An seni respublica gerenda sit

And yet, on the other hand, we see that the mere lads and young men are turned away from public affairs by those who are wise; and the lawrs wrhich are proclaimed by the heralds in the assemblies bear witness to this, when they call up first to the platform, not the young men like Alcibiades and Pytheas, but men over fifty years of age, and invite them to speak and offer advice. For such men are not incited by lack of the habit of daring or by want of practice

to try to score a victory over their political opponents. And Cato, when after eighty years he was defendant in a law-suit, said it was difficult when he had lived with one generation to defend himself before another. In the case of the Caesar[*](i.e. Augustus.) who defeated Antony, all agree that his political acts towards the end of his life became much more kingly and more useful to the people. And he himself, when the young men made a disturbance as he was rebuking them severely for their manners and customs, said, Listen, young men, to an old man to whom old men listened when he was young. And the government of Pericles gained its greatest power in his old age, which was the time when he persuaded the Athenians to engage in the war; and when they were eager to fight at an unfavourable time against sixty thousand heavy-armed men, he interposed and prevented it; indeed he almost sealed up the arms of the people and the keys of the gates. But what Xenophon has written about Agesilaüs[*](Xenophon, Agesilaüs, 11. 15. ) certainly deserves to be quoted word for word: For what youth, he says, did not his old age manifestly surpass? For who in the prime of life was so terrible to his enemies as Agesilaüs at the extreme of old age? At whose removal were the enemy more pleased than at that of Agesilaüs, although his end came when he was aged? Who inspired more courage in his allies than Agesilaüs, although he was already near the limit of life? And what young man was more missed by his friends than Agesilaüs, who was aged when he died?

Time, then, did not prevent those men from doing such great things; and shall we of the present

day, who live in luxury in states that are free from tyranny or any war or siege, be such cowards as to shirk unwarlike contests and rivalries which are for the most part terminated justly by law and argument in accordance with justice, confessing that we are inferior, not only to the generals and public men of those days, but to the poets, teachers, and actors as well? Yes, if Simonides in his old age won prizes with his choruses, as the inscription in its last lines declares:

1. But for his skill with the chorus great glory Simonides followed,
2. Octogenarian child sprung from Leoprepes’ seed.[*](Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graec. iii. p. 496, no. 147 (203).)

And it is said that Sophocles, when defending himself against the charge of dementia brought by his sons,[*](This story, though repeated by several ancient writers, deserves no credit.) read aloud the entrance song of the chorus in the Oedipus at Colonus, which begins[*](Sophocles, Oed. Col. 668-673.):

1. Of this region famed for horses
2. Thou hast, stranger, reached the fairest
3. Dwellings in the land,
4. Bright Colonus, where the sweet-voiced
5. Nightingale most loves to warble
6. In the verdant groves;

and the song aroused such admiration that he was escorted from the court as if from the theatre, with the applause and shouts of those present. And here is a little epigram of Sophocles, as all agree:

1. Song for Herodotus Sophocles made when the years of his age were
2. Five in addition to fifty.[*](Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graec. ii. p. 245, no. 5.)

But Philemon[*](Philemon, the chief rival of Menander, was born in 361 and died in 262 b.c. Suidas (s.v. Φιλήμων) states that he died in his sleep at the age of 99 years, the pseudo-Lucian (Macrobioi, 25) that he died of excessive laughter when 97 years old.) the comic dramatist and Alexis[*](There is epigraphic as well as literary evidence for the prolific productiveness and great age of Alexis, the foremost poet of the Middle Comedy, who lived circa 376-270 b.c. See Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa, Suppl. Bd., and Am. Jour. Phil. xxi. (1900) pp. 59 ff.) were overtaken by death while they were on the stage acting and being crowned with garlands. And Polus the tragic actor, as Eratosthenes and Philochorus tell us, when he was seventy years old acted in eight tragedies in four days shortly before his death.[*](A long list of Greeks who lived to an advanced age is given by B. E. Richardson, Old Age among the Ancient Greeks, pp. 215-222.)

