Renaissance Studies Val. 4 No.

Leisure and idleness in the Renaissance: the

ambivalence of otium
BRIAN VICKERS

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

From some modern accounts of seventeenth-century poetry one could imagine that otium was an unqualified good. Taken to mean peace,quiet
or leisure, it is seen as an entirely suitable goal for human life, a legitimate retirement from the strains and stresses of politics and business. A
striking example of this version of the word and its implications is provided
by critical discussions of Marvellspoem The Garden, a short lyric of nine
stanzas in which the speaker rejects all forms of activity in the world in
favour of the solitary pleasures of the retired life, in a garden. Twentiethcentury critics, many of whom also identify Marvell with the persona of
the poem, frequently see The Garden as a typical retirement poem
(Tillyard), expressing the Roman love of retirement (Hunt), forming
the most memorable English expression of Horatian retired leisure
(OLoughlin), the most imaginative celebration of the values of retirement (Lord 1967). The poem celebrates the delights of rural retirement (Lord 1979), endorsing the superiority of the contemplative
life, as recommended by the ancient philosophers, especially Aristotle
(Leishman), or Plotinus (Norford). To some critics it emulates Horaces
love of otium and umbra (Coolidge), or a Horatian-Epicurean preference
for otium (Potter).
Other writers prefer to see in the poem a Christianized otium, following
the example of the Polish neo-Latin poet Sarbiewski (R&tvig), with
Marvell portraying the progress of a soul from the quest for the pagan
paradise of pastoral otium and contemplation, to the quest for the lost
Eden (Cullen). Endorsing the values expressed in the poem necessarily

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.

@ 1990 The Society f o r Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

Brian Vickers

implies approving of the persona who represents them, enjoying the easy
life of the green world (Berger); engaged in a contemplative activity
which balances the passivity of the body (Hyman); and excluding women
from his state of innocence (Kermode). When Marvell wrote poetry on
public affairs, and indeed prose satire, before and after The Garden,
critics find these works rather philistine and ill-informed, expressing the
later seventeenth-centurys excessive preoccupation with man in his
political and social capacity, the poetry suffering from the constricting
and dehumanising influence of party politics (Leishman). They agree
that the life of political action and political satire brought a coarsening
of sensibility (Lord 1968), a dissociated or excessively limited sensibility
(Lord 1967), a phase in which Marvell even came to see literature in
more negative terms [sic!],as a weapon, as an aid to action (Rivers).*
T o anyone concerned with history and the recovery of the past such
judgements seem a total inversion of the true meaning of otium, umbra
and the related concepts, labor and virtus. T o take the last point first,
many defences of literature - whether poetry, oratory or historiography in classical and Renaissance times were premissed on the writers role in
supporting moral values in society, attacking vice, celebrating virtue.
This is the justification for epideictic rhetoric, from Plato to the Renaissance; for poetry, from Ciceros Pro Archia to Sidneys Apology for
Poetry; and for historiography, from Sallust to Milton, at least. In the
lapidary and self-assured words of Ben Jonson,
Although to write be lesser than to doo,
It is the next deed, and a great one too.

Throughout this tradition human worth was evaluated in terms of the

degree, and success of ones involvement in society, for the public good.

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 OLoughlin, 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:
Marvells 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.MarueZls 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. Marvells 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, Marvells 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 Marvells 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, Epzrammes, 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

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
of social and religious duties prevented any such i ~ o l a t i o nThe
. ~ persona
in The Garden, judged by these criteria, is guilty of hedonism, selfishness and the arrogant rejection of Gods will. His otium is anything but
admirable, and stands in sharp contrast to Marvells thirty years of public
service, as Latin Secretary, MP for Hull, representative of the Trinity
House and confidential agent for two administrations.
I

Marvells critics express a generally shared misconception of otzum, which

may derive from the tendency in modern times to translate it with such
innocent, indeed to us admirable words as leisure, or retirement. At
some point in history the negative associations almost vanished from view,
although otiose in the sense of idle or superfluous is still with us.
Modern dictionaries are not always a reliable guide, the new Oxford
Latin Dictionary, for instance, giving a generally favourable impression
of otzum as meaning free time, vacant time.6 Yet in the majority of
classical uses, and in very many medieval and Renaissance contexts,

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 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); C. Trinkaus, Adversitys 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 Ciceros
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 formd: the dichotomy of
the active and the contemplative lives in John Miltons Paradise Lost, Parudise Regained, and Samson 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 Patterson, 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 Poets 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.

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 respectu. T h e n follows this division:
I spectat ad desidiam, luxuriam, &am commodam sim. (fere cum vituperatione
dicitur . . .). (A) quorumlibet (exempla selecta . . .). (B) amantium: (1)
respicitur desidia, ex qua homines amore capiuntur (sec. opinionem communem, quod homo desidiosus amore capiatur . . .). (2) respicitur inertia
eorum, qui amore abstinent: comparatur amans cum milite . . . spectat ad
statum nondum nuptae. . . . (C) militum (. . . hic illic subauditur doctrina
quae pacem hominibus nocentem vitandam monet . . .).
I1 spectat ad statum a publicis officiis, negotiis liberum:
(A) de qualibet vacatione (fere studiorum, artium sim. causa).
( 1 ) quorumlibet . . . (2) philosophorum, philosophiae deditorum
(3) poetarum . . .
(B) de missione sive temporali sive perpetua, a militia vel ab aliis ministeriis.
111 spectat ad ferias, dies festos sim. (A) paganorum (B) ludaeorum,
Christianorum
IV spectat ad vitam contemplativam, abstinentem sim. (A) apud paganos
(B) apud Christianos.

