
6 7 Smith 1965, 298-301. I cannot agree, however, that Virgil ‘seems to endorse the Epicurean
ideal of ataraxia or disengagement from the world of restless activity’ (p. 301). The shepherds are not
philosophers; and they are working. Daphnis invites Meliboeus to join him: ‘ “Your goat and kids are
safe, and ifyou can idle awhile, pray rest beneath the shade”’(7.9ff, my italics: ‘si quid cessare potes,
requisce sub umbra’). Cf. also Martial, 5.20: ‘Si tecum mihi, care Martialis, /securis licet frui
diebus, / si disponere tempus otiosum / et verae pariter vacare vitae . . .’ (‘If I and you, dear Martial,
were permitted to enjoy careless days, if permitted to dispose an idle time, and both alike to have
leisure for genuine life . . .’ - we should avoid power, public life, and prefer ‘the colonnade, the
garden’sshade . . .’). The point of such ‘wish’poems is that the desired-for state is the more attractive
since unavailable.
26 Brian Vickers
first Eclogue Meliboeus, who has no land of his own, and is soon to be
exiled to hot and dusty Africa, says rather enviously to Tityrus (who has
both leisure and stability of tenure): ‘nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre,
lentus in umbra / formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas’ (1.4ff: ‘We
are outcasts from our country: you, Tityrus, at ease beneath the shade,
teach the woods to re-echo “fair Amaryllis”’). Tityrus may praise the god
who gave him his otium (deus nobis haec octia fecit), but some modern
scholars see in this remark less divine favour than a critical comment on
Octavian’s land policy.68Shadow and repose are indulged in by Virgil for
a time, but the concluding Eclogue represents a farewell to Pastoral:
surgamus: solet esse gravis cantatibus umbra,
iuniperi gravis umbra, nocent et frugibus umbrae,
ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae. (10.75-7)
(‘Let us rise; the shade oft brings peril to singers. The juniper’s shade
brings peril: hurtful to the corn, too, is the shade. Get ye home, my full-
fed goats - the Evening-star comes - get ye home!’) These allusions -
made more pointed by the rhetorical figure epistrophe placing the word
at the end of the first three clauses - are to the negative connotations of
umbra within Roman agriculture beliefs. These included sunless crops;
the poison shades of juniper, walnut, pine and other trees; the gloomy
chill of night, associated with death and the underworld”.
Evidently Virgil consciously used the motif of leaving the shade, emerg-
ing into a more noble state. The ambivalent concept of umbra allows him
to accept, and then reject, concealment. If Virgil’s Eclogues evoke the
shepherd’s life, the Georgics move on to the harder life of farmers, with
their all-conquering ‘insatiable toil’ (labor omnia vi’cit improbus,
Georg., 1.145ff). Yet this mode of poetry, too, can be set aside as un-
worthy of the poet’s vocation in the vita activa. At the end of the fourth
Georgic Virgil writes an epilogue, or rather a palinode to this and the
earlier collection:
Thus sang I of the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great
Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates, and gave a victor’s law
unto willing nations, and essayed the path to Heaven. In those days I,
Virgil, was nursed of sweet Parthenope, and rejoiced in the art of in-
glorious ease - I who dallied with shepherds’ songs. . . . (4.559-66)
The poet preparing to write The Aeneid is no longer the Virgil who
reproached himself for having indulged in studiis . . . ignobilis oti.
Those who chose to remain in shadow ran great risks in Roman life,
signalling in this way their abandonment of all the supportive values of
public vi’rtus. Tacitus paints a desperate picture of the Emperor Vitellius,
who, on the eve of a military campaign, refused to ‘invigorate his soldiers
‘” Smith 1965, 300-1 and n. 12.
See Smith 1965, 303-4, and Holzer 1955, 59ff. 63-74
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 27
by encouraging speeches or warlike exercises’, and quit the public eye
altogether. ‘Buried in the shade of his gardens, like those sluggish animals
which, if you supply them with food, lie motionless and torpid, he had
dismissed with the same forgetfulness the past, the present, and the
future’, and ‘lay wasting his powers in sloth’ (. . . umbraculis hortorum
abditus, ut ignavia animalia . . .).’O The philosophical sect which espoused
retirement and pleasure, the Epicureans, were often accused of all the
vices resulting from voluptas, including a perverse liking for shadow. In
his treatise De beata vita (7.3) Seneca juxtaposes virtus and voluptas as
irreconcilable opposites:
Virtue you will find in the temple, in the forum, in the senate-house -
you will find her standing in front of the city walls, dusty and stained,
and with calloused hands; pleasure you will find more often lurking
out of sight, and in search of darkness, around the public baths
and the sweating-rooms and the places that fear the police - soft, en-
ervated, . . . and pallid.
