[329a]
For it often happens that some of us elders of about the same age come
together and verify1 the old saw of like to like. At these
reunions most of us make lament, longing for the lost joys of youth and
recalling to mind the pleasures of wine, women, and feasts, and other things
thereto appertaining, and they repine in the belief that the greatest things
have been taken from them and that then they lived well and now it is no
life at all.2 And some of them
1 Lit. “preserving.” For the reverse Cf. Symposium 174 B. Cicero renders, “similes cum similibus veteri proverbio facile congregantur.” The proverb is ἧλιξ ἥλικα τέρπειPhaedrus 240 C, or, as in Lysis 214 A, Protagoras 337 D, Symposium 195 B, the reference may be to Homer's ὡς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει θεὸς ὡς τὸν ὁμοῖον, Odyssey xvii. 218. Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, x., “The ancient proverb in Homer . . . entitles this work of leading each like person to his like, peculiarly to God, himself.”
2 The sentiment of the sensualist from Mimnermus to Byron; cf. also Simonides fr. 71, Sophocles Antigone 1165, Antiphanes, in Stobaeus 63. 12. For the application to old age Cf. Anth. Pal. ix. 127, Horace Epistles ii. 2. 55, and the ψόγος γήρως in Stobaeus, 116.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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