T h e second sense-grouping sees o t i u m in more favourable terms, in

opposition t o war and other public disturbance:

b potius negatur perturbatio, fere i.q. quies, securitas, tranquillitas sim.

. de statu securo rei publicae, pace externa vel domestica.
. de quolibet statu securo, placido, tranquillo, qui praebetur:
I variis condicionibus
I1 locis tranquillis, abditis

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 Schalks 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

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. . . .

Further uses are distinguished, in connection with the tropes metonymy

(of places; poetry; men), and prosopopoeia, while the final heading
analyses grammatical and syntactical usages.
This account of the spread of meanings of otium, based on more than a
thousand instances, is strikingly different from other dictionary entries in
giving priority to the pejorative associations. Otium is to be understood
most frequently in opposition to the active life expected of a Roman
citizen, when it connotes idleness, luxury, the easy life in a context where
the mark of the good man is to be active, and is therefore treated with
vituperation. Two classes of mankind are seen as particularly prone to
these harmful states, lovers and soldiers. Only secondarily is otium seen as
the state of being free from public business, and examination of the
passages will show how carefully the term needs to be qualified in order to
avoid negative associations. In Latin otium is not usually opposed to
negotium, as many modern writers evidently believe, but to officium or
~ c c u p a t i o n e s The
. ~ findings of the Thesaurus will be confirmed if we
leave the synchronic treatment of a dictionary for the diachronic approach of a historian, Jean-Marie Andre, who has explored the semantics
of otium across three centuries of Latin literature. l o Where some writers
take otium as a translation of the Greek schole, the two concepts are in
fact very different. In classical Greece schole, leisure, had mainly positive
connotations. In Plato and Aristotle it is an acceptable state of life for the
educated elite on whom their philosophy is based, and could be seen as a
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 Andres first publication in this field was Recherches sur lotzum Romazn (Paris, 1962 =
Annales Littdraires de lllniversitd de Besanpn, vol. 52), of which the first section (pp. 5-25)
discusses Les origines de Iotium: conjectures itymologiques et rialitis simantiques, and the second
(pp. 27-81), Otium, retraite et conversion 2 la sagesse chez Sineque. His major study is Lotium
duns la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines a ldpoque augustdenne (Paris, 1966). Other
relevant publications are Lotzumchez 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 apport 2 la riflexion moderne, in Vickers (ed.), Arbezt, Musse, Meditation, 35-63.

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 'timewasting', 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 necotium) 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 prolonged stay in the countryside, which they find disorientating. '' Andre'
argues that otium originally had military, not pastoral associations, referring 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 Porcius 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, selfindulgence, 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.
Andre 1962, 12-17; Andre 1966, 10-12, 35, 212.
'' Andre 1966, 9 .
' ' Andre 1966, 81, 124, 306, 356.
'' Andre 1962, 12, 17-18; Andre 1966, 17-19.
See the Loeb edition, Attzc Nzghts, trans. J. C . Rolfe, 111 (London, 1961), 385-91, and 0.
Skutsch, 'Der Ennianische Soldatenchor', Rheinisches Museumfur Philologie, N.F. 96 (1953), 193 201, whose elucidation of the text is a good deal more helpful than Rolfe's verse translation. Skutsch
comments that otiosum in this context 'nicht ein ornamental verstarkendes Beiwort von otium ist.
sondern schadliche Musse van guter, sinnvoll verwendrter Musse unterscheidet' (p. 198).
'' Andre 1966, 20-4.
I'
Ibid. 21, 29, 282, 397.
'O
Ibid. 28-58; Alan E . Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford, 1978).

Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium

Thermus (tu otiosus ambulas) shows both the largely negative connotations of otiosus as an adjective* and Catos special association of otium
with umbulure, strolling and gossiping, both forms of time-wasting. To
him pure otium (nihil ugere) was unworthy of a Roman, who should be
busy and avoid the temptations of the easy life. For Cato, as for many
Romans, this easy life was the otium Graecum, Roman prejudice against
the Greeks ascribing to them the antithesis of their own virtus. The
Greeks were over-talkative, guilty of levitas (frivolity), softness, laziness,
being dedicated to purely intellectual activities without practical outcome.22Cat0 expressed the views of many later Romans in his speech Pro
Rhodiensibus (parts of which were preserved by Aulus Gellius), that too
much prosperity would lead to superbiu and luxuriu, an association of
vices which would cause a peoples decline.23Gellius also preserves a
passage by Cat0 which first uses the metaphor, destined to enjoy a long
life, of rust for inactivity: human life is very like iron. If you use it, it
wears out; if you do not, it is nevertheless consumed by rust. In the same
way we see men worn out by toil; if you toil not, sluggishness and torpor
[inertia utque torpor] are more injurious than toil.24For Cat0 the only
justifiable forms of literature were those which echoed or prolonged
political action, such as history or oratory. He collected his own speeches,
of which some 150 were known to Cicero, and it was Cicero who praised
him in the appropriate terms as a good man outstanding non minus otii
q u a m negotii. 2 5
Cicero balanced those terms again in his famous praise of another
culture-hero, Scipio Africanus, who was reported by Cat0 as saying that
he felt numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus, that is,
never less idle than when he had nothing to do - and never less lonely
than when he was alone. Cicero calls this an admirable sentiment, which
shows that even in his leisure hours his thoughts were occupied with
public business and that he used to commune with himself when alone;
so that the two conditions that prompt others to idleness - leisure and
solitude - only spurred him on.2 6 The early Roman ethos, and indeed the
mos maiorum or general repository of Roman moral values right through
the Republic and into the early Empire, praised such positives as virtus,
industria, exercitio, officium, honestas and libertas, inter-equating the
* AndrC 1966, 29-30, 62 (although I feel that here and elsewhere AndrCs 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
latentin 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 opposing labor and voluptas. See also Catos 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.

