The ancient art of sex

Tom Payne offers an insight into the age-old question of when it’s time for love to take a back seat

The doorbell rings and two elderly women in floral dresses get up to answer it. When the gas man enters, they start pawing at him and cooing, “Ooh, young man!” Later they tell him, “The grill don’t work, so if you fancy a nice bit of crumpet, you’ll have to make do with us.” It’s a television sketch, with Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke playing the women; the audience clearly loves it. A man arrives home. He’s been away for a while and is longing for his girlfriend. He knocks on the door and out comes an old woman. “I know you love me,” she says. “Maybe you’re surprised to find me at the door? Let me kiss you!” She explains that women have taken over parliament, and a new law decrees that if he wants to sleep with a young woman, he has to make love to an older woman first. “By Aphrodite, I won’t let you go!” she cries. This is Aristophanes’s play, Women of the Assembly, from 391BC. Clearly the audience loved it. Both jokes rely on us squirming at the idea of the elderly having sex. Harry Enfield’s routine is an old one, but at least it has classical authority to it. We seem for a moment to be heirs to a tradition in which the elderly look like unlikely lovers – especially elderly women. When people see an older woman stepping out with a younger man, she’s called a cougar; the Daily Mail relishes telling us about the racy lifestyles of Susan Sarandon and Jacqueline Bisset (aged 68 and 70 respectively). I recently researched ancient attitudes to growing old, in case they could offer any reassurance to new, growing generations of elderly people. I found that they offered particularly mixed messages when it came to sex, love and beauty. Often, when voices of the past sound like ours, it can remind us of just how out of date we are, and clearly many artists and writers – all male – regarded the idea of an older single woman with a kind of appalled fascination. Horace taunts an older woman with the idea that men aren’t fighting over her in the street anymore. Greek and Roman sculptors, with their genius for rendering wrinkles, could represent the gravitas of a matriarch, but also the belching lechery of an old woman reeling about the road. Meanwhile, Pliny the Younger was writing letters bragging about how young his third wife was, and how she loved him for his reputation. What a legend. Yes, the ancient world can seem like an exaggerated version of today’s views. Never mind Sharon Stone saying that there are fewer decent parts for older women to play, or Fiona Bruce saying: “There comes a point when your career just falls off a cliff.” In the ancient world, older women had to keep to themselves because to do otherwise would arouse suspicion. And the suspicion arose because they weren’t really that old. A wife would typically be much younger than her husband (15 years would be fairly normal) and, if she’d survived labour, would be likely to outlive her husband by quite a way. The problem for the squeamish Roman man, or for the Same old story: Ovid, ancient Rome’s great poet, was effusive in his praise for women of a certain age, although perhaps not Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke’s leery old ladies, below right A face pack for looking young, from Ovid: Take 2lb of barley, and of vetch; bind it with 10 eggs; grind and dry. Add 2oz of powdered hart’s horn, then strain. Peel and crush 12 narcissus bulbs, and add these to the mix, along with 1½lb honey, 2oz gum, and 2oz spelt. “Whoever uses that for her complexion / will beam more brightly than her own reflection.” judgmental matrona, was she really could be having sex. Virginia Ironside has proposed that the advantage for a woman growing old is that she can flirt with younger men, with little risk of the exchange becoming sexual. The Romans could have thought the risk was real. Now, about that sex. Aren’t the Greeks and Romans famous for it? Yes, they are – but it’s all the more amazing that they did this without Viagra or (so far as we know) pelvic floor exercises. On the face of it, technology has given the elderly better love lives – not to mention fewer wrinkles – than the ancients could ever have conceived. In theory, new generations should be able to go on for longer in quite a few senses. But this is where the more enlightened ancient thinkers offered their real wisdom. Ovid has effusive praise for the older woman: he admires her worldliness, her experience and her versatility. The predatory “cougar” in the Aristophanes play sings: “Let him who wants to taste pleasure come to my side. These young things know nothing about it; it’s only women of ripe age who understand the art of love.” What about old men? Ovid finds a way of praising their endurance, too, but with more than his usual subtlety: “He burns slowly, like hay before it’s dried / or timber freshfelled from the mountain side.” Some men welcomed the loss of appetite: Seneca thought that losing the desire for pleasure was a pleasure in itself, and Sophocles is often quoted as saying that when he reached old age, he felt freed from a terrible despot. Other voices are more seductive, though, and suggest that the idea of late love makes life worth living. One early Greek poet, Mimnermus, writes: “Please may I die when I have had enough / of bedrooms, sweet gifts and illicit love.” In her bestselling book The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting, Marie de Hennezel introduces us to an ageing couple whose lovemaking is informed by Taoist wisdom and, the way she describes it, has no danger of stopping. I like the idea of an ebbing but endless intimacy; and I like the way another early Greek poet, Anacreon, makes the end of life seem bittersweet, and worth savouring: “The women say you’re old, Anacreon; pick up a mirror and you’ll see your hair’s no longer there; your forehead’s bald as well.” Whether it’s true or not I don’t know. This I do know: it’s right that an old man should have more fun when fate is coming close to him. ‘The Ancient Art of Growing Old’ by Tom Payne is published by Vintage priced £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99 + £1.99 p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk