It is well known, Euphanes, that as an admirer of Pindar you [Sidenote:
783 B] are fond of quoting his ‘fine and forcible words’:
_When struggle is afoot, excuses
Cast a deep cloud on valour._
In connexion with the struggles of public life timidity and weakness can
find plenty of excuses, but as a last and most desperate plea they urge
‘advancing years’. This is their pretext _par excellence_ for blunting
ambition and putting it out of countenance. They argue that there is a
fitting close to a public, as much as to an athletic, career. For these
reasons [Sidenote: C] I think it well to take my own ordinary
reflections upon ‘old men in public life’ and lay them before yourself.
They may prevent either of us from deserting that long companionship
which has hitherto followed a common path, and from abandoning that
public life which may be regarded as a familiar friend from youth up, in
order to adopt another which is unfamiliar, and with which there is no
time for us to become thoroughly intimate. I would have us abide by our
original principle, and determine that life and the worthy life shall
end together. It is not for us to convert the brief remainder into a
confession that the bulk of our time has been wastefully applied to no
good purpose. [Sidenote: D]
It is not, indeed, true—as some one told Dionysius—that ‘despotism is a
fine shroud’. In his case the combination of absolutism with injustice
was only made all the more complete a calamity by the fact that it never
ceased. It was therefore a shrewd remark of Diogenes, when at a later
date he saw Dionysius’ son in a humble private station at Corinth.
‘Dionysius,’ said he, ‘you are far from receiving your deserts. Instead
of living a free and fearless life here with us, you ought to have been
there, housed in the despot’s palace and made to live in it, like your
father, till old age.’ It is different with constitutional and
democratic statesmanship. When a man has learned to show himself a
profitable subject as well as a profitable ruler, he [Sidenote: E] does
indeed obtain at death a ‘fine shroud’, in the shape of the good name
earned by his life. For this—to quote Simonides—
_Is the last thing to sink beneath the ground_,
except in cases where high human interests and noble zeal are earlier to
fail and die than natural desires.
Are the active and divine elements of our being more evanescent than the
passionate and corporeal? That were an unworthy view to hold; as
unworthy as to accept the doctrine that the [Sidenote: F] only thing of
which we never weary is making gain. On the contrary, we should improve
upon Thucydides, and regard as ‘_the only thing that never ages_’ not
‘_the love of honour_‘, but that public spirit and activity which even
ants and bees maintain till the end. No one has ever seen old age
convert a bee into a drone. Yet there are some who claim that public men
who have passed their prime should sit and be fed in seclusion at home,
allowing their practical abilities to rust away in idleness. [Sidenote:
784] Cato used to say that, to the many plagues of its own from which
old age suffers, there is no justification for deliberately adding the
disgrace of vice. There are many vices, but none can do more than weak
and cowardly inactivity to disgrace a man in years—a man who skulks away
from the public offices to look after a houseful of women, or to
supervise gleaners and reapers in the country.
_Where now
Is Oedipus? Where the famed riddles now?_
It is one thing to wait till old age before commencing public life, and
to be like Epimenides, who—so they say—fell asleep a youth and fifty
years afterwards awoke an old man. If, in [Sidenote: B] such a case, one
were to divest himself of that quiet habit which has lasted all his
life, and were to plunge into struggles and worries with which he was
unfamiliar, and for which he was not trained by intercourse with public
affairs or with mankind, there would be room for remonstrance. We might
say, as the Pythian priestess said, ‘_You come too late_’ in your quest
of office and leadership. You are past the time for knocking at the door
of the Presidency. You are like some blundering reveller whose surprise
visit is not made till night; or like some stranger who is in quest, not
of a new district or country, but of a new life, about which you know
nothing. If Simonides says
_The State is a man’s teacher_,
it is true only of those who have the time to change their teacher and
learn a new lesson—a lesson slowly and laboriously acquired by means of
many a struggle and experience, and only when it [Sidenote: C] can take
its hold sufficiently early on a natural genius for bearing toils and
troubles with equanimity.