Is it, then, not disgraceful that the old men of the public platform are found to be less noble than those of the stage, and that they withdraw from the truly sacred contests, put off the political rôle, and assume I do not know what in its stead? For surely after the rôle of a king that of a farmer is a mean one. For when Demosthenes says[*](Demosthenes, xxi. (Against Meidias) 568.) that the Paralus, being the sacred galley, was unworthily treated when it was used to transport beams, stakes, and cattle for Meidias, will not a public man who gives up such offices as superintendent of public games, Boeotian magistrate, and president of the Amphictyonic council, and is thereafter seen busying himself with measuring flour and olive cakes and with tufts of sheep’s wool - will not he be thought to be bringing upon himself the old age of a horse, as the saying is, when nobody forces him to do so? Surely taking up menial work fit only for the market-place after holding public offices is like stripping a freeborn and modest woman of her gown, putting a cook’s apron on her, and keeping her in a tavern; for just so

the dignity and greatness of high ability in public life is destroyed when it is turned to household affairs and money-making. But if - the only thing left - they give to self-indulgence and luxury the names of rest and recreation, and urge the statesman quietly to waste away and grow old in them, I do not know which of two disgraceful pictures his life will seem to resemble more closely, that of sailors who desert their ship, when they have not brought it into the harbour but it is still under sail, and devote themselves to sexual indulgence for all time to come, or that of Heracles, as some painters playfully, but with evil influence, represent him in Omphalê’s palace wearing a yellow gown and giving himself up to her Lydian maids to be fanned and have his hair curled. Shall we in like manner strip the statesman of his lion’s skin and make him constantly recline at banquets to the music of harps and flutes? And shall we not be deterred by the words addressed by Pompey the Great to Lucullus? For Lucullus gave himself up after his military activities to baths, banquets, sexual intercourse in the daytime, great listlessness, and the erection of new-fangled buildings; and he reproached Pompey for his love of office and of honour as unsuited to his age. Then Pompey said that it was more untimely for an old man to indulge in luxury than to hold office. And once when he wras ill and the physician prescribed a thrush (which was hard to get and out of season), and someone said that Lucullus had plenty of them in his breeding-place, Pompey refused to send and get one, saying, Could Pompey, then, not live if Lucullus were not luxurious?

For granted that nature seeks in every way

pleasure and enjoyment, old men are physically incapacitated for all pleasures except a few necessary ones, and not only

Aphroditê with old men is wroth,[*](Euripides, Aeolus, Frag. 23, Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 369. Plutarch, Moralia 285 b, gives two lines: ἀλλ’ ῆ τὸ γῆρας τὴν Κύ῀αν χαίρειν ἐᾷἧ τ’ Ἀφροδίτη τοῖς γεροῦσαν ἅχθεται, But either eld to Cypris bids farewell Or Aphroditê with old men is wroth. )

as Euripides says, but their appetites also for food and drink are for the most part blunted and toothless, so that they can, if I may say so, hardly whet and sharpen them. They ought to prepare for themselves pleasures in the mind, not ignoble and illiberal ones like that of Simonides, wrho said to those who reproached him for his avarice that, since old age had deprived him of all other pleasures, he was comforting his declining years with the only one left, the pleasure of gain. Public life, on the other hand, possesses pleasures most noble and great, those in fact from which the gods themselves, as we may reasonably suppose, derive their only or their chief enjoyment. These are the pleasures that spring from good deeds and noble actions. For if Nicias the painter took such delight in the labours of his art that he often had to ask his servants whether he had had his bath and his breakfast; and if Archimedes when intent upon his drawing-tablet had to be dragged away by force, stripped and anointed by his servants, and then drew diagrams upon his anointed body; and if Canus the flute-player, with whom you also are acquainted, used to say that people did not know how much greater pleasure he gave to himself than to others when he played, for if they did, those who wished to hear him would receive pay instead of giving it. In view of these examples, do we not perceive how great are the pleasures the virtues provide, for those who practise them, as the result of the noble deeds they do and their works for the good of the community and of mankind; and that too without tickling or enervating them as do the smooth and gentle motions made on the body? Those have a frantic, unsteady titillation mixed with convulsive throbbing, but the pleasures given by noble works, such as those of which the man who rightly serves the State is the author, not like the golden wings of Euripides[*](Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 655, no. 911.) but like those heavenly Platonic pinions,[*](Plato, Phaedrus, 246 b=248 e, where the soul is likened to a chariot and charioteer with winged steeds.) bear the soul on high as it acquires greatness and lofty spirit mingled with joy.

