able just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its
proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one. For as I admire a young
man who has something of the old man in him, so do I an old one who has
something of a young man. The man who aims at this may possibly become
old in body--in mind he never will. I am now engaged in composing the
seventh book of my _Origins_. I collect all the records of antiquity.
The speeches delivered in all the celebrated cases which I have defended
I am at this particular time getting into shape for publication. I am
writing treatises on augural, pontifical, and civil law. I am, besides,
studying hard at Greek, and after the manner of the Pythagoreans--to
keep my memory in working order--I repeat in the evening whatever I have
said, heard, or done in the course of each day. These are the exercises
of the intellect, these the training grounds of the mind: while I sweat
and labour on these I don't much feel the loss of bodily strength. I
appear in court for my friends; I frequently attend the Senate and bring
motions before it on my own responsibility, prepared after deep and
long reflection. And these I support by my intellectual, not my bodily
forces. And if I were not strong enough to do these things, yet I should
enjoy my sofa--imagining the very operations which I was now unable to
perform. But what makes me capable of doing this is my past life. For a
man who is always living in the midst of these studies and labours
does not perceive when old age creeps upon him. Thus, by slow and
imperceptible degrees life draws to its end. There is no sudden
breakage; it just slowly goes out.

12. The third charge against old age is that it LACKS SENSUAL PLEASURES.
What a splendid service does old age render, if it takes from us the
greatest blot of youth! Listen, my dear young friends, to a speech of
Archytas of Tarentum, among the greatest and most illustrious of men,
which was put into my hands when as a young man I was at Tarentum
with Q. Maximus. "No more deadly curse than sensual pleasure has been
inflicted on mankind by nature, to gratify which our wanton appetites
are roused beyond all prudence or restraint. It is a fruitful source of
treasons, revolutions, secret communications with the enemy. In fact,
there is no crime, no evil deed, to which the appetite for sensual
pleasures does not impel us. Fornications and adulteries, and every
abomination of that kind, are brought about by the enticemen