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[49]
But how blessed it is for the soul, after having, as it
were, finished its campaigns of lust and ambition,
of strife and enmity and of all the passions, to
return within itself, and, as the saying is, “to live
apart”! And indeed if it has any provender, so to
[p. 61]
speak, of study and learning, nothing is more enjoyable than a leisured old age. Scipio, I used to see
your father's intimate friend, Gaius Gallus, engaged
in the task of measuring, almost bit by bit, the heavens
and the earth. How often the morning sun has
surprised him working on some chart which he had
begun at night! and how often night has surprised
him at a task begun at the break of day! How
much joy he took in telling us, long in advance,
of eclipses of the sun and moon!
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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