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.)