In De beneficiis Seneca returns to the fray, denouncing the Epicureans’
inertia: ‘You count it pleasure to surrender your miserable body to slug-
gish ease, to court a repose that differs not much from sleep, to lurk in a
covert of thick shade and beguile the lethargy of a languid mind with the
most delicate thoughts, which you call tranquillity, and in the secret
retreats of your gardens to stuff with food and drink your bodies that are
pallid from inaction. . . . ’ ’ I The whole repertoire of Roman pejoratives
seems to be released by any one of the key danger words, otium, or
umbra, or voluptas.
Seneca, like Horace, is sometimes invoked as accounting for a supposed
vogue for retirement in the seventeenth century, yet neither writer can be
reduced to that simple formula. The most frequently cited text in Horace
is the second epode:
Beatus ille qui procul negotiis
ut prisca gens mortalium
paterna rura bobus exercet suis
solutus omni faenore,
neque excitatur classico miles truci
neque horret iratum mare,
forumque vitat et superba civium
potentiorum limina. (1-8)
(‘Happy the man who, far away from business cares, like the pristine
race of mortals, works his ancestral acres with his steers, from all
’O History, 3.36.1, trans. A . J. Church and W. J . Brodribb, in T h e Complete Works of Tacitus,
ed. M . Hadas (New York, 1942), 559; cf. Holzer 1955, 104.
” Vobis voluptas est inertis otiifacere corpwculum et securitatem sopitis simillimam appetere et
sub densa umbra latitare tenerrimisque cogitationibw, quas tranquillitatem uocatis, animi marcen-
tis oblectare torporem et cibis potionibusque intra hortorum latebram corpora ignavia pallentia
saginare . . .
28 Brian Vickers
money-lending free; who is not, as a soldier, roused by the wild clarion,
nor dreads the angry sea; he avoids the Forum and proud thresholds of
more powerful citizens.’) The last four lines there, with their evocation of
the nuisances of public life, are a familiar gesture after the similar
passages in Ovid justifying his choice of otium and amor. More original is
the wish to be free from money-lending (solutusomnifaenore), the point
of which only emerges at the end of the poem, after its idyllic - over-
idyllic? - praise of the country-life:
haec ubi locutus faenerator Alfius
iam iam futurus rusticus,
omnem redegit Idibus pecuniam,
quaerit Kalendis ponere. (67-70)
(‘When the usurer Alfius had uttered this, on the very point of beginning
the farmer’s life, he called in all his funds upon the Ides - and on the
Kalends seeks to put them out again!’) The usurer thinks longingly of
escaping his profession, but carries on just the same, ‘his pastoral vision’,
as one critic puts it, shattering ‘upon the continuing realities of his profes-
sion’.12Modern commentators disagree about whether Horace is express-
ing a genuine love of the country or satirizing the fashion for villegiature,
‘getting away’, and some argue that the conclusion is not such a shock,
since the deliberate inflation of the language praising rural retreat is
meant to show the persona’s insincerity.”
Any of these readings seems preferable to J.-M. Andre’s account of the
poem as a serious, concrete essay in Epicureanism, ‘une vita otiosa de con-
tenu philosophique’. Andre links it with Satire 1.6, also ‘inspired by
Epicurus’ garden’, but on examination that poem turns out to be an
attack on ambition, and a praise of the simple life, content with little, as
evinced by Horace himself. Andre‘ claims that Horace’s Epicurean
allegiances in the Odes unite ‘1’hCdonismebacchique et la quCte de la
she‘nite’, yet he can only do so by ignoring the ironic framework of the
Second Epode, and discarding the p e r ~ o n a . ’ ~
A similar avoidance of the total meaning of a Horatian poem can be
operated for the first of the odes, dedicated to Maecenas, which reviews
various human likes and occupations, all of which Horace examines and
rejects before celebrating his own vocation as a poet. One man wishes for
’* Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace. A Crztzcal Study (New Haven, Conn., 1962). 106: the
author takes the poem as balancing antithetical positions, sentimental and cynical. Yet can these be
simply ‘balanced’? Does not the one destroy the other? Eduard Fraenkel saw the poem as ‘a fun-
damentally true, if slightly idealizing, expression of Horace’s own nostalgic longing for the life of the
countryside’, to which he added ‘a dose of . . . self-mockery’ to prevent himself being taken too
seriously: Horace (Oxford, 1957), 60-1.
