Page:Cicero - de senectute (on old age) - Peabody 1884.djvu/81

Rh weaknesses laid to its charge. With your leave I would add, then, that Manius Curius, after winning triumphs over the Samnites, over the Sabines, over Pyrrhus, spent the close of his life in the country; and when I look at his house, which is not far from mine, I cannot sufficiently admire either the self-denying integrity of the man himself or the high moral standard of his time. As Curius was sitting by his hearth the Samnites brought him a large amount of gold, and he spurned the bribe, saying that he thought it better than having gold to bear sway over those who have gold. Such a mind cannot fail to make a happy old age.—But to return to my subject, and not to wander from my own mode of life, there were in those days Senators, that is, as the name implies, old men, living on farms, if indeed Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus received when ploughing the announcement that he had been made Dictator, under whose dictatorship it was that Caius Servilius Ahala, the Master of Horse, by his order, slew Spurius Maelius, who was aspiring after royalty. Curius, too, and other old men, were wont to be summoned from their farms to the Senate, giving thus to the messengers who summoned them a special name derived from the highways