Memento Mori: What the Romans Can Tell Us about Old Age and Death by Peter Jones Nic Liney

NIC LINEY Memento Mori: What the Romans Can Tell Us About Old Age and Death By Peter Jones Atlantic £12.99

The Romans were wonderfully adept at dying, thanks to a combination of deplorable living conditions, extreme violence and a penchant for suicide, particularly among the political elite.

Untouched as they were by the balm of Christian eschatology, their stance on growing old and dying is fascinatingly foreign to us, but at the same time quite apposite.

Peter Jones, whose ‘Ancient and Modern’ column at the Spectator has worked tirelessly to attract readers to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, has compiled a rich mélange of ancient sources about ageing and death, a characteristically capacious tour that touches on everything from sex in old age to the prospects of an afterlife.

For the Romans, the prospect of reaching old age was mostly a shadowy, unrealised ideal. Jones argues that, ‘today, the price of “realising it” seems to be pedalling the highways or pounding the pavements in dayglo lycra.’

An opening volley of sobering, slightly laborious statistics confirms the stark difference between then and now, leaving us tinged with the guilt of modern longevity.

The poignancy of Romans’ thinking on age and death derived from their modest expectations of the duration or quality of life. The connection is lost on us, fixated on reverse-engineering the whole process – Seneca and Cicero certainly weren’t claiming 65 to be the new 25. This is a revisionist practitioner’s guide to gerontology, cantankerously aimed at ‘the youth-maddened 21st century’. At the end of it all, Cicero – and Jones – would have us like ‘a fruit in full ripeness, ready to fall’.

Jones, a former lecturer in classics, is admirably dexterous with his sources, massaging a broad assemblage of literary and epigraphical evidence into short, thematic chapters. Grave epitaphs – and we have thousands upon thousands, collated in the 19th century in Berlin, with the characteristic diligence of German scholarship – provide a great swathe of material, and a refreshing perspective from outside the literary elite, which Jones is determined to make heard.

On the literary front, Cicero and Seneca are the stars, and Jones treats them at length. Both were card-carrying stoics who wrote extensive treatises, consolations and letters on ageing, death and grief. Each certainly had his fair share of all three: a wildly paranoid Nero forced Seneca – then an older man – to commit suicide; Cicero lost his daughter, Tullia, in 45BC, and then his head two years later.

Jones largely lets his excerpted passages speak for themselves, surfacing mainly to provide comic patter and biographical vignettes drawn from the gossipy Plutarch and Suetonius.

Breezy and engaging, these sketches read like the openings to John Updike novels: ‘Cicero was beside himself with grief, left his house and hid himself away in his villa… by this time, his first marriage had collapsed and the second was about to.’

Elsewhere, the story pivots on an aphorism or a pithy anecdote, like the 108-year-old Gorgias’s witty retort to being asked why he was living so long: ‘Because old age gives me nothing to complain about.’

Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of death in Roman culture – and of Memento Mori – is the propensity for suicide, especially when liberty or honour were at stake, but also as a form of self-administered euthanasia.

Famous suicides were part of a Roman’s cultural psyche – think of Lucretia. An honourable, self-inflicted death became rather modish for aristocrats in the early empire, confronted by increasingly oppressive and tempestuous emperors.

Jones’s narrative expositions are distinctly scintillating here, particularly on Cato the Younger, that paragon of the republic, whom Joseph Addison so compellingly brought to the stage (‘It is not now time to talk of aught… but liberty or death!’). Women, slaves and even the young could comport themselves nobly in death; emperors and the morally inept, rarely.

Memento Mori is heavy on popular philosophy, aphorism and historical example, but surprisingly light on mythology and superstition – an omission calculated to avoid dealing with a far more mysterious and arcane side of the Roman world. There’s no mention of withered Tithonus and his cruel immortality or of blind, old Tiresias. Nor do we read about the less salubrious means by which Romans sought clarity regarding death: prophecy and divination, animal sacrifice and astrological prediction (although a rather creative curse tablet is appended).

These were aspects thoroughly integral to Roman thought on ageing and death, jarringly discordant with our own sensibilities, and all the more interesting for it.

It is perhaps here that this otherwise wildly diverse book falters in its selections. For us to be like the Romans, Jones has to make the Romans more like us.