The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [66]
8. Accordingly, let there be only a proper husbanding of strength, and let each man proportion his efforts to his powers.
9. Such a one will assuredly not have any great regret for his loss of strength.
10. At Olympia the famous strongman Milo is said to have stepped into the course carrying a live ox on his shoulders. Which of the two would you prefer to have given to you – bodily strength like that of Milo, or intellectual strength like that of Pythagoras?
11. In fine, enjoy the blessing of physical strength when you have it; when it is gone, don’t wish it back, unless we are to think that young men should wish their childhood back.
12. The course of life has its bounds, and nature admits of being run but in one way, and only once; and to each part of our life there is something specially seasonable;
13. So that the dependence of children, the joyous feelings of youth, the soberness of maturer years, and the ripe wisdom of old age, all have a certain natural advantage which should be secured in its proper season.
14. Active exercise and temperance can preserve health in old age. Bodily strength may be diminished; but neither is bodily strength demanded from the old.
15. Both by law and custom, the elderly are exempt from duties which cannot be supported without bodily strength.
16. But, it will be said, many old people are so feeble that they cannot perform any duty in life of any sort or kind.
17. That is not a weakness to be set down as peculiar to old age: it is one shared by ill health.
18. How must we stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks? By taking pains; we must fight it as we should an illness.
19. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength.
20. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and reason much more.
21. For they are like lamps: unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from old age.
22. Again, the body is apt to become gross either from over-exercise or over-eating;
23. But the intellect becomes nimbler by exercising itself.
24. For what Caecilius means by ‘old dotards of the comic stage’ are the credulous, the forgetful and the slipshod.
25. These are faults that do not attach to old age as such, but to a sluggish, dull and sleepy old age.
Chapter 20
1. We may remember the words of Cato, when as an old man he was asked about age.
2. ‘As I admire a young man who has something of an old man in him,’ he said, ‘so do I an old man who has something of a young man in him.’
3. The man who aims at this may possibly become old in body, but in mind he never will.
4. ‘I am now engaged,’ Cato continued, ‘in composing the seventh book of my “Origins”, for I collect records of antiquity.
5. ‘The speeches delivered in all the celebrated cases in which I have acted I am now readying for publication.
6. ‘I am writing treatises on 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.
7. ‘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.
8. ‘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.
9. ‘And if I were not strong enough to do these things, yet I should enjoy my ease, imagining the very activities which I was now unable to perform.
10. ‘And 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.
11. ‘Thus, by slow and imperceptible degrees, life draws to its end.’
12. The third charge against age is that it reduces capacity for indulgence of the appetites, such as drinking and feasting.
13.