To resume. We find that, on the contrary, it is striplings and youths
whom sensible men do their best to keep out of public business. Witness
our laws, under which the crier in the Assembly, when inviting speech
and advice, calls upon the platform in the first instance not an
Alcibiades or a Pytheas, but persons over fifty. Foolish audacity and
lack of experience [Sidenote: D] are nowhere so out of place as in a
deliberator or a judge.[34] Cato, when past eighty and on his defence,
said it was hard to have to defend himself before one set of people
after having lived with another. It is agreed on all hands that the
measures of Caesar—the conqueror of Antony—became considerably more
regal and good for the public towards the end of his life. Once, when by
stern application of custom and law he was correcting the rising
generation, and they made an outcry, his own words were: ‘Young men,
listen to an old man to whom old men listened [Sidenote: E] when he was
young.’ It was in old age, too, that the statesmanship of Pericles
reached its greatest influence. This was the time when he induced the
Athenians to enter upon the war, and when he successfully opposed their
ill-timed eagerness to fight a battle against sixty thousand
men-at-arms, by all but sealing up the public armouries and the locks of
the gates. As for what Xenophon writes of Agesilaus, it is best to quote
verbatim. _‘Is there any youth with whom this old man did not compare to
advantage? Who in the prime of life was so formidable to an enemy as
Agesilaus was at the most advanced age? Of whom was the foe so glad to
be rid as of Agesilaus, though he was old [Sidenote: F] when his end
came? Who inspired such courage in his own side as Agesilaus, although
close upon the end of life? What young man was more regretted by his
friends than Agesilaus, though he died when full of years?_’
Well, if time was no hindrance to the great actions of men like these,
what of us, who nowadays enjoy the luxury of a public life which admits
of no despots, no fighting, no sieges, but only of warless contests and
of ambitions which are for the most part settled by just means according
to law and reason? Are we [Sidenote: 785] to play the coward? Must we
confess that we are the inferiors, not merely of the commanders and
popular leaders of those days, but of the poets, leaders of thought, and
actors? Take Simonides. He won choric victories in old age, as is
evident from the last lines of the epigram:
_And withal to Simonides fell the glory and prize of the poet;
Fell to Leoprepes’ son, come to his eightieth year._
Take Sophocles. It is said that, when his sons charged him with being in
his dotage, he read in his defence the entrance ode of the _Oedipus at
Colonus_, beginning:
_To this land of the steed, O stranger,
To the goodliest homes on earth,
Thou hast come—to the white Colonus,
Fond haunt of the nightingale,
Where her clear voice trills its sorrow
In the green of the leafy dell...._
a lyric which won such admiration that he left the court, as it
[Sidenote: B] might have been the theatre, amid the applause and cheers
of the audience. A little epigram, admitted to be by Sophocles, contains
the words:
_Five years and fifty Sophocles had seen,
Ere for Herodotus he wrought a song._
Take Philemon, the comic poet, and Alexis. They were still putting plays
upon the stage, still winning crowns, when death overtook them. Take
Polus, the tragedian. Eratosthenes and Philochorus inform us that,
shortly before his end, and when [Sidenote: C] he was seventy, he acted
eight tragedies in four days.
Is it, I say, creditable that old men of the platform should show a
poorer spirit than old men of the stage? That they should retire from
the sacred contests—for ‘sacred’ these veritably are—and give up the
rôle of the public man in exchange for goodness knows what other part?
From king, say, to farmer is a descent indeed. Demosthenes calls it
cruel treatment of the _Paralus_, to make that sacred warship carry
cargoes of timber, vine-stakes, and cattle for Meidias. But suppose a
public man abandons the Presidentship of Games, his seat on the Federal
Board, his high place in the Sacred League, and is found [Sidenote: D]
measuring out barley-meal and olive-cake, or shearing sheep. It cannot
but look as if he were needlessly courting the status of ‘old worn-out
horse’. As for leaving a public career to engage in vulgar and petty
trade, one might as well take some self-respecting lady, strip off her
gown, give her an apron, and keep her in a tavern. Turn public ability
to mere business and money-making, and its rank and character [Sidenote:
E] are lost.
