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.īut Oedipus, where is he and his riddles famed? 7įor 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), 784Cato, 6 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. 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. FOn the contrary, we ought even to emend the saying of Thucydides 5 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. P81 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. 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, Egives to his death the fair fame won in life as in very truth an honourable winding-sheet for this, as Simonides 4 says,Įxcept 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. P79 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.ĭFor the fact is that tyranny, as someone said to Dionysius, is not an honourable winding-sheet 3 no, and in his case its continuance made his unjust monarchy a more complete misfortune. Casts down our manhood into abysmal gloom. 1īut 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" 2 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, CI 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