1Old age draws us away from active affairs. 1From which? 1From those which are carried on by youth and strength? 1Are there then no affairs proper to old men, which may be managed by mind and intellect even when bodies are weak? 1Did Quintus Maximus, then, do nothing, did Lucius Paulus, your father, the father-in-law of my excellent son, do nothing? 1The other old men, the Fabricii, the Curii, the Coruncanii, when they defended the state by their counsel and authority, were they doing nothing? 1To the old age of Appius Claudius was added blindness as well; 16yet he, when the opinion of the senate was inclining towards making peace and a treaty with Pyrrhus, did not hesitate to say what Ennius has set out in verse: 'Whither have your minds, which used to stand upright before, turned themselves aside from the path in madness?' 16and the rest, with great force — for you know the poem, and besides, Appius' own speech survives.
16And he did this seventeen years after his second consulship, when ten years had passed between the two consulships and he had been censor before his first consulship; from which it is understood that he was quite an old man at the time of the war with Pyrrhus, and yet this is how we have heard it from our fathers. 17They bring forward nothing, then, who deny that old age is engaged in active affairs, and they are like those who would say that the helmsman does nothing in sailing, since some climb the masts, others run up and down the gangways, others bail out the bilge, while he sits quietly in the stern, holding the tiller; 17he may not do what the young men do; 17but in truth he does much greater and better things.
17Great affairs are carried on not by strength or speed or quickness of body, but by counsel, authority and judgement, of which old age is usually not only not robbed but even given more. 18Unless perhaps I, who as soldier and tribune and legate and consul have been engaged in wars of various kinds, seem to you to be idle now, since I am not waging wars. 18But I prescribe to the senate what is to be done and how; 18against Carthage, long now plotting mischief, I declare war well in advance, and I shall not cease to fear her until I learn that she has been destroyed. 18May the immortal gods reserve that prize for you, Scipio, so that you may finish what your grandfather left; since his death this is the thirty-third year, but all the years that follow will receive the memory of that man.
19He died the year before I was censor, nine years after my consulship, having been elected consul for the second time when I was consul. 19Would he then, if he had lived to his hundredth year, have been sorry for his old age? 19For he would not be using sallies or leaps, nor spears at a distance or swords at close quarters, but counsel, reason and judgement; and if these were not found in old men, our ancestors would not have called their highest council the senate. 19Among the Lacedaemonians, indeed, those who hold the highest office are called, just as they are, 'elders'. 20But if you wish to read or hear of foreign history, you will find that the greatest states have been undermined by young men, and propped up and restored by old men.
20'Tell me, how did you lose so great a state of yours so quickly?' 20for so they ask in the play The Wolf by the poet Naevius. 20Various answers are given, and this above all: 'New orators were springing up, foolish young men.' 20Rashness, evidently, belongs to the age of bloom, prudence to the age of growing old.