I
CATO AND HIS FRIENDS

SCIPIO: Laelius and I often express admiration for you, Cato. Your wisdom seems to us outstanding, indeed flawless. But what strikes me particularly is this. I have never noticed that you find it wearisome to be old. That is very different from most other old men, who claim to find their age a heavier burden than Mount Etna itself.

CATO: You are praising me for something which, in my opinion, has not been a very difficult achievement. A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy life will find any period of his existence wearisome. But rely for life’s blessings on your own resources, and you will not take a gloomy view of any of the inevitable consequences of nature’s laws. Everyone hopes to attain an advanced age; yet when it comes they all complain! So foolishly inconsistent and perverse can people be.

Old age, they protest, crept up on them more rapidly than they had expected. But, to begin with, who was to blame for their mistaken forecast? For age does not steal upon adults any faster than adulthood steals upon children. Besides, if they were approaching eight hundred instead of eighty, they would complain of the burden just as loudly! If old people are stupid enough, then nothing can console them for the time that has gone by, however great its length.

So if you compliment me on being wise – and I only wish I lived up to your estimate and to the name people have given me! – my explanation is this. I regard nature as the best guide: I follow and obey her as a divine being. Now since she has planned all the earlier divisions of our lives excellently, she is not likely to make a bad playwright’s mistake of skimping the last act. And a last act was inevitable. There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness which comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth. But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

LAELIUS: Yes, Cato, but I have a special request to make; and I can speak for Scipio too. We hope and desire to live long enough to see old age. Could you therefore not tell us now, well in advance, how its oncoming can best be made endurable? If you can, you will be doing us a very great favour.

CATO : If you both really want me to give you my advice, I will.

LAELIUS: You have already travelled far on the long road for which we also are destined. If, therefore, this is not asking too much of you, we should like to hear your impressions of the place to which you have come.1

CATO:Then I will do the best I can.

When I talked with my contemporaries – and the ex-consuls Gaius Livius Salinator and Spurius Postumius Albinus, who are almost my age (’ Like consorts with like,’ says the old proverb) – how they used to grumble! They had lost all material pleasures, they said, and without those life was not life at all. They also complained that people who had once been attentive to them were now neglectful. But I felt they were not directing the blame where this belonged. For if the troubles which they lamented were due to age, then I and all other veterans would be suffering the same experiences; whereas I have known many old men who had no complaints about their age or its liberating release from physical pleasures, and who were by no means treated with contempt by their associates. When you hear protests of this kind, the trouble is due to character, not age. If a man controls himself and avoids bad temper and churlishness, then he can endure being old. But if he is irritable and churlish, then any and every period of his life will seem to him tiresome.

LAELIUS : You are undoubtedly right, Cato. All the same, the objection might be raised that what helps you to find age more tolerable is your money and property and position – advantages which few others possess.

CATO: There is something in that, but it is not the whole story. Remember that anecdote of the man from Seriphos:1 he was quarrelling with Themistocles, whose fame this Seriphian attributed to his country’s greatness, not his own. ‘Quite right,’ answered Themistocles; ‘I should certainly not have been famous if I had come from Seriphos; nor would you if you had come from Athens!’ You might say the same sort of thing about age – even the wisest man would not find it pleasant to be old if he were very poor, and even the richest man would not find it particularly tolerable if he were very stupid.

Old age has its own appropriate weapons: namely the study, and the practice, of decent, enlightened living. Do all you can to develop these activities all your life, and as it draws to a close the harvest you reap will be amazing. That is partly for the very important reason that you can go on living in this fashion until your dying day. Besides, there is great satisfaction in the knowledge of a life well spent and the memory of many things well done.

When I was a young man Quintus Fabius Maximus, who captured Tarentum,1 was already old. Yet I was as fond of him as if we had been contemporaries. His natural dignity had a sociable streak, and age had not changed his character. True, when I first knew him, he was by no means extremely old, though he was already getting on in years. He had been consul in the year after I was born; and in his fourth tenure of that office I was a very young private soldier in his army marching on Capua – and then, five years afterwards, on Tarentum. Four years after that, in the consulships of Publius Sempronius Tuditanus and Marcus Cornelius Cethegus (when I was quaestor), Fabius, by now really old, spoke in support of the Cincian Law² on gifts and rewards.

