On Old Age

Cato the Elder had been dead a century when Cicero brought him back, aged eighty-four, to sit with two younger Romans in 150 BCE and answer the four charges everybody laid against old age: that it withdraws you from doing anything, that it weakens the body, that it takes away pleasure, and that it stands next to death. Cato answers each in turn. Great affairs are run by judgement and authority rather than by strength; the fading of appetite is a release rather than a theft, since appetite was the thing that made men stupid; a mind kept in use keeps its owner; and death is either the end, which cannot be suffered by anyone, or a beginning, which is not worth dreading. The choice of speaker is half the argument: Cato took up Greek when he was old, went on farming, litigating and writing history to the end, and died at eighty-five. It is also the argument's limit — Cato was rich, famous, healthy and surrounded by people, and Cicero knew it and has him say so rather than pretend otherwise. What makes the book strange is the position it was written from: Cicero was in his sixties, shut out of politics by Caesar's victory, and a year into mourning a daughter, and none of that shows on the page. It became one of the two short Ciceros that Europe kept reprinting. William Caxton put an English version through his Westminster press in August 1481, translated by Stephen Scrope and corrected by William Worcester, and two hundred and sixty-three years later Benjamin Franklin printed James Logan's translation in Philadelphia — the first classic translated and printed in North America, and the book from his own press that Franklin liked best.