1Suppose there is no strength in old age: strength is not even demanded of old age. 1And so by both laws and customs our age is exempt from those duties which cannot be sustained without strength. 1Thus we are not compelled to do what we cannot do — no, not even as much as we can. 35But many old men are so feeble that they can perform no task of duty, or indeed of life at all. 35But that is not a fault peculiar to old age; it is one common to ill health. 35How feeble was the son of Publius Africanus, the one who adopted you, how frail his health, or rather how lacking!
35Had that not been so, he would have stood out as a second light of the state; 35for to his father's greatness of mind he had added richer learning. 35What wonder, then, if old men are sometimes weak, when not even young men can escape that? 35We must resist old age, Laelius and Scipio, and make up for its faults by diligence; we must fight against old age as against a disease, take account of our health, use moderate exercise, and take only so much food and drink that our strength is restored, not overwhelmed. 36Nor indeed must we come to the aid of the body alone, but much more of the mind and spirit.
36For these too, unless you drip oil into them as into a lamp, are put out by old age. 36And bodies, indeed, grow heavy with the fatigue of exercise, but minds are lightened by exercising. 36For those whom Caecilius calls 'the foolish old men of comedy' he means the credulous, the forgetful, the dissolute, and these are faults not of old age but of an idle, sluggish and drowsy old age. 36Just as wantonness and lust belong more to young men than to old, and yet not to all young men but to those who are not upright, so that senile folly which is usually called dotage belongs to old men of no character, not to all.
37Four sturdy sons, five daughters, so great a household, such great bodies of clients did Appius govern, though both blind and old; 37for he kept his mind strung taut like a bow and did not grow slack and give in to old age. 37He held not only authority but actual command over his own people: his slaves feared him, his children revered him, all held him dear; 37in that house the ancestral way of life and discipline flourished. 38For old age is honourable only if it defends itself, if it keeps its rights, if it is in bondage to no one, if to its last breath it rules over its own.
38For just as I approve of a young man in whom there is something of the old, so I approve of an old man in whom there is something of the young, and he who follows this rule may be old in body, but will never be old in mind. 38I have in hand the seventh book of my Origins; 38I am collecting all the records of antiquity; 38I am at this very moment working up the speeches from the famous cases that I defended; 38I am dealing with augural, pontifical and civil law; 38I also make much use of Greek literature; 38and in the manner of the Pythagoreans, for the sake of exercising my memory, I go over in the evening what I have said, heard and done each day.
38These are the exercises of the intellect, these the racecourses of the mind; 38sweating and toiling at these I do not greatly miss bodily strength. 38I stand by my friends, I come often to the senate and of my own accord bring forward matters long and much pondered, and I defend them with the strength of my mind, not of my body. 38And if I were unable to carry these out, still my couch would give me pleasure as I thought over the very things that I could no longer do; 38but the life I have led makes it possible for me to do them. 38For a man who lives always in these pursuits and labours does not notice when old age creeps upon him: thus gradually, without our perceiving it, life grows old, and is not suddenly broken off, but is put out through long duration.