WorkCicero

On Old Age

Cato the Elder, at eighty-four, taking the four standard complaints about growing old one at a time — and refusing all four.

by Cicero65 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Cato Maior de Senectute
First published: 44 BCE(aged 62)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

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.

Key concepts

What four accusations does Cato answer in defending old age?

Cato answers four standard accusations: old age withdraws a person from action, weakens the body, removes pleasure, and brings death close. The sequence gives the dialogue its argumentative shape. Each complaint names a supposed loss, and Cato replies by changing the measure of a worthwhile life—from force and appetite to judgement, mental activity, and freedom from fear.

Why does Cato value authority more than physical strength?

For Cato, public affairs depend more on judgement and authority than on bodily force. Age can therefore alter the manner of action without ending a person’s power to act: experience and standing let an older person direct, advise, and decide. The claim does not praise inactivity; it relocates effectiveness from what the body can perform to what judgement can govern.

What keeps the mind active when old age weakens the body?

Cato treats continued use of the mind as the condition that preserves an older person’s agency. A mind exercised in judgement, learning, and reflection does not simply disappear when the body weakens; it remains an active possession. His own late study of Greek and continued farming, litigation, and historical writing give this claim a concrete example rather than leaving it as advice.

How does Cato argue that death should not be feared?

Cato’s case against fearing death has two branches: if death ends consciousness, no one remains to suffer it; if death begins another existence, it need not be dreaded. The argument does not prove which possibility is true. It removes fear by showing that neither alternative supplies a reason for the living to treat death as an evil.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Old Age as a Change of Powers

Does growing old take away the conditions of a worthwhile life, or does it replace force with judgement, freedom and perspective?

Cato answers the four charges against old age in sequence: it need not end useful action, because public affairs depend on judgement and authority as well as strength; it need not destroy pleasure, because fading appetite can release a person from foolish desire; it need not empty the mind, if the mind remains in use; and death need not terrify, whether it ends experience or begins another life. Yet Cicero gives Cato an honest limit: at eighty-four, he is rich, healthy and surrounded by people.

aging
wisdom
nature
death
acceptance
character
memory
virtue
leadership
duty
growth
pleasure
time
grief
reason
integrity
authority
old age
agriculture
civic virtue
friendship
immortality
temperance
intellectual life
practical wisdom
public service
moderation
rural life
afterlife
conversation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 65
distinct concepts: 169
by passages held, corpus-wide: #600

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “death” and “old age”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 12 pairings. 57 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
death	old age	7
old age	virtue	6
death	immortality	5
nature	old age	5
agriculture	nature	4
agriculture	old age	4
civic virtue	old age	4
death	nature	2
immortality	old age	2
civic virtue	friendship	1
death	virtue	1
friendship	old age	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-70 Orations
Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.
EN
-54 The Republic (De re publica)
Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.
EN
-52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)
Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.
EN
-46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)
Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.
EN
-45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)
Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.
EN
-45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)
Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.
EN
-45 The Academic Questions (Academica)
Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.
EN
-45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)
The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.
EN
-44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)
Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.
EN
-44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)
The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.
EN
-44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute) you are here EN

— or open another of their works