’ I Michael O’Loughlin, The Garlands of Repose (Chicago, 1978), 77-80. Andre 1966, 460,
describes it as a ‘diatribe contre I’usure et I’eloge de la vie champetre, mises plaisamment par un ar-
tifice‘qui ne trompe personne, dans la bouche d’un usurier’. Who is not deceived, one wonders?
’‘ Andre 1966, 460-1, 468.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 29
public honours, he writes, another strives to accumulate grain; the pea-
sant likes to work his own land and would never become a sailor.
luctantem Icariis fluctibus Africum
mercator metuens otium et oppidi
laudat rura sui; mox reficit rates
quassas, indocilis pauperiam pati. (15-18)
(‘The trader, fearing the southwester as it wrestles with the Icarian waves,
praises the quiet of the fields about his native town, yet presently refits his
shattered barks, untaught to brook privation.’)
To describe this poem as a ‘praise of otium’ is to neglect the obvious
point that these sentiments are not the poet’s own but those of a character
he describes, one who furthermore contradicts his utterance by preferring
the dangers of getting a living to the safety of rural poverty. ‘One man’,
Horace continues, ‘won’t decline / Goblets of vintage Massic wine, / Or
stolen time, a solid chunk / Of afternoon, sprawled by the trunk / Of a
green arbutus, or spread- / eagled by some quiet fountain-head’ (19-22). ’’
Andre‘ takes this account of the green shade ( n u n c uiridi membra sub ar-
buto /stratus) as ‘une &vocation. . . du “jouisseur”, pour lequel le poPte
ne peut pas se defendre d’une certaine sympathie’ because he expresses
Horace’s own Epicurean hedonism. 7 6 However, the poem continues with
its listing of the topos ‘every man to his own’: the soldier ‘likes the life at
arms’, the hunter lies contentedly under ‘freezing skies’ in pursuit of his
prey - while ‘Me the ivy, the reward of poets’ brows, links with the gods
above’. The poet’s preferred way of life detaches him definitively from all
these alternatives. An apt comment on the structure of such ‘choice of
life’ debates is Horace’s own Epistle 1.14: ‘I call him happy who lives in
the country; you him who dwells in the city. One who likes another’s lot,
of course dislikes his own. Each is foolish and unfairly blames the un-
deserving place; what is at fault is the mind, which never escapes from
itself’ (1Off).
These two poems prove that there can be several motives for praising
otium, not all honourable. A poem which starts from that point is Odes,
2.16, ‘To Grosphus’:
Otium divos rogat in patenti
prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes
condidit lunam neque certa fulgent
sidera nautis;
otium bello furioso Thrace,
otium Medi pharetra decori,
Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura ve-
nale neque auro.
’’ Trans. James Michie.
’‘ Andre 1966, 479. The fact that a likeness has been noted with Lucretius 2.29 hardly brands
Horace an Epicurean.
