An seni respublica gerenda sit

We are well aware, Euphanes, that you, who are an outspoken admirer of Pindar, often repeat, as well and convincingly expressed, these lines of his,

1. When contests are before us, an excuse
2. Casts down our manhood into abysmal gloom.[*](Pindar, ed. Bergk-Schroeder, p. 475, no. 228 (252).)

But inasmuch as our shrinking from the contests of political life and our various infirmities furnish innumerable excuses and offer us finally, like the move from the sacred line[*](In one form of the game of draughts the pieces or men stood on lines, of which there were five for each of the two players. One of these, perhaps the middle one, was called the sacred line. The expression as here used seems to be about equivalent to playing the highest trump. ) in draughts, old age; and since it is more especially because of this last that these excuses seem to blunt and baffle our ambition and begin to convince us that there is a fitting limit of age, not only to the athlete’s career, but to the statesman’s as well, I therefore think it my duty to discuss with you the thoughts which I am continually going over in my own mind concerning the activity of old men in public affairs, that neither of us shall desert the long companionship in the journey which we have thus far made together, and neither shall renounce public life, which is, as it were, a familiar friend of our own years, only to change and adopt another which is unfamiliar and for becoming familiar with which and making it our own time does not suffice, but that we shall abide by the choice which we made in the beginning when we fixed the same end and aim for life as for honourable life - unless indeed we were in the short time remaining to us to prove that the long time we have lived was spent in vain and for no honourable purpose.

For the fact is that tyranny, as someone said to Dionysius, is not an honourable winding-sheet[*](Cf. Isocrates, vi. 125.); no, and in his case its continuance made his unjust monarchy a more complete misfortune. And at a later time, at Corinth, when Diogenes saw the son of Dionysius no longer a tyrant but a private citizen, he very aptly said, How little you deserve your present fate, Dionysius! For you ought not to be living here with us in freedom and without fear, but you should pass your life to old age over yonder walled up in the royal palace, as your father did, But a democratic and legal government, by a man who has accustomed himself to be ruled for the public good no less than to rule, gives to his death the fair fame won in life as in very truth an honourable winding-sheet; for this, as Simonides[*](Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graec. iii. p. 417, no. 63 (104).) says,

last of all descends below the ground,

except in the case of those whose love of mankind and of honour dies first, and whose zeal for what is noble fails before their desire for material necessities, as if the active and divine qualities of the soul were less enduring than the passive and physical. And it is not right to say, or to accept when said by others, that the only time when we do not grow weary is when we are making money. On the contrary, we ought even to emend the saying of Thucydides[*](Thucydides, ii. 44. 4. Pericles, in his great oration over the Athenians who fell in war, says The love of honour alone never grows old, and in the useless time of old age the greatest pleasure is not, as some say, in gaining money, but in being honoured. ) and believe, not only that the love of honour never grows old, but that the same is even truer of the spirit of service to the community and the State, which persists to the end even in ants and bees. For no one ever saw a bee that had on account of age become a drone, as some people claim that public men, when they have passed their prime, should sit down in retirement at home and be fed, allowing their worth in action to be extinguished by idleness as iron is destroyed by rust. Cato,[*](See Life of Cato the Elder, ix. 10.) for example, used to say that we ought not voluntarily to add to the many evils of its own which belong to old age the disgrace that comes from baseness. And of the many forms of baseness none disgraces an aged man more than idleness, cowardice, and slackness, when he retires from public offices to the domesticity befitting women or to the country where he oversees the harvesters and the women who work as gleaners.

But Oedipus, where is he and his riddles famed?[*](Euripides, Phoen. 1688. This line is spoken by Antigonê to her blind father Oedipus. Plutarch seems to imply that the old man who enters political life without experience is no better off than was Oedipus, in spite of his famous solution of the riddle of the sphinx, when exposed to the vicissitudes of exile.)

For as to beginning public life in old age and not before (as they say that Epimenides slept while a youth and awoke as an aged man after fifty years), and then, after casting off such a long-familiar state of repose, throwing oneself into strife and timeabsorbing affairs when one is unaccustomed to them and without practice and is conversant neither with public affairs nor with public men; that might give a fault-finder a chance to quote the Pythia and say, Too late you have come seeking for office and public leadership, and you are knocking unseasonably at the door of the praetorium, like some ignorant man who comes by night in festive condition or a stranger exchanging, not your place of residence or your country, but your mode of life for one in which you have had no experience. For the saying of Simonides, the State teaches a man,[*](Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graec. iii. p. 418, no. 67 (109).) is true for those who still have time to unlearn what they have been taught and to learn a new subject which can hardly be acquired through many struggles and labours, even if it encounters at the proper time a nature capable of bearing toil and misery with ease. Such are the remarks which one may believe are fittingly addressed to a man who begins public life in his old age.