On old age
"The fact is that when I come to think it over, I find that there are four reasons for old age being thought unhappy: First, that it withdraws us from active employments; second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourth, that it is the next step to death."
Writing his essay, De Senectute (On Old Age), in 44 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to refute these four supposed reasons in characteristically robust and forthright manner. Cicero wasn't one to sit about moping in his own old age; he remained actively engaged in the political life of the Republic whose survival, in the face of tyranny, he championed so fiercely.
Cicero was nine years younger than I am now when he met his untimely end yet he considered himself already an old man; or, rather, his society judged him to be so. His second point about age enfeebling is more germane. Physical decline had not yet impacted him but, six years on from my retirement, I am now willing to concede that I am indeed getting old. Not that I bemoan the fact, simply note it and observe its effects with a sort of detached interest. The aches and pains of physical deterioration are beginning to make themselves felt and affect my mobility to an extent, but life goes on.
Withdrawal from active employments was, for me, a boon. In Cicero's case, however, he had far from withdrawn from them and remained extremely active. He may have tired of Rome and taken refuge in his country villas but it was not simply to rusticate himself in his beloved vineyards and gardens that he did so. Rather, he took advantage of the tranquility of his rural setting to write his fourteen Philippics* criticising Marc Antony, which he then delivered in person to devastating effect in a series of speeches to the Senate and the Public Assemblies in Rome.
As to deprivation of all physical pleasures, by which I take it Cicero chiefly means sex, he quotes Sophocles' shocked response on being questioned as to whether he remained sexually active: "Heaven forbid! I was only too glad to escape from that, as though from a boorish and insane master." (Martin Amis echoes this sentiment in speaking of losing his libido aged seventy: "For fifty years it was like being chained to a maniac.") In my own case, while the spirit is willing the flesh is undeniably weakening - but I'm at risk of oversharing so I'll spare my readers' (to say nothing of my own) blushes and move swiftly on.
And so to the inevitability of death. My own mortality is not a matter that has particularly absorbed me. If I do contemplate it, it certainly "puzzles the will", as Shakespeare has Hamlet say when meditating on the subject and, like Hamlet, I sometimes think it is "a consummation devoutly to be wished", but I'm with Shakespeare's Caesar on this one: "It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come".
For Caesar himself, of course, death came sooner than he anticipated, although forewarned of it in an augury, and not from a falling tile either (at whose mercy, he allegedly said, we all are) but in a pool of blood on the steps of the Capitol, stabbed by a group of conspirators on the fateful Ides of March. His demise was a matter of satisfaction to Cicero but his disappointment with Octavian was that he didn't despatch Marc Antony in order to protect the Republic.
In crossing Marc Antony so publicly, though, Cicero effectively signed his own death warrant. Although The Philippics were not published until after Cicero's death the substance of his impassioned oratory rippled out into wider Roman society immediately it was delivered, severely unsettling the triumvirs, Marc Antony, Octavian and Lepidus. With fatal implications for their author as it transpired.
Marc Antony took his revenge ** while, ironically, Octavian went on to become the first Roman Emperor, taking the name Augustus, founding a dynasty and reigning for seventeen years. He thus brought about the very things Cicero had sacrificed his life attempting to prevent: the end of the almost five hundred-year Republic and the rise of an autocratic empire.
But Cicero's writings, on old age, friendship and much more, live on to inspire the modern reader.
* Philippicae, named after those written by Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon.
** On Marc Antony's orders Cicero was ambushed at his villa at Formia, beheaded and had his hands amputated as a warning against writing seditious material. The remains of his huge mausoleum at Formia still stand as a physical monument to the enduring reputation ensured by his writings.