30 Brian Vickers
(‘For peace the mariner prays, storm-caught on the open Aegean, when
dark clouds have hid the moon and the stars shine no longer sure for
sailors; for peace prays Thrace furious in war; for peace the Parthian with
quiver richly dight - peace, Grosphus, that cannot be bought with gems,
with purple, or with gold.’) Everyone prays for peace in moments of
distress, Horace notes, but what men ought to seek is contentment with
what they have: laetus in presens animus quod ultra est /oderit curare
(25-6: ‘Let the soul be joyful in the present, let it disdain to be anxious
for what the future has in store . . .’). Horace presents himself, in conclu-
sion, as an exemplar of m’m‘tur parvo bene, with his small farm and his
poetry. The organization of the poem may be ‘somewhat haphazard’, but
it is clear that otium is only the starting-point, once again a wished-for
commodity for some men in some situations, and that the poem modulates
into the familiar Stoic theme of being satisfied with little. Yet Steele Com-
mager states that ‘the Ode’s subject is otium, that ataraxia which Horace,
like Lucretius before him, locates in the freedom from fear and desire’,
ascribing to the poem ‘an almost overt Epic~reanism’.~’ Eduard Fraenkel
claims that the ‘threefold praise of otium’ provides a ‘clearly perceptible
undertone’, suggesting a mild ‘polemic against Catullus’. Horace, he
argues, recalls Catullus 51 (Otz’um, Catulle, tibi molestum est. . . .), in
order to point up ‘the difference between his own valuation of otium and
that voiced by Catullus’. Whereas ‘the young poet’s outburst of passion
and despondency . . . over-emphasized . . . one possible aspect of otium’,
Horace’s ‘own generation has come to learn a truer appreciation of
otium, calm and peace, than was given to most contemporaries of Caesar
and Pompey’. In alluding to the peace of Augustus Fraenkel seems to be
hypothesizing a change in the meaning of the word caused by external
events. But he finally explains the poem in terms of ‘Horace’s personal
creed’, his ‘mellow wisdom’ and ‘resignation without bitterness’, which is
finally said to be ‘inseparable from a deep longing for otium’.78Andre‘
goes even farther in this direction, describing the opening as a ‘litanie . . .
un hymne 2 l’otium’, citing Fraenkel’s theory of an allusion to Catullus
51, and commenting: ‘Mais, alors que Catulle, mi-serieux mi-enjoue,
denonce l’otium comme un peril mondial, Horace le presente comme une
revendication universelle.’79With the greatest respect, however, it seems
to me that all three critics have elevated otium in this poem from a minor
position to becoming the central issue, and have thus distorted its struc-
ture. Nor is there evidence for a changing valuation of otium in Horace’s
time: it could always have the meaning of ‘peace’, as we have seen from
Cicero. Indeed, the whole point of the poem is that although the Roman
empire now enjoys peace under Augustus certain classes of men pursuing
’- Commager, The Odes of Horace, 333. In his translation of this ode (1621) John Aslimore
renders olzum as ’ease’: pp. 5 - 6 .
’’ .Fraenkel, Horace, 213-14.
jq Andre 1966, 469, once again detecting an echo of Lucretius.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 31
a dangerous or strenuous livelihood do not. The moral - although it risks
becoming even more platitudinous by being spelled out - is to accept life
as it is, not straining for more than you need. Setting aside the note of
complacency of those poems ending with Horace’s celebration of his own
good fortune, this ode is a poem against ambition, rather, with no special
‘longing for otium’ in the poet’s propria persona.
To restore the balance after these one-sided accounts of Horace we
might recall the many poems where he endorses the mos maiorum and its
distrust of laziness, selfishness, anti-social ambition. J. -M. Andre‘, to give
him his due, also records such Horatian emphases. In some poems
(Epist., 1.14.35; 1.17.6), rich meals, ‘pleasant ease and sleep till sunrise’,
are rejected. Others urge the need for discipline (Sat., 1.4.117ff), invoke
Hercules as the exemplar of moral energy (Odes, 3.3.9; 3.14.1; 4.4.58ff),
or encourage a friend to devote himself to rhetoric, law or poetry, all
forms of the active life (Epist., 1.3.21ff). An injunction to ‘keep an even
mind’ in prosperity and adversity envisages the addressee ‘reclining in
grassy nook’ and delighting ‘in some choice vintage of Falernian wine’ -
‘on holidays’ (per dies festos: Odes, 2.3.6ff)! Otium can now be a
legitimate reward for the farmers’ labour (Epist., 2.1.139ff). A full study
of Horace’s political Odes marks a ‘movement from retreat to recom-
mitment’,’’ and the values celebrated in the so-called ‘Roman Odes’
(Book 3, 1-6) as in other, less formal poems, range from the deification of
Augustus to the need for good men to dedicate themselves to their patria.
Although Horace’s output is diverse, ringing many variations on tradi-
tional themes, and although lyric poetry cannot be reduced to the
monologic status of a treatise, the main emphases in his work declare his
solidarity with traditional Roman values.
