We are ciphers, born to eat bread, the worthless suitors of Penelope and the young men of Alcinous’ court, all too concerned with keeping their skin attractive, who thought it a fine thing to sleep till midday and * * * To murder a man, thieves get up at night; to save yourself, won't you wake up?
A.E. Housman begins his discussion of this passage as follows:Footnote 1
I summarise Bentley's arguments against the above reading of v. 31 presented by most MSS. In the first place ‘cessatum ducere’ is itself a strange and scarcely intelligible substitute for ‘lenire’ or ‘solari’; secondly the youth of Phaeacia did not ‘bring care to cease’ (if that is what the words mean), inasmuch as they knew nothing of care except from hearsay; thirdly to soothe care by music is no reproach to anyone, and Horace himself carm. iv 11 35 asks for a song because ‘minuentur atrae carmine curae’.
He agrees with Bentley in rejecting curam (which actually has better manuscript support) in favour of somnum, but, although he approves of Bentley's change to cessantem in so far as it substitutes sense for nonsense, he thinks that it does not reflect the manuscripts ‘so closely as to enforce assent’. He suggests instead ad strepitum citharae arcessitum inducere somnum (‘to bring on sleep, summoned by the sound of the lyre’), pointing out that arcessere is the mot juste for summoning sleep, and arguing, with his usual expertise, that the other changes are palaeographically easy. The resulting line, however, is rhythmically awkward and the assumption of three ‘errors’ in a single line is a bit much to swallow.Footnote 2 To the best of my knowledge, Housman's emendations have not been adopted by any editor.
Despite the arguments of Bentley and Housman against cessatum ducere curam, which have generally been admitted to be valid, this is the reading that most editors since the beginning of the twentieth century have adopted. In a random sample of nine editions I have found the only exception to be that of Roland Mayer, who opted for Bentley's cessantem ducere somnum, understanding the phrase to mean ‘to induce sleep that is reluctant to come’.Footnote 3 However, W.R. Inge finds that ‘somnum is not only impossible but ridiculous. The Phaeacians were not dormice …’ and Dilke observes that ‘somnum is repetitive and the phrase implies too much somnolence even for the Phaeacians’.Footnote 4 Harrison argues persuasively that ducere somnum must mean ‘continue / prolong sleep’ rather than ‘bring on sleep’.Footnote 5 Egil Kraggerud reminds us that some past participles could be used in the active or passive sense (for example, tacitus, ratus, iuratus, cenatus) and can refer to a present state or a past action.Footnote 6 He concludes that cessatum somnum is the right reading here and, pointing to Ovid's use of cessata arua (Fast. 4.617) in the sense of fields lying fallow (i.e. ploughed but unseeded; cf. OLD s.v. 4c), argues that cessatum here means little more than inertem. But cessatus when applied to fields in the sense of lying fallow is best seen as a special application of the more general sense of ‘neglected, unused’ (OLD s.v. 4b); so, by analogy, cessatum somnum should mean ‘neglected sleep’ and neglecting sleep is clearly the last thing that the young Phaeacians can be accused of.
Perhaps the most obvious emendation for these lines is that proposed by Scaliger: retaining curam and making the easy change from cessatum to cessatam.Footnote 7 Unfortunately, we do not know how Scaliger intended these words to be taken. Dilke lists no fewer than nine articles on this passage in Classical Review between the years 1891 and 1934, but only that of W.C.F. Walters revives this reading.Footnote 8 Walters took curam to mean ‘their business’ and interpreted lines 30–1 as follows: ‘The Phaeacians’ idea of correct conduct in life was to sleep to midday and then to have a long spell of the other forms of indulgence, their real business, that sleep had interrupted.’ Extrapolating from cute curanda, as Walters does, to have cura embrace other forms of indulgence, however, is difficult without some authorial guidance.Footnote 9 Walters's reading and interpretation have not won converts, perhaps because he made no attempt to translate the line rather than paraphrase it or to explain it grammatically beyond citing two passages from Ovid involving somewhat similar use of the past participle of cessare.Footnote 10 But Harrison points to another reason: ‘Walters's attempt to preserve curam by emending cessatum to cessatam was anticipated by Scaliger and disposed of by Bentley.’Footnote 11 But how did Bentley ‘dispose of’ Scaliger's reading?
Bentley's primary argument against curam was that the young Phaeacians ‘quid sit cura, nesciebant’.Footnote 12 Now it is certainly true that Horace depicts the Phaeacians as carefree in the conventional sense of the word. However, cura has a wide range of meanings (OLD has nine major meanings, most with subdivisions), many of which are closely paralleled by ‘care’ in English. While the Phaeacians appear untroubled by care in the sense of anxiety or worry (OLD s.v. 1), they do show care in the sense of ‘devoting care to’ (OLD s.v. 3); in fact, it is clear from line 29 that Horace thought they devoted too much care to how they looked. So Bentley's dictum, while rhetorically effective, is only partially true and is misleading in so far as it suggests that they were devoid of care. Line 29 indicates that the Phaeacians did know about care but that their care was misdirected.
Bentley had a second argument against curam: ‘quod cura, quae iam cessata est, ad citharam duci non potest’. At first sight this argument seems unanswerable. But cessare is a slippery verb and among the meanings for its active forms is ‘to be neglected’ (OLD s.v. 4a). Cessatam is of course a passive form but, as Kraggerud has reminded us, past participles of some verbs, including cessare, can bear the meaning of their active forms; so cessatam curam can mean ‘care having been neglected’ and, if we understand cessatam ducere curam as an example of the ab urbe condita construction, we can translate it as ‘to prolong the neglect of care’.Footnote 13
To grasp what Horace means by ‘care’ here, it is important to remember the wider context. Horace presents Homer as providing a practical guide for himself and his readers and, in particular, for the addressee, Lollius Maximus (who is identified as a puer at line 68), with whom he begins and ends the epistle. Few can aspire to imitate Odysseus. Most of us are more akin to Penelope's suitors and the young Phaeacians. Just as the Phaeacians’ cura for their appearance is misdirected cura, so too is that of Lollius and Horace's readers, for they will immediately take remedial action if something is hurting their eyes but tend to be dilatory (differs curandi tempus) when it comes to taking care of their animus (37–9). Horace makes it clear in lines 32–43 that this all-important cura, at least for Lollius and, by extension, for his readers, entails getting up before dawn and studying serious works intensively. This is the way to leading a good life (recte uiuendi, 41), and this is what Horace means by cura; any other kind of cura is frivolous in comparison.
If we translate cessatam ducere curam as ‘to prolong their neglect of care’, what does this mean in terms applicable to the young Phaeacians? Clearly, Horace is not implying that they (like Lollius and his peers) should be rising before dawn to read philosophy, but he is implying that they are making no effort ad recte uiuendum (cf. line 41). Odysseus developed the skills of leadership, resourcefulness, oratory and an inquiring curiosity about the wider world. The young Phaeacians, by contrast, seem to care for nothing beyond the mindless pleasures of Phaeacian court life. They sleep (when of course they cannot be taking care of anything) till midday; then, when they awake, they prolong this avoidance, or neglect, of care by amusing themselves to the sound of music.
