Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
poem, and the speech of Appius himself is extant. Now, he delivered
it seventeen years after his second consulship, there having been an
interval of ten years between the two consulships, and he having been
censor before his previous consulship. This will show you that at the
time of the war with Pyrrhus he was a very old man. Yet this is the
story handed down to us.
There is therefore nothing in the arguments of those who say that old
age takes no part in public business. They are like men who would say
that a steersman does nothing in sailing a ship, because, while some
of the crew are climbing the masts, others hurrying up and down the
gangways, others pumping out the bilge water, he sits quietly in the
stern holding the tiller. He does not do what young men do; nevertheless
he does what is much more important and better. The great affairs of
life are not performed by physical strength, or activity, or nimbleness
of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion. Of these
old age is not only not deprived, but, as a rule, has them in a greater
degree. Unless by any chance I, who as a soldier in the ranks, as
military tribune, as legate, and as consul have been employed in various
kinds of war, now appear to you to be idle because not actively engaged
in war. But I enjoin upon the Senate what is to be done, and how.
Carthage has long been harbouring evil designs, and I accordingly
proclaim war against her in good time. I shall never cease to entertain
fears about her till I hear of her having been levelled with the ground.
The glory of doing that I pray that the immortal gods may reserve
for you, Scipio, so that you may complete the task begun by your
grand-father, now dead more than thirty-two years ago; though all years
to come will keep that great man's memory green. He died in the year
before my censorship, nine years after my consulship, having been
returned consul for the second time in my own consulship. If then he had
lived to his hundredth year, would he have regretted having lived to be
old? For he would of course not have been practising rapid marches, nor
dashing on a foe, nor hurling spears from a distance, nor using swords
at close quarters--but only counsel, reason, and senatorial eloquence.
And if those qualities had not resided in us _seniors_, our ancestors
would never have called their supreme council a Senate. At Sparta,
indeed, those who hold the highest magistracies are in accordance with
the fact actually called "elders." But if you will take the trouble
to read or listen to foreign history, you will find that the mightiest
States have been brought into peril by young men, have been supported
and restored by old. The question occurs in the poet Naevius's _Sport_:
Pray, who are those who brought your State
With such despatch to meet its fate?
There is a long answer, but this is the chief point:
A crop of brand-new orators we grew,
And foolish, paltry lads who thought they knew.
For of course rashness is the note of youth, prudence of old age.
7. But, it is said, memory dwindles. No doubt, unless you keep it in
practice, or if you happen to be somewhat dull by nature. Themistocles
had the names of all his fellow-citizens by heart. Do you imagine that
in his old age he used to address Aristides as Lysimachus? For my part,
I know not only the present generation, but their fathers also, and
their grandfathers. Nor have I any fear of losing my memory by reading
tombstones, according to the vulgar superstition. On the contrary, by
reading them I renew my memory of those who are dead and gone. Nor, in
point of fact, have I ever heard of any old man forgetting where he had
hidden his money. They remember everything that interests them: when to
answer to their bail, business appointments, who owes them money, and
to whom they owe it. What about lawyers, pontiffs, augurs, philosophers,
when old? What a multitude of things they remember! Old men retain their
intellects well enough, if only they keep their minds active and fully
employed. Nor is that the case only with men of high position and
great office: it applies equally to private life and peaceful pursuits.
Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age; and being believed to
neglect the care of his property owing to his devotion to his art, his
sons brought him into court to get a judicial decision depriving him of
the management of his property on the ground of weak intellect--just as
in our law it is customary to deprive a paterfamilias of the management
of his property if he is squandering it. There--upon the old poet is
said to have read to the judges the play he had on hand and had just
composed--the _Oedipus Coloneus_--and to have asked them whether they
thought that the work of a man of weak intellect. After the reading he
was acquitted by the jury. Did old age then compel this man to become
silent in his particular art, or Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, or Isocrates
and Gorgias whom I mentioned before, or the founders of schools of
philosophy, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Xenocrates, or later Zeno and
Cleanthus, or Diogenes the Stoic, whom you too saw at Rome? Is it not
rather the case with all these that the active pursuit of study only
ended with life?
But, to pass over these sublime studies, I can name some rustic Romans
from the Sabine district, neighbours and friends of my own,
without whose presence farm work of importance is scarcely ever
performed--whether sowing, or harvesting or storing crops. And yet in
other things this is less surprising; for no one is so old as to think
that he may not live a year. But they bestow their labour on what they
know does not affect them in any case:
He plants his trees to serve a race to come,
as our poet Statius says in his Comrades. Nor indeed would a farmer,
however old, hesitate to answer any one who asked him for whom he was
planting: "For the immortal gods, whose will it was that I should not
merely receive these things from my ancestors, but should also hand them
on to the next generation."