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 Catos army from 195 BC onwards, and expresses 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, dedicated 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 Captivi), 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 Cockayne, 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 virtus 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 neer-do-wells, but dangerous
and decadent to all decent people: like Petrarchs garden of Venus (in his
Trionfo dAmore), which par dolce a i cattivi, e a i buoni agra (seems to
the wicked, sweet, and bitter to the good29).
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 connotations of pax and p i e s , which to a state recovering from the Punic Wars

* Andre 1966, 34-6,

434-41.

*Ibid. 69-134; the passages to which I refer are quoted at 74-5,

80-5, 93-6, 107-8, 114-15,

121-2.
TrzonfidAmore, I V , 11. 109-11; cit. A. B. Giamatti, T h e Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance
Epic (Princeton, N J , 1966). 125-8.
Cit. Andre 1966, 39-40, 109.

Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium

were much valued q ~ a l i t i e s .Yet

~ peace itself can be an ambivalent term,
depending on the conditions with which it is achieved. Chamberlains
Munich peace, or peace at any price, may not be worth much. This is
one of the many connotations attached to otium by Cicero, the writer
who, of all Romans, uses the word most frequently and in what can seem
at times a bewildering range of meanings.32To begin with the political
contexts, otium can be the perfectly legitimate goal of a country tired of
strife, internal or external. There is nothing so desired by the people,
Cicero writes in 63 BC, as that which I, a consul who is a true friend of the
people, offer you for this year - peace, tranquillity and quiet.33Yet
Cicero also uses otium in a party-political context (not, of course, that
Roman politics was organized along the tidy divisions of the modern party
system: political groupings in Rome depended on wealth, status and current allegiances, in a much more fluid pattern). One characteristic of the
enemies of Cicero and his political affiliates was that they were enemies
of the peace, disturbers of the peace - Clodius is o t i et pacis hostis,
Matius is inimicissimus ti.^^ Cicero, who can be said to be linked with the
Optimates rather than the Populares (although he twists the application of both terms opportunistically and confusingly), claimed that the efforts of his associates entitled them to otium c u m dignitate, peace with
honour. As the studies of Balsdon and Wirszubski have shown,35this
phrase carries with it the claim that the aristocratic republicans have
earned dignitas or public renown by their efforts for the republic as a
whole, and should now be able to enjoy the otium which goes with a state
running smoothly. It is the tranquillity of all and the dignity of the
best, as Wirszubski puts it (1954, p. 9). This otium involves activity, of
Ibid. 80.
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 CicerosCum 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 Kretschmars 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, Auctontas, 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 lhumanisme 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).

* Andre

10

Brian Vickers

course, but it represents a harmony where the political organism is functioning as a unit, and it is anything but selfish. Where otium was often
linked with the sib2 uuere of Epicureanism, that devotion to the individuals 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 Ciceros philosophy, of the need to
act for the good of ones fellow men. The locus classicus for this concept is
a passage in the speech Pro Sestio, 138-9,36where he describes the selfimposed 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 themselves 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 renounce 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 advantage 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, voluptas, somnus, convimum, delectatio, mtium, lenocinium.
In attempting to legitimize his own political activity, then, Cicero invoked 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, 45.9749.105, recapitulated at 65.136-66.139. Compare similar statements on the duty of devoting ones
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 persequimur), 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. Scipioswas voluntary, for he, to find leisure from his splendid 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. Ciceros 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 listlessin 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, enjoying 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
1.16.50-1; 1.26.92; 1.44.56. See also &fin., 2.14.45-6; Pro Marcello, 25.
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 litterato?, but the context shows that he means utile as much as d u k e : For what is more delightful
I

Is

Brian Vickers

12

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 expounding philosophy to my fellow countrymen was actually my duty in the interests 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 occupation 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 ones 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, Czceros Letters t o Atticus (Harmondsworth, 1978). 99.
Andre 1966 comments that tabescere expresses the idea of mort vivante ( 3 4 ) , cet &at de vide morbide (222). Earlier that month Cicero had described himself as so in love with idleness [complexus
otium] that I cant 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 virtues. 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 Ciceros enemies embodied Epicurean vice, Piso, the tool of
Clodius, and Catiline. Piso is insulted as Epicure noster, ex hara producte, 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 Romes 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, opposing honestas to turpido, continentia to libido, aequitas, temperantia,
fortitudo, prudentia, virtutes omnes certant cum iniquitate, luxuria, ignavia, temeritate, cum vitiis omnibus (2 Cat., 11.25). Catilines 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 tyrants 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 ones 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 Ciceros exactly: it was not my intention to waste my
40

Cf. &fin., especially2.7.21ff, 2.14.43ff, 2.22.70ff, 2.33.107ff.

Cf. Andre 1966, 335-81.

