Page:Cicero - de senectute (on old age) - Peabody 1884.djvu/60

22 than work like this? I used to think Cneius and Publius Scipio, and, Scipio, your two grandfathers, Lucius Aemilius and Publius Africanus, truly fortunate in being surrounded by noble youth; nor are there any masters of liberal culture who are not to be regarded as happy, even though their strength may have failed with lengthened years. This failure of strength, however, is due oftener to the vices of youth than to the necessary infirmity of age; for a licentious and profligate youth transmits to one's later years a worn-out bodily constitution. Cyrus indeed, in his dying speech which Xenophon records, though somewhat advanced in years, says that he has never felt that his old age was more feeble than his youth. I remember in my boyhood Lucius Metellus, who, having been made high-priest four years after his second consulate, served in that office twenty-two years, and was to the very last in such full strength that he did not even feel the loss of youth. There is no need of