Or if, as a last alternative, people choose to talk of ‘ease and
enjoyment’, when they mean luxurious self-indulgence; if they recommend
the public man to adopt that process of idle senile decay, I hardly know
which of two ugly comparisons will best hit off such a life. Shall I say
it is a case of sailors taking ‘Aphrodite-holiday’ and keeping it up for
ever, without waiting till their ship is berthed, but deserting it while
still on the voyage? Or is it a case of ‘Heracles-chez-Omphale’—as some
sorry humourists depict him—wearing a saffron gown and quietly allowing
Lydian handmaids to fan him and braid his hair? Are we to treat our
public man in that way? To strip off his [Sidenote: F] lion’s-skin, lay
him on a couch, and feast him, with lute and flute lulling him all the
while? Or should we not take warning by the retort of Pompey the Great
to Lucullus? The latter, after his campaigns and public services, had
given himself up to baths, dinners, social entertainments in the
daytime, profound indolence, and new-fangled notions in the way of
house-building. Meanwhile he accused Pompey of a fondness for place and
power unsuited to his years. Pompey replied that for an old man
effeminacy was more unseasonable than office. When he was [Sidenote:
786] ill and the doctor ordered him fieldfares—the bird being then out
of season and difficult to procure—and when some one told him that
Lucullus had a large number in his preserves, he refused to send for or
receive one, exclaiming, ‘What? Pompey could not live but for the luxury
of Lucullus?’
It may be true that nature ordinarily seeks pleasure and delight. But,
with an old man, the body has become incapable of all pleasures except a
few which are essential. Not only is it the case that
_The Queen of Love turns weary from the old_,
[Sidenote: B] as Euripides has it. Though they may retain the appetite
for eating and drinking—generally in a dulled or toothless form—they
find a difficulty in whetting the edge or sharpening the teeth even of
that. It is in the mind that one must lay up a stock of pleasures,
though not of the mean and ignoble kind indicated by Simonides, when he
told those who reproached him with avarice that, though age had robbed
him of other joys, he had still one left to support his declining
years—the joy of money-making. In public activity there are pleasures of
the greatest and noblest sort, such as we may believe to be the only, or
the chief, enjoyment of the gods themselves—I mean those which result
from a beneficent deed or a fine achievement.
Nicias the painter was so taken up with his artistic work that he was
often obliged to ask his servants whether he had had his [Sidenote: C]
bath or his breakfast. Archimedes stuck so closely to his drawing-board
that, in order to anoint him, his attendants had to drag him away and
strip him by force. He then went on drawing his diagrams in the ointment
on his body. Carus the flutist (an acquaintance of your own) used to say
that people did not know how much more pleasure he himself got from
playing than he gave to others; otherwise an audience would be paid to
listen instead of paying. Can we fail to perceive how great are the
pleasures derived from fine actions and public-spirited achievements by
those who put high qualities to use? Nor is it by means of those
effeminate titillations which soft and agreeable movements exert upon
the flesh. The ticklings of the flesh [Sidenote: D] are spasmodic,
fickle, intermittent, whereas the pleasures of noble deeds—the creations
of the true statesman’s art—will bear the soul aloft in grandeur and
pride and joy, as if, I will not say upon the ‘_golden wings_’ of
Euripides, but upon those ‘_celestial pinions_’ described by Plato.
Remember the instances of which you have so often heard. Epaminondas,
when asked what had been his most pleasurable experience, replied,
‘Having been victorious at Leuctra while [Sidenote: E] my father and
mother were still alive.’ When Sulla first reached Rome after purging
Italy of its civil wars, he could not sleep a wink that night. As he has
written in his own _Notes and Recollections_, so elated was his mind
with the greatness of his joy and happiness, that it seemed to walk on
air. If we admit, with Xenophon, that ‘_no hearing is so agreeable as
praise_‘, no sight, recollection, or reflection is so fraught with
gratification as the contemplation of exploits of our own in the
conspicuous public arena of office and statesmanship. Not but what, when
[Sidenote: F] a grateful goodwill testifies to our achievements, and
when there is a rivalry of commendation productive of well-earned
popularity, our merit acquires a gloss and brilliance which adds to our
sense of pleasure.
