1. WE are not ignorant, O Euphanes, that you, being an extoller of
Pindar, have often in your mouth this saying of his, as a thing well
and to the purpose spoken by him:
When as the combat’s once agreed,
Who by pretence seeks to be freed
Obscures his virtue quite.
But since sloth and effeminacy towards civil affairs, having many
pretences, do for the last, as if it were drawn from the sacred
line, tender to us old age, and thinking by this chiefly to abate
and cool our honorable desire, allege that there is a certain decent
dissolution, not only of the athletical, but also of the political
period, or that there is in the revolution of our years a certain set
and limited time, after which it is no more proper for us to employ
ourselves in the conduct of the state than in the corporeal and robust
exercises of youth; I esteem myself obliged to communicate also to
you those sentiments of mine concerning old men’s intermeddling with
public matters, which I am ever and anon ruminating on by myself; so
that neither of us may desert that long course we have to this day
held together, nor rejecting the political life, which has been (as it
were) an intimate friend of our own years, change it for another to
which we are absolute strangers, and with which we have not time to
become acquainted and familiar, but that we may persist in what we had
chosen and have been inured to from the beginning, putting the same
conclusion to our life and our living honorably; unless we would, by
the short space of life we have remaining, disgrace that longer time
we have already lived, as having been spent idly and in nothing that
is commendable. For tyranny is not an honorable sepulchre, as one told
Dionysius, whose monarchy, obtained by and administered with injustice,
did by its long continuance bring on him but a more perfect calamity;
as Diogenes afterwards let his son know, when, seeing him at Corinth,
of a tyrant become a private person, he said to him: “How unworthy of
thyself, Dionysius, thou actest! For thou oughtest not to live here
at liberty and fearless with us, but to spend thy life, as thy father
did, even to old age, immured within a tyrannical fortress.” But the
popular and legal government of a man accustomed to show himself no
less profitable in obeying than in commanding is an honorable monument,
which really adds to death the glory accruing from life. For this
thing, as Simonides says, “goes last under the ground;” unless it be
in those in whom humanity and the love of honor die first, and whose
zeal for goodness sooner decays than their covetousness after temporal
necessaries; as if the soul had its active and divine parts weaker than
those that are passive and corporeal; which it were neither honest to
say, nor yet to admit from those who affirm that only of gaining we are
never weary. But we ought to turn to a better purpose the saying of
Thucydides, and believe that it is not the desire of honor only that
never grows old,[31] but much more also the inclinations to society
and affection to the state, which continue even in ants and bees to
the very last. For never did any one know a bee to become by age a
drone, as some think it requisite of statesmen, of whom they expect
that, when the vigor of their youth is past, they should retire and
sit mouldy at home, suffering their active virtue to be consumed by
idleness, as iron is by rust. For Cato excellently well said, that we
ought not willingly to add the shame proceeding from vice to those
many afflictions which old age has of its own. For of the many vices
everywhere abounding, there is none which more disgraces an old man
than sloth, delicacy, and effeminateness, when, retiring from the court
and council, he mews himself up at home like a woman, or getting into
the country oversees his reapers and gleaners; for of such a one we may
say,
Where’s Oedipus, and all his famous riddles?
But as for him who should in his old age, and not before, begin to
meddle with public matters,—as they say of Epimenides, that having
fallen asleep while he was a young man, he awakened fifty years
after,—and shaking off so long and so close-sticking a repose, should
thrust himself, being unaccustomed and unexercised, into difficult and
laborious employs, without having been experienced in civil affairs,
or inured to the conversations of men, such a man may perhaps give
occasion to one that would reprehend him, to say with the prophetess
Pythia
Thou com’st too late,
seeking to govern in the state and rule the people, and at an unfit
hour knocking at the palace gate, like an ill-bred guest coming late to
a banquet, or a stranger, thou wouldst change, not thy place or region,
but thy life for one of which thou hast made no trial. For that saying
of Simonides,
The state instructs a man,
is true in those who apply themselves to the business of the commonweal
whilst they have yet time to be taught, and to learn a science which
is scarce attained with much labor through many strugglings and
negotiations, even when it timely meets with a nature that can easily
undergo toil and difficulty. These things seem not to be impertinently
spoken against him who in his old age begins to act in the management
of the state.
2. And yet, on the contrary, we see how young men and those of unripe
years are by persons of judgment diverted from meddling in public
matters; and the laws also testify the same, when by the crier in the
assemblies they summon not first the men like Alcibiades and Pytheas to
come to the desk, but those who have passed the age of fifty years, to
make speeches and consult together for the good of the people. For the
being unused to boldness and the want of experience are not so much to
every soldier....
[Here is a defect in the original.]
But Cato, when above eighty years of age he was to plead his own cause,
said, that it was a difficult thing for a man to make his apology and
justify his life before others than those with whom he had lived and
been conversant.
