De Senectute (Cato Maior on Old Age)
Cato Maior de Senectute
Old age is not the burden people fear if a life has been lived with virtue and cultivated interests, because the mind's powers, unlike the body's, need not decline and can find new pleasures suited to each stage of life.
- old age reframed as a different mode of engagement, not decline
- four standard complaints against age answered in turn
- Cato the Censor as exemplar of dignified aging
- closes with an argument for the soul's immortality
A dialogue in which the elderly Cato the Censor, dramatically set in 150 BC, answers four standard complaints against old age, that it removes a man from active affairs, weakens the body, denies physical pleasures, and brings death closer, arguing in each case that a well-lived life converts these into a different and still satisfying kind of engagement. Written near the end of Cicero's own life and dedicated to Atticus, the work draws on Cicero's admiration for Cato as a model of dignified public service into extreme age, closing with an argument for the soul's immortality that made the text a favorite of Christian readers centuries later.
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