1But memory grows weaker. 1I believe it, if you do not exercise it, or also if you are rather slow by nature. 1Themistocles had learnt the names of all the citizens; 1do you then think that, when he had advanced in years, he used to greet the man who was Aristides as Lysimachus? 1For my part, I know not only those who are living but their fathers and grandfathers too, nor, as I read the tombstones, am I afraid, as they say, of losing my memory; 1for by reading these very things I recall the dead to memory. 1Nor indeed have I heard of any old man who forgot where he had buried his treasure.
1They remember everything they care about: the days fixed for their bail bonds, who owes money to them, to whom they owe it. 22What of old jurists, what of pontiffs, what of augurs, what of philosophers? 22How much they remember! 22Old men keep their mental powers, provided only their zeal and industry endure, and not only in famous men who have held high office, but in private and quiet life as well. 22Sophocles wrote tragedies to an extreme old age; 22and when because of this pursuit he seemed to be neglecting his family affairs, he was summoned to court by his sons, so that, just as by our custom fathers who manage their property badly are usually barred from it, so the jurors might remove him from his family affairs as being feeble-minded.
22Then the old man is said to have recited to the jurors the play which he had in hand and had most recently written, the Oedipus at Colonus, and to have asked whether that poem seemed the work of a feeble-minded man; when it had been recited, he was acquitted by the votes of the jurors. 23Did old age, then, force this man, did it force Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Stesichorus, did it force those I mentioned before, Isocrates and Gorgias, did it force the foremost philosophers, Pythagoras and Democritus, did it force Plato and Xenocrates, or later Zeno and Cleanthes, or the man whom you too have seen at Rome, Diogenes the Stoic, to fall silent in their pursuits?
23Was not the active pursuit of their studies, in all of them, as long as their life? 24Come, to leave aside those divine pursuits, I can name Roman countrymen from the Sabine district, my neighbours and friends, in whose absence hardly any of the greater tasks are ever done in the fields, whether in sowing, in harvesting or in storing the crops. 24And yet in other tasks this is less surprising, for no one is so old that he does not think he can live another year; 24but they also labour at things which they know do not concern them at all: 'He plants trees to be of use to another generation,' as our Statius says in his Synephebi.
25Nor indeed does a farmer, however old he may be, hesitate to answer anyone who asks for whom he is planting: 'For the immortal gods, who willed not only that I should receive these things from my ancestors but also that I should hand them on to those who come after.'