Therefore, instead of permitting our reputation to wither in our old age
like an athlete’s crown, we must be constantly adopting new devices and
making fresh efforts to enliven the sense of past obligation, to enhance
it, and to make it permanent. We must act like the craftsmen who were
required to provide for the security of the Delian ship. They used to
replace unsound timbers by others, and, by means of insertions and
repairs, were regarded as keeping the vessel immortal and indestructible
from [Sidenote: 787] the oldest times. Reputation is like flame. There
is no difficulty in keeping it alive; it merely requires a little
feeding with fuel. But let either of them become extinct and cold, and
it will take some trouble to rekindle.
Lampis, the shipowner, was once asked how he made his fortune. ‘Making
the big one,’ he answered, ‘was easy enough; but it was a long and hard
business to make the little one.’ So with political power and
reputation. Though not easy to get in the first instance, anything will
suffice to maintain and increase them when once they are great. It is as
with a friend, when once he becomes such. He does not look for a large
number of important services in order to retain his friendship;
[Sidenote: B] small tokens, consistently shown, will keep his constant
affection. Nor are the confidence and friendship of the people
perpetually calling for you to open your purse, to play the champion, or
to hold an office. They are retained by mere public spirit—by being in
no haste to desert or shirk the burden of care and watchfulness.
Campaigns are not matters of everlastingly facing the enemy, fighting,
and besieging. They have also their times of sacrifice, their occasional
social gatherings, their periods of ample leisure, when jest and
nonsense are toward. And why should one look upon public life with
dread, as being laborious, wearisome, and devoid of consolations, seeing
that the theatre, processions, awards, ‘_dances of the Muses and
Gladsomeness_,’ and honour [Sidenote: C] after honour to the gods relax
the stern brow of the Bureau or the Chamber, and yield a manifold return
of inviting entertainment?
In the next place jealousy, the greatest bane of public life, is less
severe upon old age. For, to quote Heracleitus, ‘_dogs bark at the man
they do not know_.’ Though jealousy may fight with the beginner at the
doors of the platform and refuse him access, no savageness or fierceness
is shown to a man of familiar and established reputation, but he finds
friendly admittance. For this reason some have compared jealousy to
smoke. In the case of beginners, during the process of kindling, it
pours forth in clouds; when they are in full blaze, it disappears. And
while [Sidenote: D] people resist and dispute other forms of
superiority—in merit, birth, or public spirit—through a belief that any
acknowledgement to others means so much derogation to themselves, the
primacy which is due to time—‘seniority’ in the proper sense—is conceded
without a grudge. Respect paid to the aged has the unique quality of
doing more honour to the giver than to the recipient.
Moreover it is not every one who expects to attain to the power derived
from wealth, eloquence, or wisdom; whereas no public man despairs of
winning the esteem and distinction to which age gradually leads.
Imagine a navigator, who has managed his ship safely in the face of
contrary winds and waves, and then, when the weather [Sidenote: E]
becomes fair and calm, wishes to lay her to. It is just as strange when
a man has fought his ship in a long battle with jealousies, and then,
after they are quietly laid, backs out of public life, and, in
abandoning his activities, abandons his partners and associates. The
more time there has been, the more friends and fellow-workers he has
made; but he is neither in a position to lead them with him off the
stage, as a poet does his chorus, [Sidenote: F] nor has he the right to
leave them in the lurch. A long public life is like an old tree. To pull
it up is no easy task, because of its many roots and its entanglement
with many interests, which involve worse wrenching and disturbance when
you leave them than when you stay.
And if political conflict does leave you some remnant of jealousy or
antagonism to face when you are old, it is better to quell it by means
of your position than to turn your back and retire without armour or
weapons of defence. People are not so ready to attack you out of
jealousy when you are still in action as they are out of contempt when
you give it up.
[Sidenote: 788] We may also appeal to the great Epaminondas and his
remark to the Thebans. It was winter at the time, and the Arcadians were
inviting them to enter the city and live in the houses. This he refused
to allow, observing: ‘At the present time they come to look at you and
admire your wrestling and military exercises; but if they see you
sitting by the fire and chewing your beans, they will regard you as no
better than themselves.’ So with an aged man. When making a speech,
transacting business, or receiving honours, he is a dignified spectacle;
but when he lies all day on a couch or sits in the corner of a public
[Sidenote: B] resort talking drivel and wiping his nose, he is an object
of contempt. This is precisely what Homer teaches, if you read him
rightly. Nestor, who was campaigning at Troy, received high respect and
honour; whereas Peleus and Laertes, the stay-at-homes, were despised,
and counted for nothing.