14

Brian Vickers

precious leisure in indolence and sloth [socordia atque desidia bonum

otium conterere],nor yet by turning to farming or the chase, to lead a life
devoted to slavish employments (that is, occupying the body but not the
mind). To avoid both evils he decided to write a history of the Roman
people (4.1-2).
The prooemium to his other surviving complete work, T h e War with
Jugurthu, celebrates the human mind for being able to lead man to virtue
and glory (1.3).
But if through the lure of base desires the mind has sunk into sloth and
the pleasures of the body, when it has enjoyed ruinous indulgence for
a season, when strength, time, and talents have been wasted through
indolence
- then men accuse human nature of their own weakness, and virtue yields
to fate (1.4-5). The moralists targets are, once again, inertia, voluptas,
socordia, luxus and ignama. Given the supremacy of the human intellect,
Sallust marvels at the perversity of those who pass their life in riotous living and idleness, given over to the pleasures of the body, allowing the
mind to grow dull from neglect and inaction (2.3-4: incultu atque
socordia torpescere sinunt). In these disturbed times, when all public offices should be avoided as being neither safe nor honourable (3.1-3), the
recording of past events is especially serviceable, since the memory of
great deeds will arouse the flame of emulation (4.1, 6). Although some
people will apply to this arduous and useful employment of mine the
name of idleness (inertia), yet if they recall the eminent offices Sallust
once held they will realize that it is rather from justifiable motives than
from indolence [ignaviu] that I have changed my opinion, and that
greater profit will accrue to our country from my inactivity [otio me01
than from others activity (4.3-4).
The inherent ambivalence of otzum is thus exploited by Sallust, as it
was by Cicero, to legitimize the writers own activity. His otium is virtuous
since it is negotiosum, applied to some good end; other mens otium
otiosum leads to vice. Sallust, in fact, makes otium a major factor in explaining historical decline. In the early days Roman virtue guaranteed
social order, good morals ensuring the greatest harmony and little or no
avarice: justice and probity prevailed (Cat., 9.1). But when Rome had
grown great through toil and the practice of justice and had defeated
Carthage, then Fortune took advantage of this prosperity, latching on to
a lessening of mrtus. For those who had found it easy to bear hardship
and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth [otium,
divitiae], desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse.
Hence the lust for money first, then for power, grew upon them, . . . the
root of all evils (101-3). Ambition is the enemy of virtue and glory, since
it works through craft and deception, self-interest turning men into
hypocrites (10.5; 11.1). Avarice destroys honour, integrity, and all other

Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium

15

noble qualities in its desire for money, which, like some noxious poison,
renders the most manly body and soul effeminate (10.4; 11.3). Lucius
Sulla (dictator from 82 to 79 BC), is an example of the danger of success,
for both his military and political power were soon corrupted (11.4). In
order to gain the loyalty of the army which he led to Asia, Sulla allowed
it a luxury and licence foreign to the manners of our forefathers [contra
morem maiorum]; and in the intervals of leisure those charming and
voluptuous lands . . . easily demoralized the warlike spirits of his soldiers
(1 1.5). The consequence of idleness, as so many Roman moralists warned,
are lechery, drunkenness, theft, pillaging, effeminacy in men, lewdness
in women (11.6- 13.5). After Sullascorruption of values Catiline found it
easy to surround himself with troops of criminals, wantons, gluttons,
gamesters, corrupting all who joined him (14.1-16.3). Among his rabble
were young men who, having maintained a wretched existence by
manual labour in the country . . . were tempted by public and private
doles . . . to prefer idleness in the city [urbanum otium] to their hateful
toil; these, like all the others, battened on the public ills (37.7).
To Sallust, as J.-M. Andre says, otium was both corrupt and corrupting.42Enervating idleness, leading to every form of vice, can be transmitted not only by people but by places. Sullas army was corrupted by Asia:
Loca amoena, voluptaria facile in otio ferocis militum animos
molliverant (11.5). The dangers of the locus amoenus (too often interpreted, in the wake of E. R. Curtius, as a neutral or admirable goal) to
activities of pith and moment were vividly depicted by a historian writing
shortly after Sallust, L i ~ yLike
. ~ ~so many Romans, Livy saw otium as the
greatest danger to the populace, which could easily be corrupted by
idleness. Otium, ut solet, excitamt plebis rumores (26.26.10): inaction,
as usual, stirred up talk among the common people, talk which was often
subversive. One cynical administration kept the plebs at a distance from
the city, lest they might have thoughts, if they remained peaceably at
home [ d o m i per o t i u m ] , of liberty and colonies, and might agitate for
public lands or the free use of their votes (4.58.12). The same measures
were repeated later, the object being to wear the plebeians out with service and give them no time to take breath in the City, or leisure to bethink
them of liberty . . . (6.27.7). Idleness is dangerous to the ruling classes,
too, as we see from one positive example, the praetor Quintus Fabius
Labeo, and one negative, Phileas of Tarentum. The former, lest he have
a year of idleness in office (otiosam promnczam), set out to quell an uprising in Crete (37.60.2), while the latter, a man of restless spirit and quite
unable to endure the long inactivity in which he seemed to be losing his

Ibid. 381.
Ibid. 434-54. I have benefited from D. Packard, Concordance to LZq (4 vols, Cambridge,
Mass., 1968). Livys 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.
42
43

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 Tarquinius 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 peoples
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 Shakespeares servants, who
knowingly pronounce that This peace is nothing but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed balladmakers. 1 S e w . Let me have war, say I , it exceeds peace as far as day does night: its sprightly,
waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy, mulld, deaf, sleepy, insensible . . . (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 inaction (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 permit what troops he had to grow soft in idleness under roofs (35.35.9: non
sineret sub tectis marcescere otio), the tyrants 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 Livys third and fourth
decades.46The effect of inaction can be seen on Hannibals 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 arising 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.
Livys most sustained analysis of the corruptions of idleness is his account, in Book 23, of the fate of Hannibals 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 establishing colonies? If it is luxury, Capua corrupted Hannibal himself (1.7.20),
for the arrogance and intolerable fierceness found elsewhere in Campania 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 Hannibals soldiers were demoralized
4 6 J. Briscoe, A Commentary on Livy, Books X X Z - X X X I I I (Oxford, 1973), 337. Latin verbs
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 thereafter 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 concomitants 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 oldtime 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 Hannibals 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 certainly led one man into winter quarters at Capua, and out of them a different 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 Hannibals 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 Hannibals 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:
Its 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
Im with you, Im 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 Propertius, 1.12:

Bella Punzca, 11.377ff, 12.15ff.

