position and
great office: it applies equally to private life and peaceful pursuits.
Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age; and being believed to
neglect the care of his property owing to his devotion to his art, his
sons brought him into court to get a judicial decision depriving him of
the management of his property on the ground of weak intellect--just as
in our law it is customary to deprive a paterfamilias of the management
of his property if he is squandering it. There--upon the old poet is
said to have read to the judges the play he had on hand and had just
composed--the _Oedipus Coloneus_--and to have asked them whether they
thought that the work of a man of weak intellect. After the reading he
was acquitted by the jury. Did old age then compel this man to become
silent in his particular art, or Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, or Isocrates
and Gorgias whom I mentioned before, or the founders of schools of
philosophy, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Xenocrates, or later Zeno and
Cleanthus, or Diogenes the Stoic, whom you too saw at Rome? Is it not
rather the case with all these that the active pursuit of study only
ended with life?

But, to pass over these sublime studies, I can name some rustic Romans
from the Sabine district, neighbours and friends of my own,
without whose presence farm work of importance is scarcely ever
performed--whether sowing, or harvesting or storing crops. And yet in
other things this is less surprising; for no one is so old as to think
that he may not live a year. But they bestow their labour on what they
know does not affect them in any case:

He plants his trees to serve a race to come,

as our poet Statius says in his Comrades. Nor indeed would a farmer,
however old, hesitate to answer any one who asked him for whom he was
planting: "For the immortal gods, whose will it was that I should not
merely receive these things from my ancestors, but should also hand them
on to the next generation."

8. That remark about the old man is better than the following:

If age brought nothing worse than this,
It were enough to mar our bliss,
That he who bides for many years
Sees much to shun and much for tears.

Yes, and perhaps much that gives him pleasure too. Besides, as to
subjects for tears, he often comes upon them in youth as well.

A still more questionable sentiment in the same Caecilius is:

No greater misery can of age be told
Than this: b