1Xenophon's books are very useful for many purposes, and I beg you to read them diligently, as you are doing. 1How fully agriculture is praised by him in the book about managing one's estate, which is entitled Oeconomicus! 1And so that you may understand that nothing seemed to him so kingly as the pursuit of farming, Socrates in that book tells Critobulus that Cyrus the Younger, king of the Persians outstanding in talent and in the glory of his rule, when Lysander the Lacedaemonian, a man of the highest merit, had come to him at Sardis and brought him gifts from the allies, both treated Lysander in other respects with affability and kindness and showed him a certain enclosed park, carefully planted.
1And when Lysander admired both the tallness of the trees and the rows set straight in a quincunx, and the soil well worked and clean, and the sweetness of the scents breathed out from the flowers, he said that he admired not only the diligence but also the skill of the man by whom these things had been measured out and arranged; 1and Cyrus replied: 'But it was I who measured out all these; the rows are mine, the arrangement is mine; 1many of these trees too were planted by my own hand.' 1Then Lysander, looking at his purple robe and the sleekness of his person and his Persian finery with much gold and many jewels, said: 'Rightly indeed do they call you happy, Cyrus, since good fortune is joined to your virtue!' 60This good fortune, then, old men may enjoy, nor does age prevent us from keeping up our pursuits, both in other things and above all in farming, right up to the last moment of old age.
60We are told, indeed, that Marcus Valerius Corvinus carried on to his hundredth year, living in the country when his active years were over and tilling his fields; between his first and his sixth consulship forty-six years passed. 60Thus as long a span of life as our ancestors wished to reach to the beginning of old age, so long was his career of offices; 60and the last part of his life was happier than the middle part by this much, that he had more authority and less toil. 61Authority, moreover, is the crown of old age. 61How great it was in Lucius Caecilius Metellus, how great in Aulus Atilius Calatinus!
61On whom was written that epitaph: 'This man, very many nations agree, was the foremost man of the people.' 61The whole poem, carved on his tomb, is well known. 61Rightly, then, was he a man of weight, whose praises all the world spoke of with one voice. 61What a man we saw in Publius Crassus, chief pontiff, lately, what a man afterwards in Marcus Lepidus, invested with the same priesthood! 61Why should I speak of Paulus or Africanus, or, as I did before, of Maximus? 61In these men authority rested not only in their opinion but even in their nod. 61Old age, especially when it has been honoured, has so great an authority that it is worth more than all the pleasures of youth.