And recall to your mind stories you have often heard. For Epameinondas, when asked what was the pleasantest thing that had happened to him, replied that it was winning the battle of Leuctra while his father and mother were still living. And Sulla, when he first entered Rome after freeing Italy of its civil wars, did not sleep at all that night, he was so borne aloft in spirit by great joy and gladness as by a blast of wind. This he has written about himself in his memoirs. For granted that, as Xenophon[*](Xenophon, Memorabilia, ii. 1. 31.) says, there is no sound sweeter than praise, yet there is no sight, reminder, or perception in the world which brings such great pleasure as the contemplation of one’s own acts in offices and positions of State in which one may be said to be in places flooded with light and in view of all the

people. Yes, and moreover kindly gratitude, bearing witness to the acts, and praise, competing with gratitude and ushering in deserved goodwill, add, as it were, a light and brilliance to the joy that comes from virtue. And it is a mans duty not to allow his reputation to become withered in his old age like an athlete’s garland, but by adding constantly something new and fresh to arouse the sense of gratitude for his previous actions and make it better and lasting; just as the artisans who were responsible for keeping the Delian ship[*](By Delian ship is meant the Paralus which was sent annually from Athens with delegates to the festival at Delos. Annual repairs were so long continued that none of the original timbers remained and the question arose whether it was the same ship or not.) in good condition, by inserting and fastening in new timbers to take the place of those which were becoming weak, seemed to keep the vessel from those ancient times everlasting and indestructible. Now the preservation and maintenance of reputation, as of fire, is not difficult and demands little fuel, but no one can without trouble rekindle either of them when it has gone out and grown cold. And just as Lampis the sea captain, when asked how he acquired his wealth, said, My great wealth easily, but the small beginnings of it slowly and with toil, so political reputation and power are not easy to attain at first, but when once they have grown great it is easy to augment them and keep them great by taking advantage of casual opportunities. For when a man has once become a friend, he does not require many and great services that he may remain a friend, but constancy shown by small tokens always preserves his goodwill, and so likewise the friendship and confidence of the people do not constantly demand that a man pay for choruses, plead causes, or hold offices; no, they are maintained by his mere readiness to serve and by not failing or growing weary in care and concern for the people. For even wars do not consist entirely of pitched battles, fighting, and sieges, but they admit of occasional sacrifices, social gatherings in between, and abundant leisure for games and foolishness. Why, then, forsooth, is public life feared as inexorable, toilsome, and burdensome, when theatrical exhibitions, festive processions, distributions of food, choruses and the Muse and Aglaï,[*](Pindar, Bergk-Schroeder, p. 467, no. 199 (213). Aglaïa, one of the Graces, was especially, connected with festive merriment.) and constantly the worship of some god, smooth the brows of legislators in every senate and assembly and repay its troubles many times over with pleasure and enjoyment?

Now the greatest evil attendant upon public life, envy, is least likely to beset old age, for dogs do indeed bark at whom they do not know, according to Heracleitus, and envy fights against a man as he begins his public career, at the doorway, as it were, of the orator’s platform, and tries to refuse him access, but familiar and accustomed reputation it does not savagely and roughly resent, but puts up with mildly. For this reason envy is sometimes likened to smoke, for in the case of those who are beginning their public career it pours out before them in great volume because they are enkindled, but when they burst into full flame it disappears. And whereas men attack other kinds of eminence and themselves lay claim to good character, good birth, and honour, as though they were depriving