Seneca, too, although sometimes taken as an apologist for retirement,
expresses forcibly and frequently a morality of striving, self-improve-
ment, a concern with ‘the good life’ in terms of simplicity, lack of ostenta-
tion, and a dedication to philosophic enquiry.8’ From this perspective
otium must be condemned, for men become ‘sluggish from inaction’ ( e x
otio piger: De ira, 3.29.1), ‘paralysed by sloth’ (inertia torpet: De brev.
a?., 2.1); denied activity, life ‘grows dull amid sluggish idleness’ (inerti
otio vita torpebit: E p . , 81.2). The association of otium with paralysis is
extended to the metaphor of stagnation. A mutual friend, Seneca writes
to Lucullus, ‘calls an easy existence, untroubled by the attacks of For-
tune, a “Dead Sea”’. And truly, he comments, ‘if you have nothing to
rouse you to action, nothing that will test your resolution by its threats
and hostilities; if you recline in unshaken comfort [in otio inconcusso
’’ I quote from the useful edition, Detti ef ut t z nz~rnorubilz,with facing Italian translation. by
Rino Faranda (Torino, 1971; 1976): page references incorporated in the tcxt.
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 35
Quintus Metellus juxtaposed the invigorating effect of a national
emergency, which could rouse the languishing virtue of the Roman people,
to the debilitating effects of victory, which could return them to lethargy
(VII, ii.3). Examples of Roman and Greek virtue abound in Book VIII,
chapter 7, ‘De Studio et Industria’ (pp. 622-35), a lengthy section com-
pared to the few paragraphs of the following section, ‘De Otio’, a concept
said to be ‘industriae et studio maxime contrarium’. While rejecting the
otium that leads to idleness and vice, Valerius is more interested in otium
as legitimate rest or refreshment after exertion, and his exempla amount
to a defence of relaxation, one of the first in Roman literature. (Its value
is somewhat lessened when we recall that he dedicated his book to
Tiberius, whom he constantly flatters.) Yet Valerius reveals the tradi-
tional Roman moralist’s tendency to see the vices as interlinked, for otium
recurs in the section ‘De Luxuria et Libidine’ (Ix, i: pp. 674-84), in-
cluding the obligatory references to Hannibal’s disastrous experience in
Campania.
In the last of the major Latin authors to be considered here, Tacitus
( c . 55-116 AD), otium has lost none of its pejorative When
a province, not properly ruled, is dominated by segnitia rather than labor
and virtus, then ‘mutiny and trouble’ can be expected, as an army used to
the field becomes ‘riotous and idle’ ( A . , 6: c u m adusetus expetionibus
miles otio lasciviret). The vocabulary, and attitudes of Livy recur, both in
general observations and specific instances: ‘bands of armed men, with
nothing to do’, Tacitus observes, ‘easily become riotous’ ( G . , 49: otiosae
porro armatorum manus facile l a s c i v i h t ) . A holiday granted the Roman
army to mark the death of Augustus and the accession of Tiberius pre-
dictably led to mischief, as the ranks ‘grew insubordinate . . . eager for
luxury and ease, disdainful of discipline and work’ ( A n . , 1.16: Eo @in-
cipio lascivire miles . . . denique l u x u m et otium cupere). Faced with this
prospect (as when the army, encamped too near Rome, became debili-
tated by its otium: H . , 2.93) generals in Tacitus’ chronicles follow their
predecessors by taking the usual precautions of finding the men work.
Two Roman leaders made their soldiers build a bridge, wishing ‘to keep
their own men from spending their time in idleness’( H . , 2.34: n e ipsorum
miles segne otium tereret); another general ran a canal between the
Meuse and the Rhine ‘to give the troops occupation’ (An., 11.20: ut
tamen miles otium exueret). But such tactics could rebound on rulers, as
Germanicus finds, confronted by a mutinous army taunting him with
their miserly pay, severe work and ‘the other camp drudgeries imposed
sometimes from necessity, sometimes as a precaution against leisure’
( A n . , 1.35: aut advel-sus otium castrorum quaeruntur).
Tacitus shares the common Roman belief that leisure is equally
dangerous in civil life. He writes of Helvidius Priscus that he devoted his
’’ The works of Tacitus cited here, in the Loeb versions, are Dzalogus d e oratorzbus (abbreviated
as D . ) , Agrzcolu ( A ), Germanzu ( G . ) , the Hzstorzes (If ), and Annab ( A n )
36 Brian Vickers
youth to ‘the higher studies, not as most youths do, in order to cloak a
useless leisure with a pretentious name [ut nomine magnqico segne otium
veluret], but that he might enter public life better fortified against the
chances of fortune’ ( H . , 4.5). The same contrast between appearance and
reality recurs in the disparasing judgement on a new army leader, who
‘abstained from provoking the enemy, was not challenged himself, and
conferred on this spiritless inaction the honourable name of peace’ ( A n . ,
14.39: neque lacessitus hofiestum pacis nomen segni otio imposuit).
