d
age.

11. Bodily strength is wanting to old age; but neither is bodily
strength demanded from old men. Therefore, both by law and custom,
men of my time of life are exempt from those duties which cannot be
supported without bodily strength. Accordingly not only are we not
forced to do what we cannot do; we are not even obliged to do as much
as we can. But, it will be said, many old men are so feeble that they
cannot perform any duty in life of any sort or kind. That is not a
weakness to be set down as peculiar to old age: it is one shared by ill
health. How feeble was the son of P. Africanus, who adopted you! What
weak health he had, or rather no health at all! If that had not been
the case, we should have had in him a second brilliant light in the
political horizon; for he had added a wider cultivation to his father's
greatness of spirit. What wonder, then, that old men are eventually
feeble, when even young men cannot escape it? My dear Laelius and
Scipio, we must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks
by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look
after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink
to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone
that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more. For they
are like lamps: unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from
old age. Again, the body is apt to get gross from exercise; but the
intellect becomes nimbler by exercising itself. For what Caecilius means
by "old dotards of the comic stage" are the credulous, the forgetful,
and the slipshod. These are faults that do not attach to old age as
such, but to a sluggish, spiritless, and sleepy old age. Young men are
more frequently wanton and dissolute than old men; but yet, as it is not
all young men that are so, but the bad set among them, even so senile
folly--usually called imbecility--applies to old men of unsound
character, not to all. Appius governed four sturdy sons, five daughters,
that great establishment, and all those clients, though he was both old
and blind. For he kept his mind at full stretch like a how, and never
gave in to old age by growing slack. He maintained not merely an
influence, but an absolute command over his family: his slaves feared
him, his sons were in awe of him, all loved him. In that family, indeed,
ancestral custom and discipline were in full vigour. The fact is that
old age is respect