Even in quite advanced years he fought his wars with as much determination as any young man. What wore down Hannibal’s youthful exuberance was the patience Fabius showed. My friend Ennius wrote splendidly about him: ‘One man, by delaying, restored our fortunes: he reckoned the talk of his critics as of less account than the safety of his country. So now his glory waxes even more splendidly thereafter.’ What vigilance and strategy he displayed in the recapture of Tarentum! I myself heard Marcus Livius Salinator, who had lost the town and taken refuge in the citadel,³ boasting to him;’ ‘You would not have recaptured Tarentum without me.’ ‘Very true,’ replied Fabius with a laugh; ‘if you had not lost the place first I should never have recaptured it.’

And he was as distinguished a statesman as a soldier. During his second term of office as consul, the tribune Gaius Flaminius⁴ was trying to allot land in Picenum and Cisalpine Gaul as small-holdings, in defiance of a ruling from the Senate. The other consul Spurius Carvilius did not raise his voice, but Fabius made every effort to oppose Flaminius. Again, when Fabius was augur, he had the courage to pronounce that if an action were for the good of the state then the favourable quality of the auspices need not be doubted; and conversely, when any action was opposed to the national interests the auspices could not fail to be bad.

There were many remarkable things about that great man, as I can vouch from personal knowledge. But I know of nothing more admirable than the way in which he received the death of his son, who was a distinguished former consul. The father’s funeral oration is extant for us to read, and when we do, every philosopher is put to shame. However, the greatness Fabius showed before Rome’s public gaze was less notable than his achievements in the privacy of his own home. As a talker, as a moralist, he excelled; in history, too, and augural law, his knowledge was outstanding. He was also, for a Roman, very well read: his mind was stored with information about all the wars our country has ever fought, and about wars between foreign countries as well. My absorption when I listened to his talk was prophetic, you might have said, of the time to come – when he had died and I had no one left to learn from.

Why have I said so much about Fabius Maximus? Because you must see how wrong one would be to describe an old age like his as unhappy. True, not everyone can be a Scipio or a Maximus and remember the cities he has captured, the battles he has fought on land and sea, the triumphs he has won. But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and serene evening of a life spent in peaceful, blameless, enlightened pursuits. Such, we are told, were the last years of Plato, who died in his eighty-first year while still actively engaged in writing. And then there was Isocrates,1 who informs us himself that he was rising ninety-four when he finished his Panathenaicus; and he lived for another five years after that. His teacher, Gorgias of Leontini, had reached his one hundred and seventh birthday without ever relaxing from his studies and his labours. When someone asked him why he chose to stay alive so long, he replied: ‘Old age gives me no cause for complaint.’ A fine answer, worthy of a scholar!

The evils for which ignorant people blame old age are really their own faults and deficiencies. Ennius, whom I mentioned just now, did not make that mistake when he compared himself, as an old man, to a gallant, victorious race-horse: like a courageous steed which has often won races in the last lap at Olympia, and now, worn out by years, takes his rest. Probably you can both remember Ennius quite clearly. He died in the year when Gnaeus Servilius Caepio and Quintus Marcius Philippus were consuls (the latter’s second tenure), only nineteen years before the assumption of office by our present consuls, Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Manius Acilius Balbus. I was sixty-five at the time, and I made a speech in favour of the Voconian Law,1 with the full force of my still powerful lungs. Ennius lived until he was seventy, and at that age he had to endure two of what are regarded as men’s heaviest burdens – poverty and age. But he bore them so remarkably well that you might almost have thought he was enjoying them.

When I think about old age I can find four reasons why this is regarded as an unhappy time. First, because it takes us away from active work. Secondly, because it weakens the body. Thirdly, because it derives us of practically all physical pleasures. And fourthly, because it is not far from death. If you like we will go over these reasons one by one, and see how much truth there is in each of them.