You’re Looking Very Well

typhoid, smallpox, cholera or malaria. So to reach the age of 80 was exceptional. Many Greeks thought physical decay with age a curse worse than death itself.

Plato and many of the Ancients had a positive view of old age: ‘Old age has a great sense of peace and freedom. When the passions have lost their hold, you have escaped, as Sophocles says, not only from one mad master, but from many!’ Plato also wrote that ‘As age blunts one’s enjoyment of physical pleasures, one’s desires for the things of the intelligence and one’s delight in them increase accordingly.’ He emphasised the respect with which children should treat their parents, and both he and Socrates pointed out that one could learn much in the company of the elderly. In Sparta the old were protected and venerated, and government policy was made by a council of twenty-eight elders over the age of 60, elected for life. But there were other views.

Aristotle praised youth and his views of the old were quite the opposite to those of Plato: ‘Because they have lived many years, because they have often been deceived, because they have made mistakes, and because human activities are usually bad, they have confidence in nothing and all their efforts are quite obviously far beneath what they ought to be.’ For Aristotle, man only advanced until the age of 50, and when older became garrulous and kept on going over the past. A distaste and disgust for old age was openly expressed in Greek culture. Many believed that the gods took those they loved at a young age, leaving the unwanted to experience old age. Yet several Greek laws were passed requiring children to provide for their parents, and there were severe penalties—including, in Athens, the loss of civic office—for those found guilty of maltreating their parents.

In Ancient Greece, Aristophanes was among the first to mock the old in his plays as being feeble. Euripides also had a negative view of old age; in his play Alcestis, Admetus says ‘Old people always say they long for death—their age crushes them—they have lived too long. All words! As soon as death comes near, not a single one wants to go, and age stops being a burden.’ Nor was Aeschylus in the Agamemnon any more positive:

What is an old man?
His foliage withers
He goes on three legs and
No firmer than a child
He wanders like a dream at noon.

The riddle of the Sphinx who guarded the entrance to Thebes is well known: what, she asked, has one voice and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed, and goes slowest when it has the most feet? Oedipus, passing by, answered: it is a human being that starts on all fours, is mature on two feet, and then when old has three, as there is also a cane. The Sphinx killed herself when, on this occasion, her riddle was answered correctly.

The philosopher Cicero, who introduced the Romans to Greek thought, was positive about ageing, celebrating the delights of intellectual activities in old age such as civic service, writing, learning a language, and the study of philosophy. But he also listed the difficulties:

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

The Roman poet Ovid was also unenthusiastic: ‘Farewell to laughing, happy love and easy sleep’, and ‘Time, oh great destroyer, and envious of old age, together you bring all things to ruin.’ It has been estimated that about 20 per cent of the senators in Rome at any one time would have been 60 years of age or older. Both Cicero and Plutarch, in their own old age, felt that their years did not earn them the respect they merited. The Roman playwright Plautus created sympathetic old male characters, and in one play points out that an old man should be careful to avoid prating about public affairs, or slipping a hand under the dress of a woman whom he does not know. It has been suggested that from Ancient Egypt to the Renaissance the theme of old age was handled by writers in a stereotyped manner, with similar comparisons being made and little attempt to really look at old age deeply.

Respect for the old was an important principle in Judaism. The Old Testament says that we must cherish parents in their old age: ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God’ (Leviticus 19:32). This has been taken to mean that when an old man or woman passes by, you should stand up as a token of respect. Old age may be one reward of those who honour their parents: ‘Honour your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12). The Koran takes a similar view: ‘Be good to parents, whether one or both of them attains old age with thee… neither chide them, but speak unto them words respectful.’ To Buddha, born in 565 BC, old age was a spectacle of misery and sorrow which needed to be eliminated. Against this, the Upanishads, the sacred texts of Hinduism, speak of active and joyful ageing.

Since Jesus was young, this could have made youth more important than old age for early Christians, and early Christianity did little for the old, though the building of hospitals and asylums may have helped them. In the Middle Ages the young ruled the world; even the Popes were mainly young. There were exceptions: Charlemagne ruled until he was 72, and Enrico Dandolo, the twelfth-century Doge of Venice, is infamous for his role in the Fourth Crusade at the age of 90. But in 1380, when Charles V of France, died aged 42, he was regarded as already old.

Eastern civilisations in old times showed respect to the old. The high position of the old in China is due to Confucius (551–479 BC), who gave superiority to the elderly; for him the whole household owed obedience to the oldest man, who had the right of life and death over his children. On his 70th birthday Confucius said: ‘I could follow the dictates of my heart without disobeying the moral law.’ Confucius stated that filial piety ‘… is the root of all virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching.’ The Chinese wanted to grow old, or at least to appear old, because of the privileges enjoyed by older people. When two people of different ages were together, the elder spoke freely and the younger listened respectfully, so the younger man wished to grow older so that he might talk more and listen less. In family life, age brought authority. The young saw the advantage of honouring and obeying their parents; even the middle-aged could profit by the wisdom of the old and feel repaid for supporting them. Several Chinese proverbs illustrate this view: ‘If you wish to succeed, consult three old people’; ‘He who will not accept an old man’s advice will some day be a beggar’; ‘If a family has an old person in it, it possesses a jewel.’ As a result, a man’s 50th birthday in China was marked with reverence. Fathers had the right of life and death over their children.

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The old are rarely seen in Western literature in the Middle Ages, though La Morte D’Arthur has the king aged over a hundred and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, makes an old man’s sexual activity revolting. Most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers are said to have viewed old age as a time of physical decline, and thought that old people were peevish, garrulous and forgetful. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is one of the earliest novels in which a woman’s life is followed until she reaches seventy, and which shows the strength of her character. Moll’s lifestyle was lurid, but her closing words are that she and her husband had determined ‘to spend the rest of our lives in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived’. For Moll, age was a time of cheer and good humour, where one can make up for the failings of a lifetime. Goethe, who wrote Faust at the age of 65, also took a positive line:

So, lively brisk old man
Do not let sadness come over you;
For all your white hairs
You can still be a lover.

Charles Dickens objected to the comparision of old age to childhood, reckoning it as similar as death is to