(Otium Epicurien et essor d u lyrisme, a somewhat unfocused discussion of possible Epicurean hedonism in Roman poetry); 403-29 (Les ElCgiaques Romains: Otium ct
libertinage amoureux; Otzum et ma1 daimer), and 425-529 (on Horace and Virgil). Valuable
though it is, this study suffers from the weakness of the doctorat dEtatin feeling obliged to discuss
every possible aspect of each topic exhaustively. A much sharper account of Catullus is that by A. J.
Woodman, Some implications of otium in Catullus 51.13-16, Latomus, 25 (1966). 217-66. Also
relevant, if less penetrating, are Luigi Alfonsi, Otium e vita d a m o r e negli elegiaci Augustei, Studz
in onore d i Aristzde Calderzni e Roberto Paribeni (2 vols, (Milan, 1956)), I , 187-209; C. Segal,
Catullan otiosi: the lover and the poet, Greece 8* R o m e , 17 (1970), 25-31.
Trans. Philip Dunlop, The Poems of Tibullus (Harmondsworth, 1972).

See Andre 1966, 205-42

Brian Vickers

20

quid mihi desidiae non cessas fingere crimen

quod faciat nobis conscia Roma moram?

(Why, Rome, thou witness of my sloth, ceasest thou never to tax me

falsely with sloth, saying tis sloth delays my suit?)- in fact, Cynthia has
left him. Ovid, too, uses the idea in Amores, 1.15, but with a difference:
Quid mihi, Livor edax, ignavos obicis annos
ingeniique vocas carmen inertis opus?

(Why, gnawing Envy, impute an idlers existence to me? Why dismiss the
poet as a drone?) He has rejected the dusty rewards/Of a soldiers
career, and not sold my eloquence like a whore/In the courts and
Forum, since his goal is poetry, and fame.5
Obviously the Roman elegists intend these repudiations of public
morality to be provocative, perhaps to pre-empt criticism. They are
aware of the negative associations of otium, and by glorying in them they
share, as commentators have pointed out, the attitudes and vocabulary of
the parasites and rebellious lovers in Roman comedy.52 It is as if a
character out of Plautus is speaking when, in propria persona, the poets
proclaim their independence from public morality. Few opening lines of
a poem could be so shocking to the Roman mos maiorum, which opposed
militia and otium as irreconcilable oppositess3,as Ovids Amores, 1.9:
Militat omnis amans et habet sua castra Cupido Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans.

(Every lovers on active service, my friend, active service, believe

me, / And Cupid has his headquarters in the field: trans. Peter Green.)
In his witty development of the analogy (reconnaissance sorties, night
attacks) Ovid rejects the identification of love and idleness: ergo desidzam
quicumque vocabat amorem / desinat (31ff: So if youve got love written
off as an easy option / Youd better think twice), and presents his own
metamorphosis as typical:
ipse ego segnis eram discinctaque in otia natus
mollierant animos lectus et umbra meos

(41ff: Then take/My own case. I was born idle, born to leisure e n
dkshabillee, / Mind softened by lazy scribbling in the shade). But his love
for a pretty girl drove the sluggard to action (impulit ignavum),
inde vides agilem nocturnaque bella gerentem.
qui nolet fieri desidiosus amet.

Trans.

Peter Green, Omd. the Erotzc Poems (Harmondsworth, 1982).

1966, 220-1, 226; Segal 1970, 26. See, e.g., Plautus, Mercator,
24ff sed amori accedunt etiam haer quae dixi minus . . . /inertia, aviditas, desidia, iniuria (But
love has still more ills which I omitted - inertia, inordinate desire, sloth, injustice).
Andr6 1966, 410, 421-3. T h e idea of love as a species of warfare is developed in Ars amatorza,
2.233ff.

* Andri 1966, 108ff: Woodman

Leisure and idleness: the ambivalence of otium

21

(45ff: And just look at me now - fighting fit, dead keen on night exercises: / If you want a cure for slackness, fall in love.)
Ovid is emphasizing, in this brilliant and witty poem, another aspect of
love, its need for activity. Inertia may be the characteristic of the lover
viewed from the perspective of public morality, but within the love affair
he must be anything but pas~ive.~
The most concise formulation of this
rule is, again, Ovids: amor odit inertes (Ars amatoria, 2.229: Love
detests laggards). Yet these are exceptions to the main rule, which identifies otium with love and with love-poetry. The most consistent exponent
of this link, appropriately enough, is Ovid, in his Tristia or Poems of
Lamentation written after his abrupt and unexplained exile from Rome.
In his poetic autobiography (4.10) he describes himself once as that
playful poet of tender love (tenerorum lusor amorum) who abstained
from the pursuit of office since he had neither a body to endure the toil
nor the mind suited to the ambitious life, while the Muses always urged
him to seek the security of a retirement I had ever chosen and loved (40:
otia, iudicio semper amata meo). O t i u m is now said to be the necessary
condition for writing poetry: carmina secessum scribentis et otia quaerunt
(Tristia, 1.1.39ff: poetry requires the writer to be in privacy and ease),
and Ovid contrasts his present discomforts with the easy life he had
chosen for himself in Rome:
quique fugax rerum securaque in otia natus,
mollis et impatiens ante laboris eram,
ultima nunc patior. . . . (3.2.9-11)

