Aristotle’s top tips for growing old gracefully
I’M NOT quite there yet, but I’m working on it. Whenever you were born, you need to know as much about old age as you can, for chances are that you’ll spend quite a lot of time there.
‘I hope I die before I get old,’ wrote Pete Townshend in 1965. He’ll be 71 in May. He may have had a rethink.
Tom Payne, one-time literary journalist and now classics teacher, feels that the ancients have much to teach us on the subject. A good old age, they believed, is the reward for a good life.
The great Greek and Latin orators and writers had an extraordinary variety of beliefs and observations about old age, some sensible, some rather more peculiar.
The Greek sophist Gorgias lived into his 90s and believed he had done so because he never accepted dinner invitations.
Just 6 to 8 per cent of Ancient Greeks and Romans reached 60, and only 3 per cent passed 80. Average life expectancy was in the late 20s, though those figures were skewed by high infant mortality rates. Greeks lived marginally longer, and one theory put forward for this is the relative purity of their wine.
A litre of Roman wine, by contrast, contained up to 20 mg of lead, which didn’t do anyone any good. Youth was the age of ‘bravery and courage’, or rather, fighting. If a man survived that, and was of sufficiently noble birth, then he was ready for politics. The wisdom of the old was deemed more useful in the running of empires than the hot-headed impulsiveness of the young.
Women’s roles were defined differently. As Euripides’s Medea says: ‘I’d rather go to the front line three times than give birth once.’ The death toll in childbirth was horrendous.
Looking old was seen as the natural and accepted consequence of not dying. According to Juvenal, young people all looked different, while ‘old age has one face. Trembling voice and limbs, a shiny head and an infant’s runny nose . . .’
Aristotle saw baldness as the result of an overcharged libido, while the 4th-century Greek writer Synesius took the view that hair was overrated, and ‘positively dangerous in a battle situation’, in his work In Praise Of Baldness.
Legend has it that Romans and Greeks treated their elderly people with almost exaggerated respect, but Payne isn’t convinced.
Not surprisingly, the old often liked to keep a tight hold on their money. ‘What avarice in the elderly can achieve, I really don’t understand,’ wrote Cicero disapprovingly.
‘Is there anything more absurd than the traveller who looks for more luggage when there’s little of the journey left?’
Aristotle was kinder. ‘Their experience has taught them how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.’ Amen to that.
The Ancient Art Of Growing Old is being sold as a self-help book, but I’m not sure Payne is comfortable with that. It’s more of an oldfashioned monograph, rather school-masterish in tone and about to throw a piece of chalk at the boy talking in the corner.
No less interesting for that, of course — especially for those of us who have more grey hairs than we did this time last week.