e sure, the young dislike the old.

Delight in them is nearer the mark than dislike. For just as old men, if
they are wise, take pleasure in the society of young men of good parts,
and as old age is rendered less dreary for those who are courted and
liked by the youth, so also do young men find pleasure in the maxims of
the old, by which they are drawn to the pursuit of excellence. Nor do
I perceive that you find my society less pleasant than I do yours. But
this is enough to show you how, so far from being listless and sluggish,
old age is even a busy time, always doing and attempting something, of
course of the same nature as each man's taste had been in the previous
part of his life. Nay, do not some even add to their stock of learning?
We see Solon, for instance, boasting in his poems that he grows old
"daily learning something new." Or again in my own case, it was only
when an old man that I became acquainted with Greek literature, which in
fact I absorbed with such avidity--in my yearning to quench, as it were,
a long-continued thirst--that I became acquainted with the very facts
which you see me now using as precedents. When I heard what Socrates had
done about the lyre I should have liked for my part to have done that
too, for the ancients used to learn the lyre but, at any rate, I worked
hard at literature.

9. Nor, again, do I now MISS THE BODILY STRENGTH OF A YOUNG MAN (for
that was the second point as to the disadvantages of old age) any more
than as a young man I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant. You
should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do
it with all your might. What could be weaker than Milo of Croton's
exclamation? When in his old age he was watching some athletes
practising in the course, he is said to have looked at his arms and to
have exclaimed with tears in his eyes: "Ah well! these are now as good
as dead." Not a bit more so than yourself, you trifler! For at no time
were you made famous by your real self, but by chest and biceps. Sext.
Aelius never gave vent to such a remark, nor, many years before him,
Titus Coruncanius, nor, more recently, P. Crassus--all of them learned
juris-consults in active practice, whose knowledge of their profession
was maintained to their last breath. I am afraid an orator does lose
vigour by old age, for his art is not a matter of the intellect alone,
but of lungs and bodily strength. Though as a rule that musical ring
in the