[35]
to practise
moderate exercise; and to take just enough of food
and drink to restore our strength and not to overburden it. Nor, indeed, are we to give our attention
solely to the body; much greater care is due to the
mind and soul; for they, too, like lamps, grow dim
with time, unless we keep them supplied with oil.
Moreover, exercise causes the body to become heavy
with fatigue, but intellectual activity gives buoyancy
to the mind. For when Caecilius speaks of “the
old fools of the comic stage,”1 he has in mind old
men characterized by credulity, forgetfulness, and
carelessness, which are faults, not of old age generally,
but only of an old age that is drowsy, slothful, and
inert. Just as waywardness and lust are more often
found in the young man than in the old, yet not
in all who are young, but only in those naturally base;
so that senile debility, usually called “dotage,”
is a characteristic, not of all old men, but only of
those who are weak in mind and will.
1 From his lost play Epiclerus. For the line in full see De amicitia 99.
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