1CATO. 1I will do it as well as I can, Laelius. 1For I have often been present at the complaints of my contemporaries — and like, by the old proverb, most readily flocks with like — complaints which Gaius Salinator and Spurius Albinus, men of consular rank and of about my own age, used to make with lamentation, both that they lacked pleasures, without which they thought life was no life, and that they were scorned by those by whom they had been used to being courted; 1but they seemed to me not to be blaming what ought to be blamed. 1For if this happened through the fault of old age, the same things would befall me and all other older men, many of whom I have known to pass an old age without complaint, men who did not take it ill that they had been set free from the chains of desire, and who were not despised by their own people.
1But the fault in all complaints of this kind lies in character, not in age. 1For old men who are self-controlled and neither difficult nor ill-natured pass a tolerable old age, while peevishness and ill nature are troublesome at every age. 8LAELIUS. 8It is as you say, Cato; 8but perhaps someone might say that old age seems more tolerable to you because of your resources and wealth and standing, and that this cannot fall to the lot of many. 8CATO. 8That is indeed something, Laelius, but by no means does everything lie in it; 8just as Themistocles is said to have answered a certain Seriphian in a quarrel, when the man had said that he had won his brilliance not through his own glory but through his country's: 'By Hercules,' he said, 'neither would I, if I were a Seriphian, nor would you, if you were an Athenian, ever have become famous.' 8And the same can be said of old age; 8for neither can old age be light amid extreme poverty, not even for a wise man, nor can it fail to be burdensome to a fool even amid the greatest plenty.
9Altogether the most fitting weapons of old age, Scipio and Laelius, are the arts and the practice of the virtues, which, if cultivated at every age, bear wonderful fruit when you have lived long and much, not only because they never desert you, not even at the very end of life — although that indeed is a very great thing — but also because the consciousness of a life well spent and the memory of many good deeds are most pleasant.