For like to goodly bronze, it shines in use,
While a house crumbles, if left idle long,
says Sophocles. We may say the same of that glossy brightness of the mind, to which we owe calculation, memory, and sound judgement.
For the same reason it is said that wars and campaigns make better kings than inactivity. Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, was so thoroughly enervated by long peace and |B| idleness that Philopoemen, one of his intimates, had simply to shepherd him and keep him fat. In fact, the Romans used to inquire of arrivals from Asia, whether ‘the king had any influence with Philopoemen’. It would be hard to find a Roman general more able than Lucullus, so long as he kept his intellect braced with action. But he surrendered himself to a life of inactivity, stayed at home, thought of nothing, and became as lifeless and shrunken as a sponge in a calm. Afterwards, in his old age, he so tamely accepted a certain freedman, Callisthenes, for his keeper, that the man |C| was thought to be bewitching him with spells and drugs, till at last his brother Marcus drove the fellow away and himself took to managing and tutoring him for the short remainder of his life. On the other hand, Darius, the father of Xerxes, used to say that he became his wisest in times of danger; and Ateas the Scythian declared that, when he had nothing to do, he could see nothing to distinguish him from his grooms. When some one asked the elder Dionysius if he had time to spare, he replied: ‘Heaven forbid I ever should!’ Whereas a bow, they tell us, is broken by stringing it tight, a mind is broken by leaving it loose. If a musician gives up listening |D| for pitch, a geometrician the solving of problems, an arithmetician the constant habit of calculation, old age will enfeeble the ability along with the loss of its exercise, although the art in these cases is not a ‘practic’ one, but a ‘theoretic’. In the case of the special ability of the statesman—his caution, wisdom, and justice, together with an experienced knack of hitting the right language at the right time; that is to say, a faculty for creating persuasion—it is kept in good condition by constant speech, action, calculation, and judicial decision. It would be a dire mistake for it to abandon such activities |E| and permit all those important virtues to leak away from the mind. For it naturally means a decline of kindly interest in man and society—a thing which should be without limit or end.
Suppose your father had been Tithonus. Suppose, though he was immortal, old age had made him require close and constant care. You would not, I imagine, have run away and repudiated the task of tending him, talking to him, and helping him, just because you had ‘borne the burden for a long time’. Well, your fatherland—or ‘motherland’ as it is called in Crete—has claims prior to those of parents, and greater. Your country’s life has been a long one, but she is not without old age. She is |F| not sufficient to herself, but is in perpetual need of watchful and considerate help. She therefore grasps at the statesman and holds him back:
Clutching his garment she stays him, though eager he be for departure.
You are aware that I have performed my public duty at many a Pythian festival. But you would not say ‘Plutarch, you have done enough in the way of sacrifices, processions, and choruses. You are now in years; it is time to put off your wreath; age entitles you to leave the shrine alone’. Well, look at your own duty in the same way. In the sacred service of the State you are coryphaeus and prophet, and it is not for you to abandon that worship of Zeus, God of State and Assembly, in which you have been so long initiated and are so thoroughly versed.
|793| Permit me now to leave the arguments for quitting public life, and to examine another point. We must beware of inflicting upon our old age an unbecoming or exacting task, when so many portions of public work are so well suited to that time of life. If it had been proper for us to go on singing all our days, there are at our disposal many keys and modes, or, as the musicians call them, ‘systems.’ Our right course in our old age would have been to cultivate, not a mode both high and sharp, but one combining ease with appropriate character. And since Nature prompts mankind to act and speak—even more |B| than it prompts the swan to sing—until the end, our duty is not to lay action aside, like a lyre of too high a pitch, but to lower the key and adapt it to such forms of public effort as are light, unexacting, and within an old man’s compass. We do not leave our bodies entirely without muscular exercise because we cannot use the spade and the jumping-weights, or hurl the discus, or practise fencing, as we used to do. We swing or walk, and in some cases the breathing is exercised and warmth stimulated by playing a gentle game of ball, or by conversation.
On the one hand, then, do not let us allow ourselves to become |C| stiff and torpid from inactivity. On the other, let us not undertake any and every official position, clutch at any and every kind of public work, and bring such an exposure upon old age that it is driven to exclaim in despair:
Right hand, how fain art thou to grasp the spear!