themselves of so much of these as they grant to others; yet the primacy which comes from time, for which there is the special word presbeion or the prerogative due to seniority in age, arouses no jealousy and is freely conceded; for of no honour is it so true that it adorns the giver more than the receiver as of that which is paid to old age. Moreover, not all men expect that the power derived from wealth, eloquence, or wisdom will accrue to them, but no one who takes part in public life is without hope of attaining the reverence and repute to which old age leads. So there is no difference between the pilot who has sailed in great danger against adverse winds and waves, and, after clear weather and fair winds have come, seeks his moorings, and the man who has struggled in the ship of State a long time against the billows of envy, and then, when they have ceased and become smooth, backs water and withdraws from public life, giving up his political affiliations and clubs along with his public activities. For the longer the time has been the greater the number of those whom he has made his friends and fellow-workers, and he cannot take them all out with him, as a trainer leads out his chorus, nor is it fair to leave them in the lurch. But a long public career is, like old trees, hard to pull up, for it has many roots and is interwoven with affairs which cause more troubles and torments to those who withdraw from them than to those who remain in them. And if any remnant of envy or jealousy does continue against old men from their political contests, they should rather extinguish this by power than turn their backs and go away naked and unarmed. For people do not attack them so much because of envy if they maintain the contest as because of contempt if they have given up.

Testimony to the point is what Epameinondas the Great said to the Thebans when in winter weather the Arcadians invited them to come into the city and be quartered in their houses. He forbade it, saying Now they admire you and gaze at you as you do your military exercises and wrestle, but if they see you sitting by the fire and sipping your bean porridge, they will think you are no better than they are. Just so an old man active in word and deed and held in honour is a sight to arouse reverence, but one who spends the day in bed or sits in the corner of the porch chattering and wiping his nose is an object of contempt. And undoubtedly Homer also teaches this to those who hear aright; for Nestor, who went to the war at Troy, was revered and highly honoured, but Peleus and Laërtes, who stayed at home, were put aside and despised. For the habit of prudence does not last so well in those who let themselves become slack, but, being gradually lost and dissipated by inactivity, it always calls for what may be called exercise of the thought, since thought rouses and purifies the power of reason and action;

For when in use it gleams like beauteous bronze.[*](From an unknown drama of Sophocles; Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 314, no. 780; it is quoted in fuller form in Moralia, 792 a and 1129 c.)

For the evil caused by their physical weakness to the public activities of those who step into civil or military office when beyond the usual age is not so great as the advantage they possess in their caution and prudence and in the fact that they do not, borne along sometimes because of past failures and sometimes as the result of vain opinion, dash headlong upon public affairs, dragging the mob along with them in confusion like the storm-tossed sea, but manage gently and moderately the matters which arise. And that is why States when they are in difficulties or in fear yearn for the rule of the elder men; and often they have brought from his field some aged man, not by his request and even contrary to his wish, and have forced him to take the helm, as it were, and steer affairs into safety, and in so doing they have pushed aside generals and politicians who were able to shout loud and to speak without pausing for breath and, by Zeus, even men who were able, planting their feet firmly, to fight bravely against the enemy.[*](A reminiscence of Tyrtaeus, 8. 31 ἀλλά τις εῦ διαβὰς μενέτος, and Homer, Il. xii. 458.) So, for example, the politicians at Athens grooming Chares, son of Theochares, a powerful man at the height of his physical strength, to be the opponent of Timotheüs and Iphicrates, declared that the general of the Athenians ought to be such as he, but Timotheüs said, No, by the gods, but such should be the man who is to carry the general’s bedding. The general should be one who sees at the same time that which is before and behind[*](Homer, Il. i. 343.) and does not let anything that happens disturb his reasoning as to what is for the best. Sophocles[*](Cf. Plato, Republic, 329 c, with Shorey’s note.) indeed said that he was glad to have escaped, now that he was old, from sexual love, as from a cruel and raging tyrant; but in public life one must escape, not from one tyrant, the love of boys or women, but from many loves which are more insane than that: love of contention, love of fame, the desire to be first and greatest, which is a disease most prolific of envy, jealousy, and discord. Some of these old age does slacken and dull, but others it quenches and cools entirely, not so much by withdrawing a man from the impulse to action as by keeping him from excessive and fiery passions, so as to bring sober and settled reasoning to bear upon his thoughts.