Nay, even intellectual power begins to fail those who have let
themselves relax. Idleness gradually renders it feeble and flaccid, in
the absence of some necessary exercise of thought to keep the logical
and practical faculty perpetually alive and in trim.
_Like glossy bronze, ’tis use that makes it shine._
Bodily weakness may be a drawback to public activity in the [Sidenote:
C] case of those who, in spite of their years, make the platform or the
Cabinet their goal. But it is more than compensated by the advantage of
their caution and prudence. They do not dash into public affairs with
the expression of opinions prompted by error or vanity as the case may
be, and carrying the mob with them in as excited a condition as a stormy
sea; but they deal in a mild and reasonable fashion with such matters as
arise. It is for this reason that, in times of disaster or alarm,
communities feel the need of a Board of Government consisting of senior
men. Often they have fetched back from the country [Sidenote: D] an old
man who neither asked nor wished it, and have compelled him to put his
hand to the helm and steer the ship of State into safety, while they
thrust aside generals and popular leaders, despite all their ability to
shout, to talk without taking breath, and also, no doubt, to make
‘_sturdy stand and doughty fight_’ against the enemy. When Chares, the
son of Theochares—a man in the prime of bodily strength and
condition—was brought into the ring in opposition to Timotheus and
Iphicrates by the public speakers of Athens, with the claim that ‘this
is the kind of general the Athenians should have’, Timotheus [Sidenote:
E] replied: ‘By no manner of means. No doubt that is the sort needed to
carry the general’s baggage; but the general should be one who “_sees
before and after_”, and whose calculations as to policy no distractions
can disturb.’ Sophocles said ‘he was glad that old age had enabled him
to escape from sexual passion—a fierce and mad master.’ But in public
life we have to escape, not from one master—the love of women—but from
many madder still; from contentiousness, vanity, and the desire to be
first and greatest—a malady most fertile in envy, jealousy, and
[Sidenote: F] feud. Some of these feelings are abated or dulled, some
are altogether chilled and quenched, by old age. And though old age may
do something to diminish our zest for action, it does more to guard us
from the intemperate heat of passion, so that we can bring a sober and
steady reason to bear upon our thoughts.
By all means, in dealing with one who begins to play the youth when his
hair is grey, let it be—as it is considered—sound warning to say:
_Misguided man, stay quiet in thy bed._
[Sidenote: 789] Let us remonstrate with an old man when he rises from a
long privacy, as from a bed of sickness, and bestirs himself to obtain a
command or an official post. But suppose a man has lived a life of
public action and thoroughly played the part. To prevent him from going
on till ‘finis and the torch’, to call him back and bid him change the
road he has long followed, is utterly unfeeling, and bears no
resemblance to the case just given. If an old man has his wreath on and
is scenting himself in readiness to marry, there is nothing unreasonable
in trying to dissuade him by quoting the lines addressed to Philoctetes:
_But, pray, where is the bride, where the young maid,
Would welcome thee? Rare bridegroom thou, poor soul!_
Nay, they are fond of making jests of the kind at their own [Sidenote:
B] expense:
_I’m marrying old, and for the neighbours’ good:
I know it._
But when a man has been long married, and has lived with his wife for
years without a fault to find, to tell him that he should divorce her
because he is old, and that he should live by himself or get a wretched
concubine in place of his lawful spouse, is the very extreme of
absurdity. In the same way when an aged man seeks to enter
politics—Chlidon the farmer, Lampon the ship’s captain, or some
philosopher from the Garden[35]—there is some reason in admonishing him,
and keeping him to the state of inactivity to which he has been used.
But it is urging a public man to act [Sidenote: C] with injustice and
ingratitude, when we take hold of a Phocion, a Cato, or a Pericles, and
say, ‘Sir Athenian—or Sir Roman—
_Thine age is wither’d and thy head o’erfrosted_;
therefore sue for a divorce from statesmanship, have done with the
worrying business of the platform and the Board of War, and make haste
into the country, to live with farming “for a waiting-maid” or to occupy
the rest of your days with thrift and the keeping of accounts.’