(I, who once shunned affairs, who was born for a care-free life of ease,
who was soft and incapable of toil, am now suffering extremes.) But my
spirit has proved equal to misfortune, he adds proudly, his body also
(lines 12-14), a claim repeated elsewhere: my soul, disdaining to give way
to misfortune, proved itself unconquerable, relying on its own powers,
despite a previous life passed in ease (4.10.103ff: oblitus m e i ductaeque
per otia vitae).
Yet, if Ovids endurance of exile and misfortune proves his mrtus, his
earlier life would have been viewed critically by many Roman readers.
The word he used to describe his condition in his life of ease, mollis, was
almost universally connected with effeminate behaviour, with Epicurean
hedonism and with self-indulgence. The inherent ambivalence of otium
can now excuse a life dedicated to love and ease, now indict it. In one
poem Catullus can recall the pleasant die otiosi he has just spent with his
friend and fellow poet Licinius, writing verses in various metres answering each other, as we laughed and drank our wine (50.1-6); in another
he can recall the youth of Greece hastening towards Troy, so that Paris

Woodman 1966, 220n.

See AndrC 1966, 108, 229, 240, 245.

22

Brzun Vickers

might not enjoy undisturbed leisure [lzberu . . . otiu] in a peaceful

chamber, rejoicing in the rape of his paramour (68A.61-4). Otium can
be now innocent, now vicious. In the fifty-first of his Carminasb(based on
a famous poem by Sappho) Catullus depicts himself struck dumb by his
love for Lesbia, robbed of all my senses, not even capable of a whisper:
my tongue is paralysed [lingua sed torpet], a subtle flame courses
through my limbs, with sound self-caused my ears ring, and my eyes are
covered in double darkness. Having recorded these symptoms of extreme
love-sickness, Catullus stands off from himself self-critically and diagnoses the cause:
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis.
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes. (51.13-16)

(Idleness, Catullus, is your trouble; idleness is what delights you and

moves you to passion; idleness has proved ere now the ruin of kings and
prosperous cities.) A. J. Woodman has shown the differing implications
of otium in this passage: in line 13 it means inertia, in the next line wantonness or excessive licence (nequitza, a favourite word of Propertius),
and in the concluding lines that luxury and softness which Roman
moralists saw as the great danger to armies and states. Catullus here
joins with Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Cicero and such Roman heroes as Scipio
and Cat0 in stigmatizing inactivity as the source of many vices. As T . P.
Wiseman puts it, citing significant parallels in Ciceros Tusculun Disputations, 5 8 the physical symptoms are the sign of a self-destructive emotional
excess, Catullus the poet commenting bitterly on Catullus the lover
(p. 154). This palinode against love gains more significance when set in
the context of the collection as a whole, for the three following poems
restore us to the thick of Roman political life, so that no Roman reader
could have failed to see in the final stanza of 51 a rejection of idleness,
with its dangerous self-indulgence, and a return to the traditional Roman
preoccupations of civic life and the virtues needed to preserve it (p.
155). Wiseman quotes another apposite passage from Cicero, the speech
defending Marcus Caelius, which excuses a young man indulging some
16 See T. P. Wiseman, CatullusandHis World. A Reapp.raisal(Cambridge, 1985), 151-5; 1 quote
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 Ciceros attack on exuberant pleasure (volupta.c grstzens) 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
Haec, ut ames, faciunt, haec, quod fecere, tuentur;
Haec sunt iucundi causa cibusque mali
Otia si tollas, periere Cupidinis arcus,
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,
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:
Da vacuae menti, quod teneatur, opus.

136

139

143

149

In Peter Greens lively translation:

No leisure - thats rule
Number one. Leisure stimulates love, leisure watches the
lovelorn,
Leisures the cause and sustenance of this sweet
Evil. Eliminate leisure, and Cupids 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 youll 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 Ovids 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 seriously recommended work as the antidote to love.6oReaders who enjoyed
Ovids 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. /Thats how
Cupid slips in; thats 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, /Dont opt
out - youll 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, dependent 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 debilitating, and equated umbra with mollitia, desidza, segnitia, ignavia. All
O
Andre 1966, 229, cites Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.74ff. On Ciceros 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 Vergils 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 skins all white from the soft,
sheltered city life youve led). In every branch of the vita activu the opposition 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 Horaces 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
gardensshade . . .). The point of such wishpoems 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
Octavians 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 junipers shade
brings peril: hurtful to the corn, too, is the shade. Get ye home, my fullfed 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, emerging into a more noble state. The ambivalent concept of umbra allows him
to accept, and then reject, concealment. If Virgils Eclogues evoke the
shepherds life, the Georgics move on to the harder life of farmers, with
their all-conquering insatiable toil (labor omnia vicit improbus,
Georg., 1.145ff). Yet this mode of poetry, too, can be set aside as unworthy of the poets 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 victors 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 inglorious 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 virtus. 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, enervated, . . . and pallid.
In De beneficiis Seneca returns to the fray, denouncing the Epicureans
inertia: You count it pleasure to surrender your miserable body to sluggish 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 marcentis 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 - overidyllic? - 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 farmers 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 profession.12Modern commentators disagree about whether Horace is expressing 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 personas insincerity.
Any of these readings seems preferable to J.-M. Andres account of the
poem as a serious, concrete essay in Epicureanism, une vita otiosa de contenu 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 Horaces Epicurean
allegiances in the Odes unite 1hCdonismebacchique et la quCte de la
shenite, 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 fundamentally true, if slightly idealizing, expression of Horaces 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 OLoughlin, The Garlands of Repose (Chicago, 1978), 77-80. Andre 1966, 460,
describes it as a diatribe contre Iusure et Ieloge de la vie champetre, mises plaisamment par un artificequi ne trompe personne, dans la bouche dun 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 peasant 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 poets 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, wont 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 arbuto /stratus) as une &vocation. . . du jouisseur, pour lequel le poPte
ne peut pas se defendre dune certaine sympathie because he expresses
Horaces 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 poets preferred way of life detaches him definitively from all
these alternatives. An apt comment on the structure of such choice of
life debates is Horaces own Epistle 1.14: I call him happy who lives in
the country; you him who dwells in the city. One who likes anothers lot,
of course dislikes his own. Each is foolish and unfairly blames the undeserving 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 venale 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 conclusion, as an exemplar of mmtur 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 Commager states that the Odes 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 (Otzum, 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 poets outburst of passion
and despondency . . . over-emphasized . . . one possible aspect of otium,
Horaces 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 Horaces 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 lotium, citing Fraenkels theory of an allusion to Catullus
51, and commenting: Mais, alors que Catulle, mi-serieux mi-enjoue,
denonce lotium 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 structure. Nor is there evidence for a changing valuation of otium in Horaces
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.
Andre 1966, 469, once again detecting an echo of Lucretius.
jq

