Written more than 2000 years ago, Cicero’s ‘On Old Age’ debunks stereotypes that persist today

As the New Year festivities fade, each January reminds us of the passage of time. There is a tendency to look back with regret at roads not taken, and perhaps even despair at what the future holds.

Yet this time of year can also encourage more positive reflection. It was probably in early January of 44 BCE that Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman politician, orator, and philosopher, sat down to write On Old Age.

At 62, Cicero had endured personal and political losses. The year before, his daughter Tullia had died from complications from childbirth (the baby likely dying soon after), and Cicero had divorced his second wife, Publilia.

The Roman Republic was likewise in a dire state, in Cicero’s opinion, since Julius Caesar had recently been (or was about to be) named dictator for life.

Even amid this turmoil, and in the face of his own mortality, Cicero took pains to defend the experience of old age from its critics and to point out its many positive aspects.

He did so by adopting the persona of Cato the Elder, one of the most prominent statesmen of the third and second centuries, who lived from 234-149 BCE until his death at the age of 85.

While it was common in Greece and Rome for philosophical treatises to...

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