Since I first encountered Cicero in school, my admiration for him has grown and grown. I was drawn even closer to him when I found out the Roman lawyer and philosopher summered in Treglia — ancient Trebula Balliensis — my family’s village in southern Italy. When I suggest to my lawyer friends that I might be related to Cicero, it always gets a good laugh.
But it is Cicero’s short treatise “On Aging” — “De Senectute” — that needs our attention now. When he was sidelined from the affairs of state near the end of his life, he wrote a series of essays, including one on how to grow old without giving up and how to continue to contribute to society.
With two old men running for president of the United States, we are all grappling with the question of “how old is too old.” It is an important issue in our politics and in our society generally. We seem to have developed a habit of sidelining older citizens who may have valuable experience and wisdom.
Cicero knew the limitations of old age, but he also knew the strengths. “For as Nature has marked the bounds of everything else, so she has marked the bounds of life,” he wrote. In a society obsessed with youthfulness, it is good to remember that there is a place for wisdom borne of experience.
Cicero believed as we grow old and our physical energy lags, it is our duty to our community to stay active, to share hard-earned experience with those energetic young people who are willing to consider the value of that experience. The young then have their own duty to move forward with vigor.
It might seem an old Roman politician could not possibly have anything to contribute to America and to the solution for our political woes. But the Founders of our republic drew strength from Cicero as one of the last Romans to defend liberty against tyranny.
President John Adams reread “De Senectute” throughout his life and quoted Cicero frequently, even fashioning some of his legal arguments after Cicero’s. Adams urged his son, future President John Quincy Adams, to read Cicero’s works in order to become a “good man and a useful citizen.”
John Quincy Adams then encouraged his sons to read Cicero. “To live without having a Cicero … at hand seems to me as if it was a privation of one of my limbs,” he said.
Thomas Jefferson said Cicero was an important source of his understanding of natural law and rights and justice as he was drafting the Declaration of Independence.
Ben Franklin thought enough of Cicero and “De Senectute” that he printed a copy of it in Philadelphia in 1744, making it one of the earliest classical books published in America.
None of us are sure about how this current presidential election is going to turn out. A lot of Americans seem to wish that both Republicans and Democrats would take another shot at picking their presidential candidates.
As we wrestle with old age and a proper role for all of us as we grow older — no matter how this election goes — there is something that Cicero said in “De Senectute” that we should remember.
“It is not by muscle, speed or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character and judgement; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but is even richer.”