However, let us grant that the words

Bide still, poor wretch, in thine own bedding wrapped[*](Euripides, Orestes, 258. These words are addressed to the sick Orestes by his sister Electra.)

are and appear to be deterrent when addressed to a man who begins to act young when his hair is grey and that they rebuke the old man who gets up from long continued home-keeping, as from a long illness, and sets out towards the office of general or of civil administrator; but the words which forbid a man who has spent his life in public affairs and contests to go on to the funeral torch and the end of his life, and which call him back and tell him, as it were, to leave the road he has travelled so long and take a new one, - those words are altogether unkind and not at all like those we have quoted. For just as he is perfectly reasonable who tries to dissuade an old man who is garlanded and perfumed in preparation for his wedding, and says to him what was said to Philoctetes,

1. What bride, what virgin in her youth, you wretch,
2. Would take you? You’re a pretty one to wed

for old men themselves crack many such jokes on themselves, saying

I’m marrying old, I know - and for my neighbours, too;[*](From a comedy of unknown authorship; Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 451, no. 225.)

so he who thinks that a man who has for a long time shared his life and his home blamelessly with his wife ought on account of his age to dismiss her and live alone or take on a paramour in place of his wedded spouse has reached the height of perversity. There is some sense in admonishing in that way and confining to his accustomed inactivity an old man such as Chlidon the farmer or Lampon the shipcaptain or one of the philosophers of the Garden,[*](i.e. the Epicureans.) if he comes forward for popular favour; but anyone who buttonholes a Phocion or a Cato or a Pericles and says, My Athenian (or Roman) friend,

With withered age bedecked for funeral rites,[*](Evidently a line from some tragedy or comedy.)

bring action for divorce from public life, give up your haunting the speakers’ platform and the generals’ office and your cares of State, and hurry away to the country to dwell with agriculture as your handmaid or to devote the rest of your time to some sort of domestic management and keeping accounts, is urging the statesman to do what is wrong and unseemly.

What then? someone may say; do we not hear a soldier say in a comedy

My white hair grants me henceforth full discharge?

[*](Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 451, no. 226. Poet and play are unknown.) Certainly, my friend, for the servants of Ares should properly be young and in their prime, as practising

war and war’s practices baneful,[*](Homer, Il. viii. 453.)

in which even if an old mans hoary hair is covered by a helmet,

Yet are his limbs by unseen weight oppressed,[*](Homer, Il. xix. 165.)

and though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak; but from the servants of Zeus, god of the Council, the Market-place, and the State, we do not demand deeds of hands and feet, but of counsel, foresight, and speech - not such speech as makes a roar and a clamour among the people, but that which contains good sense, prudent thought, and conservatism; and in these the hoary hair and the wrinkles that people make fun of appear as witnesses to a man’s experience and strengthen him by the aid of persuasiveness and the reputation for character. For youth is meant to obey and old age to rule, and that State is most secure

1. Where old men’s counsels and the young men’s spears
2. Hold highest rank[*](Pindar, Bergk-Schroeder, p. 467, no. 199 (213).);

and the lines

1. First he established a council of old men lofty in spirit
2. Hard by the vessel of Nestor[*](Homer, Il. ii. 53.)

meet with wonderful approval. And therefore the Pythian Apollo named the aristocracy which was coupled with the kingship at Lacedaemon Ancients (Presbygeneas), and Lycurgus named it Elders (Gerontes), and the council at Rome is still called the Senate (body of elders). And just as the law places diadem and crown upon the head, so nature puts grey hair upon it as an honourable symbol of the high dignity of leadership. And the words geras (honour, also reward) and gerairein (venerate) retain, I believe, a meaning of veneration derived from old men (gerontes), not because they bathe in warm water or sleep in softer beds than other men, but because they hold royal rank in the States in accordance with their wisdom, the proper and perfect fruit of which, as of a late-bearing plant, nature produces after long effort in old age. At any rate when the king of kings prayed to the gods:

Would that I had ten such advisers among the Achaeans[*](Homer, Il. ii. 372. Agamemnon is the speaker.)

as Nestor was, not one of the martial and might-breathing Achaeans found fault with him, but all conceded that, not in civil affairs alone, but in war as well, old age has great weight;

1. For one wise counsel over many hands
2. Is victor,[*](Euripides, Antiopê, Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 419, no. 200.)

and one sensible and persuasive expression of opinion accomplishes the greatest and most excellent public measures.