n from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it
is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This
ripeness is so delightful to me, that, as I approach nearer to death,
I seem as it were to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last
after a long voyage.

20. Again, there is no fixed borderline for old age, and you are making
a good and proper use of it as long as you can satisfy the call of duty
and disregard death. The result of this is, that old age is even more
confident and courageous than youth. That is the meaning of Solon's
answer to the tyrant Pisistratus. When the latter asked him what he
relied upon in opposing him with such boldness, he is said to have
replied, "On my old age." But that end of life is the best, when,
without the intellect or senses being impaired, Nature herself takes
to pieces her own handiwork which she also put together. Just as the
builder of a ship or a house can break them up more easily than any one
else, so the nature that knit together the human frame can also
best unfasten it. Moreover, a thing freshly glued together is always
difficult to pull asunder; if old, this is easily done.

The result is that the short time of life left to them is not to be
grasped at by old men with greedy eagerness, or abandoned without cause.
Pythagoras forbids us, without an order from our commander, that is God,
to desert life's fortress and outpost. Solon's epitaph, indeed, is that
of a wise man, in which he says that he does not wish his death to be
unaccompanied by the sorrow and lamentations of his friends. He wants, I
suppose, to be beloved by them. But I rather think Ennius says better:

None grace me with their tears, nor weeping loud Make sad my funeral
rites!

He holds that a death is not a subject for mourning when it is followed
by immortality.

Again, there may possibly be some sensation of dying and that only for
a short time, especially in the case of an old man: after death, indeed,
sensation is either what one would desire, or it disappears altogether.
But to disregard death is a lesson which must be studied from our youth
up; for unless that is learnt, no one can have a quiet mind. For die we
certainly must, and that too without being certain whether it may not be
this very day. As death, therefore, is hanging over our head every hour,
how can a man ever be unshaken in soul if he fears it?

But on this theme I don't think I need much enlarge: when