Fond haunt of the nightingale,
Where her clear voice trills its sorrow
In the green of the leafy dell....
a lyric which won such admiration that he left the court, as it |B| might have been the theatre, amid the applause and cheers of the audience. A little epigram, admitted to be by Sophocles, contains the words:
Five years and fifty Sophocles had seen,
Ere for Herodotus he wrought a song.
Take Philemon, the comic poet, and Alexis. They were still putting plays upon the stage, still winning crowns, when death overtook them. Take Polus, the tragedian. Eratosthenes and Philochorus inform us that, shortly before his end, and when |C| he was seventy, he acted eight tragedies in four days.
Is it, I say, creditable that old men of the platform should show a poorer spirit than old men of the stage? That they should retire from the sacred contests—for ‘sacred’ these veritably are—and give up the rôle of the public man in exchange for goodness knows what other part? From king, say, to farmer is a descent indeed. Demosthenes calls it cruel treatment of the Paralus, to make that sacred warship carry cargoes of timber, vine-stakes, and cattle for Meidias. But suppose a public man abandons the Presidentship of Games, his seat on the Federal Board, his high place in the Sacred League, and is found |D| measuring out barley-meal and olive-cake, or shearing sheep. It cannot but look as if he were needlessly courting the status of ‘old worn-out horse’. As for leaving a public career to engage in vulgar and petty trade, one might as well take some self-respecting lady, strip off her gown, give her an apron, and keep her in a tavern. Turn public ability to mere business and money-making, and its rank and character |E| are lost.
Or if, as a last alternative, people choose to talk of ‘ease and enjoyment’, when they mean luxurious self-indulgence; if they recommend the public man to adopt that process of idle senile decay, I hardly know which of two ugly comparisons will best hit off such a life. Shall I say it is a case of sailors taking ‘Aphrodite-holiday’ and keeping it up for ever, without waiting till their ship is berthed, but deserting it while still on the voyage? Or is it a case of ‘Heracles-chez-Omphale’—as some sorry humourists depict him—wearing a saffron gown and quietly allowing Lydian handmaids to fan him and braid his hair? Are we to treat our public man in that way? To strip off his |F| lion’s-skin, lay him on a couch, and feast him, with lute and flute lulling him all the while? Or should we not take warning by the retort of Pompey the Great to Lucullus? The latter, after his campaigns and public services, had given himself up to baths, dinners, social entertainments in the daytime, profound indolence, and new-fangled notions in the way of house-building. Meanwhile he accused Pompey of a fondness for place and power unsuited to his years. Pompey replied that for an old man effeminacy was more unseasonable than office. When he was |786| ill and the doctor ordered him fieldfares—the bird being then out of season and difficult to procure—and when some one told him that Lucullus had a large number in his preserves, he refused to send for or receive one, exclaiming, ‘What? Pompey could not live but for the luxury of Lucullus?’
It may be true that nature ordinarily seeks pleasure and delight. But, with an old man, the body has become incapable of all pleasures except a few which are essential. Not only is it the case that