_Thy sire begat thee for rich use to men_,
_Ne’er let us cease from service to mankind._
To urge the plea of ill-health or disablement is to blame disease and injury, not old age. Young men are often sickly, old men often vigorous. It is therefore not the old whom we should discourage, but the incapable. It is the capable whom [Sidenote: E] we should encourage, not the young. Aridaeus was young, and Antigonus old; but while Antigonus annexed nearly the whole of Asia, Aridaeus was like the ‘super’ upon the stage—a king with nothing to say, and a butt for whoever happened to be in power. To demand of the sophist Prodicus or the poet Philetas—who, young though they might be, were thin, sickly, and constantly taking to their beds through ill-health—that they should take up public life, were folly. But it were folly also to hinder old men like Phocion, or Masinissa the African, or the Roman Cato, from holding office or military command. The [Sidenote: F] Athenians being set upon an ill-timed war, Phocion ordered that every man under sixty should take up arms and serve. When this made them angry, he said, ‘There is no hardship. I, who am to be with you in command, am over eighty.’ And of Masinissa Polybius relates that he died when he was ninety, leaving a child of four, of whom he was the father. Shortly before his death he beat the Carthaginians in a great battle, [Sidenote: 792] and the next day was seen in front of his tent eating a loaf of cheap coarse bread. To expressions of surprise he answered that he did so to keep himself in training.
_For like to goodly bronze, it shines in use, While a house crumbles, if left idle long_,
says Sophocles. We may say the same of that glossy brightness of the mind, to which we owe calculation, memory, and sound judgement.
For the same reason it is said that wars and campaigns make better kings than inactivity. Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, was so thoroughly enervated by long peace and [Sidenote: B] idleness that Philopoemen, one of his intimates, had simply to shepherd him and keep him fat. In fact, the Romans used to inquire of arrivals from Asia, whether ‘the king had any influence with Philopoemen’. It would be hard to find a Roman general more able than Lucullus, so long as he kept his intellect braced with action. But he surrendered himself to a life of inactivity, stayed at home, thought of nothing, and became as lifeless and shrunken as a sponge in a calm. Afterwards, in his old age, he so tamely accepted a certain freedman, Callisthenes, for his keeper, that the man [Sidenote: C] was thought to be bewitching him with spells and drugs, till at last his brother Marcus drove the fellow away and himself took to managing and tutoring him for the short remainder of his life. On the other hand, Darius, the father of Xerxes, used to say that he became his wisest in times of danger; and Ateas the Scythian declared that, when he had nothing to do, he could see nothing to distinguish him from his grooms. When some one asked the elder Dionysius if he had time to spare, he replied: ‘Heaven forbid I ever should!’ Whereas a bow, they tell us, is broken by stringing it tight, a mind is broken by leaving it loose. If a musician gives up listening [Sidenote: D] for pitch, a geometrician the solving of problems, an arithmetician the constant habit of calculation, old age will enfeeble the ability along with the loss of its exercise, although the art in these cases is not a ‘practic’ one, but a ‘theoretic’. In the case of the special ability of the statesman—his caution, wisdom, and justice, together with an experienced knack of hitting the right language at the right time; that is to say, a faculty for creating persuasion—it is kept in good condition by constant speech, action, calculation, and judicial decision. It would be a dire mistake for it to abandon such activities [Sidenote: E] and permit all those important virtues to leak away from the mind. For it naturally means a decline of kindly interest in man and society—a thing which should be without limit or end.