We are not ignorant, O Euphanes, that you, being an
extoller of Pindar, have often in your mouth this saying
of his, as a thing well and to the purpose spoken by him:
When as the combat's once agreed,
Who by pretence seeks to be freed
Obscures his virtue quite.
But since sloth and effeminacy towards civil affairs, having
many pretences, do for the last, as if it were drawn from
the sacred line, tender to us old age, and thinking by this
chiefly to abate and cool our honorable desire, allege that
there is a certain decent dissolution, not only of the athletical, but also of the political period, or that there is in
the revolution of our years a certain set and limited time,
after which it is no more proper for us to employ ourselves
in the conduct of the state than in the corporeal and robust
exercises of youth; I esteem myself obliged to communicate also to you those sentiments of mine concerning old
men's intermeddling with public matters, which I am ever
and anon ruminating on by myself; so that neither of us
may desert that long course we have to this day held
together, nor rejecting the political life, which has been
(as it were) an intimate friend of our own years, change it
for another to which we are absolute strangers, and with
which we have not time to become acquainted and familiar, but that we may persist in what we had chosen and
have been inured to from the beginning, putting the same
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conclusion to our life and our living honorably; unless we
would, by the short space of life we have remaining, disgrace that longer time we have already lived, as having
been spent idly and in nothing that is commendable. For
tyranny is not an honorable sepulchre, as one told Dionysius, whose monarchy, obtained by and administered with
injustice, did by its long continuance bring on him but a
more perfect calamity; as Diogenes afterwards let his son
know, when, seeing him at Corinth, of a tyrant become a
private person, he said to him: ‘How unworthy of thyself,
Dionysius, thou actest! For thou oughtest not to live
here at liberty and fearless with us, but to spend thy life,
as thy father did, even to old age, immured within a
tyrannical fortress.’ But the popular and legal government
of a man accustomed to show himself no less profitable in
obeying than in commanding is an honorable monument,
which really adds to death the glory accruing from life.
For this thing, as Simonides says, ‘goes last under the
ground;’ unless it be in those in whom humanity and the
love of honor die first, and whose zeal for goodness sooner
decays than their covetousness after temporal necessaries;
as if the soul had its active and divine parts weaker than
those that are passive and corporeal; which it were neither
honest to say, nor yet to admit from those who affirm that
only of gaining we are never weary. But we ought to
turn to a better purpose the saying of Thucydides, and
believe that it is not the desire of honor only that never
grows old,
1 but much more also the inclinations to society
and affection to the state, which continue even in ants and
bees to the very last. For never did any one know a bee
to become by age a drone, as some think it requisite of
statesmen, of whom they expect that, when the vigor of
their youth is past, they should retire and sit mouldy at
home, suffering their active virtue to be consumed by idleness,
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as iron is by rust. For Cato excellently well said,
that we ought not willingly to add the shame proceeding
from vice to those many afflictions which old age has of
its own. For of the many vices everywhere abounding,
there is none which more disgraces an old man than sloth,
delicacy, and effeminateness, when, retiring from the court
and council, he mews himself up at home like a woman,
or getting into the country oversees his reapers and gleaners; for of such a one we may say,
Where's Oedipus, and all his famous riddles?
But as for him who should in his old age, and not before, begin to meddle with public matters,—as they say
of Epimenides, that having fallen asleep while he was a
young man, he awakened fifty years after,—and shaking
off so long and so close-sticking a repose, should thrust
himself, being unaccustomed and unexercised, into difficult
and laborious employs, without having been experienced
in civil affairs, or inured to the conversations of men, such
a man may perhaps give occasion to one that would reprehend him, to say with the prophetess Pythia:
Thou com'st too late,
seeking to govern in the state and rule the people, and at
an unfit hour knocking at the palace gate, like an ill-bred
guest coming late to a banquet, or a stranger, thou wouldst
change, not thy place or region, but thy life for one
of which thou hast made no trial. For that saying of
Simonides,
The state instructs a man,
is true in those who apply themselves to the business of
the commonweal whilst they have yet time to be taught,
and to learn a science which is scarce attained with much
labor through many strugglings and negotiations, even
when it timely meets with a nature that can easily undergo toil and difficulty. These things seem not to be
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impertinently spoken against him who in his old age begins
to act in the management of the state.
