nown than work like this? I used to think Cneius and Publius Scipio, and, Scipio, your two grandfathers, Lucius Aemilius and Publius Africanus, truly fortunate in being surrounded by noble youth; nor are there any masters of liberal culture who are not to be regarded as happy, even though their strength may have failed with lengthened years. This failure of strength, however, is due oftener to the vices of youth than to the necessary infirmity of age; for a licentious and profligate youth transmits to one's later years a worn-out bodily constitution. Cyrus indeed, in his dying speech which Xenophon records, though somewhat advanced in years, says that he has never felt that his old age was more feeble than his youth. I remember in my boyhood Lucius Metellus, who, having been made high-priest four years after his second consulate, served in that office twenty-two years,[1] and was to the very last in such full strength that he did not even feel the loss of youth. There is no need of
- ↑ He was Consul in 251 and 247 B. C. The earliest age at which he was eligible to the consulship was forty-three; but he probably must have reached that dignity at a later age, if he was so very old a man thirty years afterward. The pontifex maximus (for which we have no better English rendering than high-priest), like the other pontifices, held his office by life tenure. At some epochs, he was chosen by popular vote; at others, appointed by the college. He and the pontifices were not priests of any special divinity, but the legal trustees of the national religion, its rites and its laws. The pontifex maximus was, oftener than not, a jurist of eminence, and most of the early Roman jurists attained that dignity.
