M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
shall be this, in regard to which, if you say that I have taken up an easier theme in accusing sleep than you who have praised it—for who, say you, cannot easily bring an indictment against sleep?—I will counter thus: what is easy to indict is hard to praise; what is hard to praise can serve no useful purpose.
2. But I let that pass. For the nonce, as we are staying at Baiae in this interminable labyrinth[1] of Ulysses, I will take from Ulysses a few things which bear on my subject. For he surely would not have taken twenty years his fatherland to reach,[2] nor have wandered so long about that pool, nor gone through all the other adventures which make up the Odyssey, had not then sweet sleep seized his weary limbs.[3] Yet on the tenth day his native soil appeared[4]—but what did sleep do?
The evil counsel of my crew prevailed:
The bag they opened, and forth rushed the winds;
The fierce gale caught and swept them to the sea,
Weeping with sorrow, from their native shore?[5]
What again took place at the island of Trinacria?[6]
Nor winds sweet sleep upon mine eyelids shed:
Eurylochus his crew ill counsel gave.[7]
Afterwards, when the Sungod's oxen and fat flocks . . they slew and flayed . . and burnt the thighs and ate the flesh,[8] what then Ulysses when awaked?
Wailing I cried to all the Gods on high,
Who ruthless to my ruin made me sleep.[9]
- ↑ Marcus seems to refer to Ulysses being driven back-wards and forwards along the coast (Odyss. xii. ).
- ↑ Odyss. iii. 117.
- ↑ ibid. x. 31.
- ↑ ibid. 29.
- ↑ ibid. 46.
- ↑ Sicily.
- ↑ Odyss. xii. 338.
- ↑ ibid. xi. 108; xii. 359, 364.
- ↑ ibid. xii. 370, 372.
