Nature Did Not Get Careless About the Last Act

Your admiration is easily excited, my dear Scipio and Laelius.¹

Men who have no resources inside themselves for living well find every age a burden. Men who look for their happiness from within can never think anything bad which nature has made unavoidable — and old age comes first in that category. Everybody hopes to reach it, and everybody grumbles once they have.

That is Folly's inconsistency for you.

Everyone Wants to Get Here, and Everyone Complains on Arrival

They tell me it has crept up on them faster than they expected. Well, in the first place, who compelled them to believe otherwise? In what respect did old age creep up on manhood faster than manhood crept up on childhood?

And in the second place — how exactly would old age have been less disagreeable to them if they had reached it in their eight hundredth year rather than their eightieth? However long a past you have, once it is past it is no consolation whatever to a stupid old age.

You are in the habit of admiring my wisdom, and I wish it deserved your good opinion, or my surname. But such as it is, it consists in this. I follow nature as the best of guides, as I would follow a god, and I obey her instructions.

And it is not likely, if she has written the rest of the play well, that she has been careless about the last act like some lazy poet.

Some last act was always going to be necessary. The berries on a tree and the fruits of the earth come in the fullness of time to their period of decay and fall. A wise man does not make a grievance of it.

To rebel against nature — is that not fighting the gods, like the giants?

It Is Not the Years. It Is the Man.

I have listened to a great deal of complaining from men my own age. Salinator and Spurius Albinus, both consulars, used to give vent to two grievances.

First, that they had lost the pleasures of the senses, without which they did not consider life to be life. Second, that they were now neglected by people who used to pay them attention.

I think those men were blaming the wrong thing.

Because if the fault lay in old age, the same misfortunes would have happened to me and to every other man of years. And I have known a great many old men who never uttered a word of complaint — men who were only too glad to be let out of the bondage of their own appetites, and who were not looked down on by anybody.

Important

The blame for complaints of that kind belongs to character, not to a period of life. Old men who are reasonable, and neither sour nor difficult, find old age tolerable enough. Unreason and churlishness are a nuisance at every age whatsoever.

Now Laelius will say that it is easy for me — that it is my means and my position that make old age tolerable, and that such good fortune falls to very few.

There is something in that. Not much.

Themistocles was once in a wrangle with a man from Seriphos, who said that he owed his brilliant position to the reputation of his country rather than to himself. If I had been a Seriphian, said Themistocles, I should never have been famous. And neither would you, if you had been an Athenian.

Something similar can be said about old age. A philosopher could not find it easy to bear in the depths of poverty, and a fool would find it nothing but a burden if he were a millionaire.

The arms best suited to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues. Maintain those at every period — live much, as well as long — and the harvest is remarkable. Not only because they never desert you at the end, though that in itself matters enormously, but because the consciousness of a well-spent life, and the recollection of a great many decent actions, is about as pleasant a thing as a man can have.

Now to the charges themselves. When I think it over, I find there are four reasons why old age is supposed to be unhappy.

• First, that it withdraws us from active work.
• Second, that it weakens the body.
• Third, that it takes away nearly all physical pleasure.
• And fourth, that it stands next to death.

Let us take them in order and see what force there is in each.

The First Charge: It Takes You Out of the Work

Withdraws us from active employments — from which employments?

Do you mean the ones carried on by youth and bodily strength? Then are there no old men's employments, to be conducted by the intellect even when the body is weak?

Was Quintus Maximus doing nothing, then? Was Lucius Aemilius — your father, Scipio — doing nothing? Were the Fabricii and the Curii and the Coruncanii doing nothing when they held the state up with their advice and their weight?

Appius Claudius had the additional disadvantage of being blind. And when the Senate was drifting toward a peace treaty with Pyrrhus, it was Appius who did not hesitate to say what he thought of it — and there was no treaty.

Take Fabius, whom I loved as though he were my own contemporary though he was far older. He conducted war with all the spirit of a young man when he was well advanced in life, and he gradually wore Hannibal out by his patience while Hannibal was rioting in all the confidence of youth. Ennius wrote of him: one man, by wise delays, restored the state.

And I will tell you the exchange I heard with my own ears. Salinator, who had lost Tarentum and retreated into the citadel, said to Fabius after Fabius had retaken the town: it was thanks to me, Quintus Fabius, that you recovered Tarentum.

And Fabius laughed and said: quite so. Had you not lost it, I should never have recovered it.

The Second Charge: It Weakens the Body

I do not miss the bodily strength of a young man any more than, when I was a young man, I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant.

Use what you have. And whatever you happen to be doing, do it with all your might.

Consider Milo of Croton, and how feeble his famous exclamation was. In his old age he was watching athletes training on the track, and he looked down at his own arms and said, with tears in his eyes: These are now as good as dead.

Not one bit more dead than the rest of you, you trifler. You were never made famous by yourself at any point. You were made famous by a chest and a pair of biceps.

Sextus Aelius never said anything of the kind. Nor did Coruncanius, nor Crassus — jurists in active practice, all of whom kept their command of their profession to their last breath.

And I will grant one thing to the other side, since I do not intend to acquit old age of every fault. An orator does lose some vigor, because his art depends on lungs and body and not only on intellect. Though as a rule that musical ring in the voice actually gains in brilliance as a man gets older — and I have not lost mine yet, as you can hear.

