How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life

"Yes, though Cicero, of course, did not live to experience it. He was murdered before he got to that stage, so he didn’t have the chance to test his theories out. I like De Senectute because it’s one of the few books that is actually all about old age. That is the topic—it’s not about dying, it’s not about medicine, or literature, it’s about, ‘What is this old age business? ‘ He frames it as an old man, a very distinguished old man, talking to two younger men who think that he’s amazing in a ‘How are you doing it Grandad?’ kind of way. And Grandad turns around and says, ‘Well, look.’ Cicero is famous as an orator and famous as a writer. This is one of his simpler pieces. It’s quite short and it’s not one of these great, long, flowery things that he was doing when he was in the law courts. “Fixing a broken leg or even a broken heart is easy compared to when you’re dealing with the brain.” But it is entertaining and quite philosophical. He raises pretty much all the questions that you will come across in the later literature on ageing. One of the things I found so entertaining about it was that he had already considered and discussed stuff that people are writing about in papers and talking about being a very big issue. Well, yes, it’s been a big issue for two thousand years plus. Nothing is new under the sun. He talks about old age and the weakening of the faculties. He talks about whether old age should be considered a disease. He talks about the extent to which pre-existing personality influences how you age—all of this stuff that’s being discussed now. One of the things that Cicero is saying is that ‘Yes, exercise and good living and all the rest of it is important and that will raise your chances of getting to a decent old age, but it’s also about developing the faculties that will stand you in good stead when your critical strength runs out.’ He has an example of someone who was a great runner and then complains that he can’t run anymore. Cicero says that if you spent the time cultivating your brain a little bit more, then you would have something to do when you can’t run any more. So, use your brain, keep your social skills, keep in contact with younger people, talk to people, get out, and use your faculties. He says that a lot of what makes people miserable in old age is either (a) stuff that was making them miserable all the way through their life or (b) they don’t feel useful; and they don’t feel useful—being a bit of a right-winger here—because they haven’t made themselves useful. So, when you think about it, he’s not actually that far removed from the modern mantra that it’s all down to diet and exercise, mental and physical. No. It would have counted as senior maturity but not old age. It’s always being quoted how the average age was only your 40s-50s in the old days. That is actually a miscalculation because it relates to the number of babies that died in childbirth. If you take that out, people often lived quite lengthy lives. They often did live to, what we would consider, really ripe old age. So Cicero, yes, was considered senior and mature but there was no expectation that he would be losing his faculties at sixty. That very much depends on how you define it. If you’re looking at dementia, for example, there’s a division between early onset and what they call late onset dementia. The early onset is usually taken to be before either sixty or sixty-five. The ‘normal’ dementia is taken to be from mid-sixties onwards. But then, sixty through to about eighty or eighty-five would be considered early old age. And then oldest old age would be late-eighties/nineties. But you get people living to over a hundred."