Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs (intro-4)

Euphanes, to whom this essay is addressed, is known from no other source. That he and Plutarch were aged men when the essay was written appears from the opening sentences (see also Chapter 17, towards the end, 792 f). He was evidently a man of some distinction at Athens, where he held important offices (Chapter 20, 794 b). It is not unlikely that he may have asked Plutarch’s advice about retiring from public life and that this essay is in reply to his appeal, but there is no definite statement to that effect. Cicero’s Cato Maior or De Senectute differs from this in not being limited to the discussion of old age in its relation to public activities, but the two essays have much in common and may well be read in connexion with each other.

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,

When contests are before us, an excuse

Casts down our manhood into abysmal gloom.[*]

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 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[*]; 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[*] 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[*] 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,[*] 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?[*]

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,[*] 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.

And yet, on the other hand, we see that the mere lads and young men are turned away from public affairs by those who are wise; and the lawrs wrhich are proclaimed by the heralds in the assemblies bear witness to this, when they call up first to the platform, not the young men like Alcibiades and Pytheas, but men over fifty years of age, and invite them to speak and offer advice. For such men are not incited by lack of the habit of daring or by want of practice

to try to score a victory over their political opponents. And Cato, when after eighty years he was defendant in a law-suit, said it was difficult when he had lived with one generation to defend himself before another. In the case of the Caesar[*] who defeated Antony, all agree that his political acts towards the end of his life became much more kingly and more useful to the people. And he himself, when the young men made a disturbance as he was rebuking them severely for their manners and customs, said, Listen, young men, to an old man to whom old men listened when he was young. And the government of Pericles gained its greatest power in his old age, which was the time when he persuaded the Athenians to engage in the war; and when they were eager to fight at an unfavourable time against sixty thousand heavy-armed men, he interposed and prevented it; indeed he almost sealed up the arms of the people and the keys of the gates. But what Xenophon has written about Agesilaüs[*] certainly deserves to be quoted word for word: For what youth, he says, did not his old age manifestly surpass? For who in the prime of life was so terrible to his enemies as Agesilaüs at the extreme of old age? At whose removal were the enemy more pleased than at that of Agesilaüs, although his end came when he was aged? Who inspired more courage in his allies than Agesilaüs, although he was already near the limit of life? And what young man was more missed by his friends than Agesilaüs, who was aged when he died?

Time, then, did not prevent those men from doing such great things; and shall we of the present

day, who live in luxury in states that are free from tyranny or any war or siege, be such cowards as to shirk unwarlike contests and rivalries which are for the most part terminated justly by law and argument in accordance with justice, confessing that we are inferior, not only to the generals and public men of those days, but to the poets, teachers, and actors as well? Yes, if Simonides in his old age won prizes with his choruses, as the inscription in its last lines declares:

But for his skill with the chorus great glory Simonides followed,

Octogenarian child sprung from Leoprepes’ seed.[*]

And it is said that Sophocles, when defending himself against the charge of dementia brought by his sons,[*] read aloud the entrance song of the chorus in the Oedipus at Colonus, which begins[*]:

Of this region famed for horses

Thou hast, stranger, reached the fairest

Dwellings in the land,

Bright Colonus, where the sweet-voiced

Nightingale most loves to warble

In the verdant groves;

and the song aroused such admiration that he was escorted from the court as if from the theatre, with the applause and shouts of those present. And here is a little epigram of Sophocles, as all agree:

Song for Herodotus Sophocles made when the years of his age were

Five in addition to fifty.[*]

But Philemon[*] the comic dramatist and Alexis[*] were overtaken by death while they were on the stage acting and being crowned with garlands. And Polus the tragic actor, as Eratosthenes and Philochorus tell us, when he was seventy years old acted in eight tragedies in four days shortly before his death.[*]

Is it, then, not disgraceful that the old men of the public platform are found to be less noble than those of the stage, and that they withdraw from the truly sacred contests, put off the political rôle, and assume I do not know what in its stead? For surely after the rôle of a king that of a farmer is a mean one. For when Demosthenes says[*] that the Paralus, being the sacred galley, was unworthily treated when it was used to transport beams, stakes, and cattle for Meidias, will not a public man who gives up such offices as superintendent of public games, Boeotian magistrate, and president of the Amphictyonic council, and is thereafter seen busying himself with measuring flour and olive cakes and with tufts of sheep’s wool - will not he be thought to be bringing upon himself the old age of a horse, as the saying is, when nobody forces him to do so? Surely taking up menial work fit only for the market-place after holding public offices is like stripping a freeborn and modest woman of her gown, putting a cook’s apron on her, and keeping her in a tavern; for just so

the dignity and greatness of high ability in public life is destroyed when it is turned to household affairs and money-making. But if - the only thing left - they give to self-indulgence and luxury the names of rest and recreation, and urge the statesman quietly to waste away and grow old in them, I do not know which of two disgraceful pictures his life will seem to resemble more closely, that of sailors who desert their ship, when they have not brought it into the harbour but it is still under sail, and devote themselves to sexual indulgence for all time to come, or that of Heracles, as some painters playfully, but with evil influence, represent him in Omphalê’s palace wearing a yellow gown and giving himself up to her Lydian maids to be fanned and have his hair curled. Shall we in like manner strip the statesman of his lion’s skin and make him constantly recline at banquets to the music of harps and flutes? And shall we not be deterred by the words addressed by Pompey the Great to Lucullus? For Lucullus gave himself up after his military activities to baths, banquets, sexual intercourse in the daytime, great listlessness, and the erection of new-fangled buildings; and he reproached Pompey for his love of office and of honour as unsuited to his age. Then Pompey said that it was more untimely for an old man to indulge in luxury than to hold office. And once when he wras ill and the physician prescribed a thrush (which was hard to get and out of season), and someone said that Lucullus had plenty of them in his breeding-place, Pompey refused to send and get one, saying, Could Pompey, then, not live if Lucullus were not luxurious?