All men indeed confess, that the actions of Augustus Caesar, when
he had defeated Antony, were no less royal and useful to the public
towards the end of his life, than any he had done before. And himself
severely reprehending the dissoluteness of young men by establishing
good customs and laws, when they raised an uproar, he only said to
them: Young men, refuse not to hear an old man, to whom old men not
unwillingly gave ear when he was young. The government also of Pericles
exerted itself with most vigor in his old age, when he both persuaded
the Athenians to make war, and at another time, when they were eagerly
bent unseasonably to go forth and fight sixty thousand armed men
withstood and hindered them, sealing up in a manner the arms of the
people and the keys of the gates. Now as for what Xenophon has written
of Agesilaus, it is fit it should be set down in his own words. “What
youth,” says he, “was ever so gallant but that his old age surpassed
it? Who was ever so terrible to his enemies in the very flower of his
virility, as Agesilaus in the declension of his days? At whose death
were adversaries ever seen more joyful than at that of Agesilaus,
though he departed not this life till he was stooping under the burden
of his years? Who more emboldened his confederates than Agesilaus,
though being at the utmost period of his life? What young man was ever
missed more by his friends than Agesilaus, who died not till he was
very old?”
3. Age then hindered not these men from performing such gallant
actions; and yet we, forsooth, being at our ease in states which have
neither tyranny, war, nor siege to molest them, are afraid of such
bloodless debates and emulations, as are for the most part terminated
with justice only by law and words; confessing ourselves by this not
only worse than those ancient generals and statesmen, but even than
poets, sophisters, and players. Since Simonides in his old age gained
the victory by his choral songs, as the epigram testifies in these
concluding verses:
Fourscore years old was Leoprepes’ son,
Simonides, when he this glory won.
And it is said of Sophocles, that, to avoid being condemned of dotage
at the instance of his children, he repeated the entrance song of the
Chorus in his tragedy of Oedipus in Colonus, which begins thus:
Welcome, stranger, come in time
To the best place of this clime,
White Colonus, which abounds
With brave horses. In these grounds,
Spread with Nature’s choicest green,
Philomel is often seen.
Here she her hearers charms with sweetest lays,
Whilst with shrill throat
And warbling note
She moans the sad misfortunes of her former days:[32]
and that, this song appearing admirable, he was dismissed from the
court, as from the theatre, with the applause and acclamations of all
that were present. And this short verse is acknowledged to be written
of him:
When Sophocles framed for Herodotus
This ode, his years were fifty-five.
Philemon also the comedian and Alexis were snatched away by death,
whilst they were acting on the stage and crowned with garlands. And as
for Polus the tragedian, Eratosthenes and Philochorus related of him
that, being seventy years of age, he a little before his death acted in
four days eight tragedies.
4. Is it not then a shame, that those who have grown old in councils
and courts of judicature should appear less generous than such as have
spent their years on the stage, and forsaking those exercises which are
really sacred, cast off the person of the statesman, to put on instead
of it I know not what other? For to descend from the state of a prince
to that of a ploughman is all over base and mean. For since Demosthenes
says that the Paralus, being a sacred galley, was unworthily used in
being employed to carry timber, pales, and cattle to Midias; would not
a man who should, after his having quitted the office of superintendent
at the public solemnities, governor of Boeotia, or president in the
council of the Amphictyons, be seen measuring of corn, weighing of
raisins, and bargaining about fleeces and wool-fells,—would not such
a one, I say, wholly seem to have brought on himself, as the proverb
has it, the old age of a horse, without any one’s necessitating him to
it? For to set one’s self to mechanical employments and trafficking,
after one has borne office in the state, is the same as if one
should strip a well-bred virtuous gentlewoman out of her matron-like
attire, and thrust her with an apron tied about her into a public
victualling-house. For the dignity and greatness of political virtue
is overthrown, when it is debased to such mean administrations and
traffics for gain. But if (which is the only thing remaining) they
shall, by giving effeminacies and voluptuousness the name of living at
quiet and enjoying one’s self, exhort a statesman leisurely to waste
away and grow old in them, I know not to which of the two shameful
pictures his life will seem to have the greater resemblance,—whether to
the mariners who, leaving their ship for the future not in the harbor
but under sail, spend all their time in celebrating the feasts of
Venus; or to Hercules, whom some painters merrily but yet ridiculously
represent wearing in Omphale’s palace a yellow petticoat, and giving
himself up to be boxed and combed by the Lydian damsels. So shall
we, stripping a statesman of his lion’s-skin, and seating him at a
luxurious table, there be always cloying his palate with delicacies,
and filling his ears with effeminate songs and music; being not a whit
put to the blush by the saying of Pompey the Great to Lucullus, who
after his public services both in camp and council, addicted himself
to bathing, feasting, conversing with women in the day, and much other
dissoluteness, even to the raising and extravagantly furnishing of
sumptuous buildings, and who, once upbraiding Pompey with an ambition
and desire of rule unsuitable to his age, was by him answered, that it
was more misbecoming an old man to live voluptuously than to govern?
The same Pompey, when in his sickness his physician had prescribed him
the eating of a thrush, which was then hard to be got, as being out of
season, being told that Lucullus bred great store of such birds, would
not send to him for one, but said: What! Cannot Pompey live, unless
Lucullus be luxurious?
5. For though Nature seeks by all means to delight and rejoice
herself, yet the bodies of old men are incapacitated for all pleasures,
except a few that are absolutely necessary. For not only