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 Horaces celebration of his own
good fortune, this ode is a poem against ambition, rather, with no special
longing for otium in the poets 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 Horaces political Odes marks a movement from retreat to recommitment, 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 Horaces output is diverse, ringing many variations on traditional 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-improvement, a concern with the good life in terms of simplicity, lack of ostentation, 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 Fortune, 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
*

Commager, T he Odes of Horace, 160-234.

The following account of Seneca is based on the Moral Essays, De providentia, De constantia,

De ira, De consolatione ad Marciam, De vita beata, De otio, De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate

vitae, De consolatione ad Polybium, De co,nsolatione ad Helviam, De beneficiis and the Epistulae
morales, all in the Loeb Classical Library translations.

32

Brian Vickers

iacere], it is not tranquillity; it is merely a flat calm (malacia: Ep.,

67.14). O t i u m desidiosum, slothful idleness, typical of the Epicurean
(De brev. mt., 13.2; De ira, 2.21.6), is often the setting for gluttony and
lust, where sluggish inaction (inerti otio torpet: De Ben., 7.2.2.), goes
with selfish and degraded pleasures (De Ben., 4.13.1; Ep., 55.5; 67.11).
Man, compared to other animals, is weak, unable to bear cold, heat and
toil, yet from mere rest and idleness [situ et otio] doomed to decay ( A d
Mar., 11.3). In this way the weak get weaker, for by reason of too much
leisure natures which are naturally weak and effeminate . . . have grown
spoiled, are easily hurt by trifles (De const., 10.3).
The connection between otium and degeneration, both physical and
moral, is as real for Seneca as for Cicero and Livy. Epistle 55 discusses the
villa of Vatia, a man famous for his life of leisure and generally thought
to be happy: but, Seneca concludes, he chose this place when his leisure
was already unfruitful and decrepit ( o t i u m . . . pigrum i a m et senile:
55.7). Strength, if unused, easily melts into softness and impotence, a
perversion summed up again by the words delicatus, languor (De brev.
vit., 12.6), and above all mollis. Describing Baiae, that dangerous locus
amoenus on the bay of Naples (a place to be avoided . . . the resort of
luxury: E p . , 51.1), Seneca alludes again to the disintegration of Hannibals army through sensual indulgence, and urges an unrelenting battle
against pleasure, for the wise and good man cannot indulge in dainty or
effeminate conduct (nihil delicate, nihil molliter), and his sweat should
come from toil, not from a sauna (55.6). Life should be lived calmly, but
not luxuriously (placide, n o n molliter), another letter advises, for a
hard, rough, toilsome life (dure, aspere, laboriose) is on all counts
better than a soft one. When men praise someone for living luxuriously
(molliter) in fact they mean: He is softened by luxury. For the soul is
made womanish by degrees, and is weakened until it matches the ease
and laziness [otii sui et pigritiae] in which it lies. For the real man it
would be better to become hardened (obrigescere: EP., 82.2).
Again like Livy and other exponents of Roman civic values, Seneca sees
the remedy for otium as being action, military or civil. The brave man is
he whom war cannot subdue, . . . not he who battens at ease among the
idle populace (pingue otium est inter desides populos: De const., 3.4).
Whenever in the grasp of an uncontrolled sluggishness we must rouse
ourselves to action and to worthwhile pursuits (bonarum artium), for the
busy man has no time for wantonness (lascivere), and the evils of leisure
can be shaken off by hard work (otii mtia negotio discuti: Ep.,
5-6, 8-9). This is almost a definition of virtue, for the man intent on the
right (erectus ad honesta) is eager for reasonable toil and ready for
duties accompanied by danger. T o what energetic man is not idleness a
punishment? (De Prov., 2.2). While some worthless fellow wastes his
leisure time at the recreation-ground (in campo otium mum oblectet),
toil summons the best men (ibid. 5.4). Not just the optimi, all who are