8. That remark about the old man is better than the following:
If age brought nothing worse than this,
It were enough to mar our bliss,
That he who bides for many years
Sees much to shun and much for tears.
Yes, and perhaps much that gives him pleasure too. Besides, as to
subjects for tears, he often comes upon them in youth as well.
A still more questionable sentiment in the same Caecilius is:
No greater misery can of age be told
Than this: be sure, the young dislike the old.
Delight in them is nearer the mark than dislike. For just as old men, if
they are wise, take pleasure in the society of young men of good parts,
and as old age is rendered less dreary for those who are courted and
liked by the youth, so also do young men find pleasure in the maxims of
the old, by which they are drawn to the pursuit of excellence. Nor do
I perceive that you find my society less pleasant than I do yours. But
this is enough to show you how, so far from being listless and sluggish,
old age is even a busy time, always doing and attempting something, of
course of the same nature as each man's taste had been in the previous
part of his life. Nay, do not some even add to their stock of learning?
We see Solon, for instance, boasting in his poems that he grows old
"daily learning something new." Or again in my own case, it was only
when an old man that I became acquainted with Greek literature, which in
fact I absorbed with such avidity--in my yearning to quench, as it were,
a long-continued thirst--that I became acquainted with the very facts
which you see me now using as precedents. When I heard what Socrates had
done about the lyre I should have liked for my part to have done that
too, for the ancients used to learn the lyre but, at any rate, I worked
hard at literature.
9. Nor, again, do I now MISS THE BODILY STRENGTH OF A YOUNG MAN (for
that was the second point as to the disadvantages of old age) any more
than as a young man I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant. You
should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do
it with all your might. What could be weaker than Milo of Croton's
exclamation? When in his old age he was watching some athletes
practising in the course, he is said to have looked at his arms and to
have exclaimed with tears in his eyes: "Ah well! these are now as good
as dead." Not a bit more so than yourself, you trifler! For at no time
were you made famous by your real self, but by chest and biceps. Sext.
Aelius never gave vent to such a remark, nor, many years before him,
Titus Coruncanius, nor, more recently, P. Crassus--all of them learned
juris-consults in active practice, whose knowledge of their profession
was maintained to their last breath. I am afraid an orator does lose
vigour by old age, for his art is not a matter of the intellect alone,
but of lungs and bodily strength. Though as a rule that musical ring
in the voice even gains in brilliance in a certain way as one grows
old--certainly I have not yet lost it, and you see my years. Yet
after all the style of speech suitable to an old man is the quiet and
unemotional, and it often happens that the chastened and calm delivery
of an old man eloquent secures a hearing. If you cannot attain to that
yourself, you might still instruct a Scipio and a Laelius. For what is
more charming than old age surrounded by the enthusiasm of youth? Shall
we not allow old age even the strength to teach the young, to train
and equip them for all the duties of life? And what can be a nobler
employment? For my part, I used to think Publius and Gnaeus Scipio and
your two grandfathers, L. Aemilius and P. Africanus, fortunate men when
I saw them with a company of young nobles about them. Nor should we
think any teachers of the fine arts otherwise than happy, however much
their bodily forces may have decayed and failed. And yet that same
failure of the bodily forces is more often brought about by the vices of
youth than of old age; for a dissolute and intemperate youth hands down
the body to old age in a worn-out state. Xenophon's Cyrus, for instance,
in his discourse delivered on his death-bed and at a very advanced age,
says that he never perceived his old age to have become weaker than his
youth had been. I remember as a boy Lucius Metellus, who having been
created Pontifex Maximus four years after his second consulship, held
that office twenty-two years, enjoying such excellent strength of body
in the very last hours of his life as not to miss his youth. I need not
speak of myself; though that indeed is an old man's way and is generally
allowed to my time of life. Don't you see in Homer how frequently Nestor
talks of his own good qualities? For he was living through a third
generation; nor had he any reason to fear that upon saying what was true
about himself he should appear either over vain or talkative. For, as
Homer says, "from his lips flowed discourse sweeter than honey," for
which sweet breath he wanted no bodily strength. And yet, after all, the
famous leader of the Greeks nowhere wishes to have ten men like Ajax,
but like Nestor: if he could get them, he feels no doubt of Troy shortly
falling.
10. But to return to my own case: I am in my eighty-fourth year. I could
wish that I had been able to make the same boast as Cyrus; but, after
all, I can say this: I am not indeed as vigorous as I was as a private
soldier in the Punic war, or as quaestor in the same war, or as consul
in Spain, and four years later when as a military tribune I took part in
the engagement at Thermopylae under the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio;
but yet, as you see, old age has not entirely destroyed my muscles, has