ustration. It suggests a reason
for the absence. Romance and sentiment came from the dark forests of the
North, when Scandinavia and Germany poured forth their hordes to subdue
and people the Roman Empire. The life of a citizen of the Republic of Rome
was essentially a public life. The love of country was there carried to
an extravagant length, and was paramount to, and almost swallowed up, the
private and social affections. The state was everything, the individual
comparatively nothing. In one of the letters of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius to Fronto, there is a passage in which he says that the
Roman language had no word corresponding with the Greek [Greek:
philostorgia],--the affectionate love for parents and children. Upon
this Niebuhr remarks that the feeling was 'not a Roman one; but Cicero
possessed it in a degree which few Romans could comprehend, and hence he
was laughed at for the grief which he felt at the death of his daughter
Tullia'".

CHAPTER X.

ESSAYS ON 'OLD AGE' AND 'FRIENDSHIP'

The treatise on 'Old Age', which is thrown into the form of a dialogue, is
said to have been suggested by the opening of Plato's 'Republic', in which
Cephalus touches so pleasantly on the enjoyments peculiar to that time
of life. So far as light and graceful treatment of his subject goes, the
Roman essayist at least does not fall short of his model. Montaigne
said of it, that "it made one long to grow old";[1] but Montaigne was a
Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in his way. The dialogue, whether
it produce this effect on many readers or not, is very pleasant reading:
and when we remember that the author wrote it when he was exactly in his
grand climacteric, and addressed it to his friend Atticus, who was within
a year of the same age, we get that element of personal interest which
makes all writings of the kind more attractive. The argument in defence of
the paradox that it is a good thing to grow old, proceeds upon the only
possible ground, the theory of compensations. It is put into the mouth
of Cato the Censor, who had died about a century before, and who is
introduced as giving a kind of lecture on the subject to his young
friends Scipio and Laelius, in his eighty-fourth year. He was certainly
a remarkable example in his own case of its being possible to grow old
gracefully and usefully, if, as he tells us, he was at that age still able
to take part in the debates in the Senate, was busy collecting material