Leisure and idleness: t h e ambiualence of otium

33

truly human prefer action, for it is the nature of the human mind to be
active and prone to movement (De tranq. an., 2.11). Those men who fail
in public life and take refuge in leisure and in solitary studies, find them
unendurable since they have been used to public affairs, desirous of
action (ibid. 2.9). Unable to control their own desires, and not having
any worthwhile occupation, they are forced to the sad and languid endurance of their leisure (otii sui tristis atque aegra patientiu), and come
to loathe their own leisure, complaining that they have nothing to do,
their unhappy sloth making them envy other mens advancement (ibid.
2.10).
Although he believes that action is necessary to human health and to
the continuation of society, Seneca does not believe that everyone is
required to take part all of the time. As a Stoic, he writes in De otio, he is
committed to the ethos of living for the public good, rather than (with
the Epicureans) for private pleasure, and of not enjoying leisure before
death, indeed not even taking leisure for death itself (1.4). Yet there are
some circumstances in which the wise man may legitimately retire from
society. If the respublica in which he lives is corrupt he may dedicate
himself to the respublica maior, the world at large, and devote himself to
liberal studies and the cultivation of virtue for the benefit of others (ibid.
3.3-4). Like Cicero and Sallust, Seneca - who spent the last years of his
life as a private citizen, ousted from his position as tutor and governor of
the young Nero - rationalized his own enforced leisure by redefining
otium and the otiosus. The leisured man is not one who, in his retirement, is so pampered with luxury that he doesnt know if he is alive or
dead, sitting or standing (De breu. uzt., 12.9). Nor are those truly leisured
who, although at ease and in solitude, are themselves the source of their
own worry; we should say that these are living, not in leisure, but in busy
idleness (ibid. 12.2: n o n otiosa vita dicenda est, sed desidiosa occupatio).
Trivia1 pursuits, childish hobbies, may fill the vacuum of leisure but do so
with an idle occupation (12.4: n o n otium . . . iners otium), and such
otiosi have m u l t u m negotii (13.1). Senecas word-play seems to echo
Ennius bored soldiers, suffering from otium otiosum, and the point he is
making is similar, if at a more literate level: the activity practised in
otium must be worthwhile. From his perspective, then, he can assert that
Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they
alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their
own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own. . . . These glorious
fashioners of holy thoughts were born for us, that is, for posterity (ibid.
14.1).
The otiosus is legitimate if he is also sapiens, for he can serve the
greater commonwealth better in leisure by enquiring what virtue is, . . .
whether it is nature or art that makes men good, whether the world is a
solitary creation, or one of many, what God is, and so on ( D e otio, 4.2).
The sapiens retires into his otium knowing that there also he will be

34

Brian Vickers

doing something that will benefit posterity, for the good man in this way
governs the ages to come, speaking to the ears of all men of all nations,
now and in the future (ibid. 6.4). Although the Stoics normally held that
virtue could only be realized in social action, Seneca argues that virtue
can still do good although obscured, and that philosophy in leisure still
gives us some chance of honourable activity (De tranq. an., 3.6; 4.7-8).
But he is always careful to distinguish leisure dedicated to study and letters (otio ac litteris, otioso studio, ibid. 5.5; 7.2) from idleness, contrasting the vita otiosa and zgnavu (EP., 55.4). Writing to his friend
Paulinus he urges him to a justified retirement after a life of virtue given
to the state: now try how your virtue . . . will behave in leisure. But, he
adds, I do not summon you to slothful or idle inaction, or to drown all
your native energy in slumbers and the pleasures dear to the crowd ( D e
brev. vit., 18.2). It is better to be a dead man than a live one dead, he
writes elsewhere ( D e tranq. an., 5.5), for idle leisure [iners otium] makes
men hate their lives (EP., 78.26). All the negative connotations of otium
are still operative for Seneca, when he writes, ironically, that there is a
great difference between lying idle and lying buried ( E p . , 82.2: inter
otium et conditivum, a word usually applied to the storing of grain). A
man lying on a perfumed couch - some Epicurean resting in a purely
sensual sluggishness - is no less dead than he who is dragged along by the
executioners hook. T h e conclusion, formulated with memorable brevity,
is that
Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura.

Leisure without study is death; it is a tomb for the living man (EP.,
82.3 -4).
Of much inferior quality as a writer, Valerius Maximus shared with
Seneca great popularity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a
repository of Roman moral philosophy. His Factorum ac dictorum
memorabilium libri I X 8 * ( c . 31 AD) adapted itself most easily to the
florilegium tradition, being itself a compilation of deeds and sayings
arranged under ethical categories, such as moderation, gratitude, happiness, the whole being illustrated by examples, Roman (domestica) and
foreign (externa). Book VII, chapter 2 is dedicated to Sapienter Dicta
aut Facta (pp. 532-4), a rag-bag title which includes two references to
otium. Appius Claudius observed that the Roman people are better kept
in negotium than otium, since the most powerful states have found that
activity leads to virtue, but quzes to desidia. Et sane, Valerius comments,
negotium nomine horridum civitatis nostrae mores in suo statu continuit,
blandae appellationis quies plurimis vitiis respersit (VII, ii. 1). The
soft and attractive concept of quies is an incitement to vice. Secondly,

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 compared 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 traditional Roman moralists tendency to see the vices as interlinked, for otium
recurs in the section De Luxuria et Libidine (Ix, i: pp. 674-84), including the obligatory references to Hannibals 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 predictably led to mischief, as the ranks grew insubordinate . . . eager for
luxury and ease, disdainful of discipline and work ( A n . , 1.16: Eo @incipio lascivire miles . . . denique l u x u m et otium cupere). Faced with this
prospect (as when the army, encamped too near Rome, became debilitated 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 unobtrusively, to a society of triflers where he became indistinguishable from
the rest by his absorption in peace and idleness ( A . ,40: otiosus . . . tranquillitatem 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 Cappadocia 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). Indulgence 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.
Neros introduction of Greek-style games to Rome (including competitions 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 incarnated in Cat0 and Scipio Africanus. In one of his later works, the dialogus
de Oratoribus, he even innovates in literary critical terminology by applying the negative connotations of otium to prose-writing, in Ciceros dismissal of Brutus style as spiritless and disjointed (D.,
18: otiosum atque
diiunctum). There could be few more damning judgements.
Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich
This essay continues in Volume 4, No. 2 of this Journal.