Book Description

Excerpt from Cicero De Senectute (Cato Major) A Dialogue on Old Age It belongs to the division of Ethics, which had for its subject-matter the nature of the summum bonum, and the conduct of life. Since the third century B.C. philosophy had lost the hope of substituting reason for violence in the management of affairs, and had aimed to find for the individual philosopher, in virtue or pleasure or elsewhere, a satisfaction to outweigh the inevitable ills of life. Every relation and incident of life was a subject of philosophical discussion, either from the pleasure it could afford, or the pain it was vulgarly supposed to cause. In this treatise Cicero, imitating Aristo of Ceos, endeavors to show that old age, usually considered one of the ills of life, is to the wise man deprived of its terrors. In form it imitates the Socratic or Platonic dialogue, the slight part taken in it by the other speakers serving only to give an air of reality, and to mark the divisions of the subject, while the name of Cato gives dignity and weight to the argument. The dialogue is put, apparently, in the last year of Cato's long life, and represents the old man discoursing, calmly and cheerfully, with the younger Scipio (AEinilianus), brother-in-law of Cato's elder son, and his friend Larlius, the same who gives his name to the dialogue on Friendship. Cicero himself was strongly attracted by some points of the old statesman's life and character, his plebeian birth, his political struggles, his intellectual eminence, and his genuine love of rural occupations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."