Discussing the career of C. Cassius Longinus, a distinguished jurist who
rose to high administrative office in Asia and Syria, Tacitus comments, in
propria persona, that ‘the arts of war are lost in a quiet world, and peace
maintains on a single level the man of action and the sluggard’ ( A n . ,
12.12.: n a m militares artes per otium ignotae, industriosque aut ignavos
pax in aequo tenet). This judgement is borne out by Agricola, who
returned from his successful career as provincial governor to Rome unob-
trusively, to a ‘society of triflers’ where he became indistinguishable from
the rest by his absorption in ‘peace and idleness’ ( A . ,40: otiosus . . . tran-
quillitatem atque otium). Other rulers and governors degenerate in
idleness. Classicus ‘spent most of his time in indolent ease’ ( H . , 4.70:
segne plerumque otium), while Tiberius, living in retirement on the isle
of Capri, ‘once absorbed in the cares of state, was now unbending with
equal zest in hidden vice and flagitious leisure’ ( A n . , 4.67: tanto
occultiores in luxus et malurn otium resolutus). The procurator of Cap-
padocia was ‘a person made doubly contemptible by hebetude of mind
and grotesqueness of body, yet on terms of the greatest intimacy with
Claudius during the years of retirement when he amused his sluggish
leisure with the society of buffoons’ ( A n . , 12.49: ignavia animi et
deridiculo corporis . . . c u m privatus olim conversatione scurrarum iners
otium oblectaret). O t i u m in high places is especially dangerous.
Yet, in addition to these traditional views, Tacitus has more original
emphases in his role as monitor of national and cultural differences. A
controlled dose of otium can be salutary, as Vitellius judged, sending the
First Legion of Marines on holiday to Spain, ‘to have their savage temper
softened by peace and quiet’ ( H . , 2.67: ut pace et otio misceret). In-
dulgence in otium can infect a whole nation, however, such as the Jews,
who ‘first chose to rest on the seventh day because that day ended their
toils; but after a time they were led by the charms of indolence to give
over the seventh year as well to inactivity’ ( H . , 5.4: dein blandiente
inertia septimum quoque a n n u m ignaviae d a t u m ; cf. Deut. 5.15; Levit.
25.4). Comparing the Britons and the Gauls, Tacitus writes that the
former race has not been ‘emasculated [emollierzt] by long years of
peace’. The Gauls were once warlike, but ‘afterwards indolence made its
appearance hand in hand with peace, and courage and liberty have been
lost together’ ( A . , 11: mox segnitia c u m otio intruvit). In Roman thought
the best remedy against o h m is still war. So, among the Germans, if the
Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium 37
community where they grow up is ’drugged with long years of peace and
quiet’ (longa pace et otio torpeat, the ‘high-born youth’ seek out some
nearby war, for ‘rest [quies] is unwelcome to the race’ (G., 14). To
modern ears such a remedy seems perverse, but on a Roman scale of
values there were few things more threatening than peace and idleness.
Nero’s introduction of Greek-style games to Rome (including competi-
tions in drama, music and rhetoric) was opposed by some Romans on the
ground that national morality was being overturned, with the aim that
‘our youth, under the influence of foreign tastes, should degenerate into
votaries of the gymnasia, of indolence, and of dishonorable amours’ (An.,
14.20: degeneretque studiis externis iuventis, gymnasia et otia et turpis
amores exercendo). O t i u m remains the enemy of virtus.
Independent and critical though he is in so many respects, Tacitus
shows himself on this head to be the upholder of the mos maiorum incar-
nated in Cat0 and Scipio Africanus. In one of his later works, the dialogus
de Oratoribus, he even innovates in literary critical terminology by apply-
ing the negative connotations of otium to prose-writing, in Cicero’s dis-
missal of Brutus’ style as ‘spiritless and disjointed’ (D.,
18: otiosum atque
diiunctum). There could be few more damning judgements.