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However, let us grant that the words Bide still, poor wretch, in thine own bedding wrappedEuripides, Orestes, 258. These words are addressed to the sick Orestes by his sister Electra. are and appear to be deterrent when addressed to a man who begins to act young when his hair is grey and that they rebuke the old man who gets up from long continued home-keeping, as from a long illness, and sets out towards the office of general or of civil administrator; but the words which forbid a man who has spent his life in public affairs and contests to go on to the funeral torch and the end of his life, and which call him back and tell him, as it were, to leave the road he has travelled so long and take a new one, - those words are altogether unkind and not at all like those we have quoted. For just as he is perfectly reasonable who tries to dissuade an old man who is garlanded and perfumed in preparation for his wedding, and says to him what was said to Philoctetes, What bride, what virgin in her youth, you wretch, Would take you? You’re a pretty one to wed!Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 609, no. 1215, attributes these lines to Strattis, a poet of the Middle Comedy; Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 841, no. 10, to an unknown tragic poet. for old men themselves crack many such jokes on themselves, saying I’m marrying old, I know - and for my neighbours, too;From a comedy of unknown authorship; Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 451, no. 225. so he who thinks that a man who has for a long time shared his life and his home blamelessly with his wife ought on account of his age to dismiss her and live alone or take on a paramour in place of his wedded spouse has reached the height of perversity. There is some sense in admonishing in that way and confining to his accustomed inactivity an old man such as Chlidon the farmer or Lampon the shipcaptain or one of the philosophers of the Garden, i.e. the Epicureans. if he comes forward for popular favour; but anyone who buttonholes a Phocion or a Cato or a Pericles and says, My Athenian (or Roman) friend, With withered age bedecked for funeral rites,Evidently a line from some tragedy or comedy. bring action for divorce from public life, give up your haunting the speakers’ platform and the generals’ office and your cares of State, and hurry away to the country to dwell with agriculture as your handmaid or to devote the rest of your time to some sort of domestic management and keeping accounts, is urging the statesman to do what is wrong and unseemly.