But notice how often the failure of a body is brought about by the vices of youth rather than by age at all. A dissolute and intemperate young man hands his body on to his old age already worn out.

As for the mind, the objection is even weaker.

Sophocles composed tragedies into extreme old age, and because he seemed to neglect his property while doing it, his sons brought him into court to have him declared incompetent to manage his own affairs — exactly as we do with a man who is squandering an estate.

And the old poet is said to have read the judges the play he had in hand, the one he had just finished, the Oedipus at Colonus, and to have asked them whether they thought that was the work of a weak intellect.

He was acquitted.

Old men keep their intellects perfectly well, provided they keep them employed and interested. And I notice that no old man ever forgets where he buried his money. They remember what interests them: when to answer to their bail, who owes them, whom they owe.

The Third Charge: It Takes Away Pleasure

What a magnificent service old age performs, if it takes from us the greatest blot on youth.

Listen to a speech of Archytas of Tarentum, which was put into my hands when I was a young man there.

No more deadly curse has been given by nature to man than bodily pleasure. In its eagerness to be gratified, it drives the appetites recklessly and beyond all restraint. It is the fruitful source of treason, of revolution, of secret correspondence with the enemy. There is no crime and no evil deed to which the appetite for pleasure does not drive us. Intellect is the best gift nature or god has given: and there is nothing so hostile to that gift as pleasure. For where appetite is master there is no room for self-control, and where pleasure reigns virtue cannot hold its ground.

Plato said the same thing more briefly and called pleasure the bait of vice — because men are caught by it exactly as fish are.

So when you tell me that old age is deprived of the heaped-up table and the rapidly circulating wine cup, I answer that it is also free of headache, disordered digestion and broken sleep.

Important

And why do I spend so many words on pleasure? Because so far from being a charge against old age that it does not much feel the want of pleasures, that is old age's highest praise.

What Is Left Is Better, and It Is a Farm

Take away the banquets and see what remains. Conversation. Study. And, best of all, a farm.

I am not going to apologize for this. Nothing in my life delights me more.

It is not only the usefulness of the thing, though the earth never refuses what you ask her and always returns it with interest. It is the method of it, and the process — the rows of uprights, the crosspieces, the tying up of the vines, the propagating by layers, the pruning of one shoot and the setting of another. The trenching and the irrigation. And grafting, which I consider the most ingenious thing farmers have ever invented.

And it is not only the cornfields and the vineyards. There is the garden, and the orchard, and the sheep, and the swarms of bees, and endless kinds of flowers.

I could go on, and I have gone on longer than I meant to. You will have to forgive me: farming is my hobby, and old age is naturally rather talkative.

It was in a life of that kind that Manius Curius spent his last days, after triumphs over the Samnites, the Sabines and Pyrrhus. His villa is not far from mine, and I never look at it without admiring the man's frugality and the spirit of his age. He was sitting at his own hearth when the Samnites brought him a large sum of gold — and he refused it, saying that he did not think it a fine thing to have gold, but to have power over the men who did.

And there is one more thing an old man has, which I would not trade for anything the young possess: authority.

Not the kind you are given. The kind that accumulates.

The Fourth Charge: It Stands Next to Death

Now the last charge, which everyone thinks is the serious one.

It ought to be despised entirely if it turns out that death extinguishes the soul, and ought to be positively welcome if death takes the soul somewhere that it can be eternal. There is no third possibility. So what is there to fear?

And notice that death is not, in any case, the property of the old. It comes to the young as well — and there nature revolts and fights against it.

The death of a young man seems to me like a great fire put out with a deluge of water. Old men die like a fire going out because it has burnt down of its own accord, with nobody touching it.

Or think of fruit. Unripe apples have to be torn off the tree. Ripe ones drop.

That ripeness is so agreeable to me that as I come nearer to death I feel as though I am sighting land, and coming into port at last after a long voyage.

And notice that old age is actually braver than youth, not more timid. When the tyrant Pisistratus asked Solon what on earth he was relying on, to oppose him so boldly, Solon answered: on my old age.

The best end of life is when the intellect and the senses are unimpaired, and nature herself takes to pieces the work she herself put together. A shipwright or a builder can pull a thing apart more easily than anybody else, because he made it.

I Buried My Son

I will tell you the thing that most people think should have broken me.

I burnt my son's body — when it should have been the other way round, and his hands that burnt mine.

I was thought to have borne it heroically. That is not quite the truth. I did not bear it without distress. But I found my own consolation, and it was this: that the separation between us was not going to be for very long.

That is what makes my old age sit lightly on me, and makes it not merely tolerable but a pleasure.

Now — I believe the human soul is immortal. If I am wrong about that, then I am glad to be wrong, and I do not intend to let anybody take a mistake away from me that gives me so much pleasure, for as long as I live.

And if the small philosophers are right, and I am to be without sensation when I am dead, then at least I need not fear that dead philosophers will be standing about laughing at my errors.

Even if we are not to be immortal, it is still a thing a man ought to want — to have his life end at its proper time. Nature puts a limit to living as she does to everything else.

Old age is the playing out of the drama. We should avoid the full fatigue of it — particularly when we also feel that we have had rather more than enough.

This is all I had to say about old age.

I hope that you arrive at it, both of you. And that you put my words to a practical test.