The State is a man’s teacher,
it is true only of those who have the time to change their teacher and learn a new lesson—a lesson slowly and laboriously acquired by means of many a struggle and experience, and only when it |C| can take its hold sufficiently early on a natural genius for bearing toils and troubles with equanimity.
To resume. We find that, on the contrary, it is striplings and youths whom sensible men do their best to keep out of public business. Witness our laws, under which the crier in the Assembly, when inviting speech and advice, calls upon the platform in the first instance not an Alcibiades or a Pytheas, but persons over fifty. Foolish audacity and lack of experience |D| are nowhere so out of place as in a deliberator or a judge.[[34]] Cato, when past eighty and on his defence, said it was hard to have to defend himself before one set of people after having lived with another. It is agreed on all hands that the measures of Caesar—the conqueror of Antony—became considerably more regal and good for the public towards the end of his life. Once, when by stern application of custom and law he was correcting the rising generation, and they made an outcry, his own words were: ‘Young men, listen to an old man to whom old men listened |E| when he was young.’ It was in old age, too, that the statesmanship of Pericles reached its greatest influence. This was the time when he induced the Athenians to enter upon the war, and when he successfully opposed their ill-timed eagerness to fight a battle against sixty thousand men-at-arms, by all but sealing up the public armouries and the locks of the gates. As for what Xenophon writes of Agesilaus, it is best to quote verbatim. ‘Is there any youth with whom this old man did not compare to advantage? Who in the prime of life was so formidable to an enemy as Agesilaus was at the most advanced age? Of whom was the foe so glad to be rid as of Agesilaus, though he was old |F| when his end came? Who inspired such courage in his own side as Agesilaus, although close upon the end of life? What young man was more regretted by his friends than Agesilaus, though he died when full of years?’
Well, if time was no hindrance to the great actions of men like these, what of us, who nowadays enjoy the luxury of a public life which admits of no despots, no fighting, no sieges, but only of warless contests and of ambitions which are for the most part settled by just means according to law and reason? Are we |785| to play the coward? Must we confess that we are the inferiors, not merely of the commanders and popular leaders of those days, but of the poets, leaders of thought, and actors? Take Simonides. He won choric victories in old age, as is evident from the last lines of the epigram:
And withal to Simonides fell the glory and prize of the poet;
Fell to Leoprepes’ son, come to his eightieth year.
Take Sophocles. It is said that, when his sons charged him with being in his dotage, he read in his defence the entrance ode of the Oedipus at Colonus, beginning:
To this land of the steed, O stranger,
To the goodliest homes on earth,
Thou hast come—to the white Colonus,