either not miserable, or even happy? Moreover, who is so foolish, however young he may be, as to feel sure on any day that he will live till nightfall? Youth has many more chances of death than those of my age. Young men are more liable to illnesses; they are more severely attacked by disease; they are cured with more difficulty. Thus few reach old age. Were it otherwise, affairs would be better and more discreetly managed; for old men have mind and reason and practical wisdom; and if there were none of them, communities could not hold together. But to return to impending death,—can this be urged as a charge against old age, when you see that it belongs to it in common with youth? I felt in the death of my most excellent son,[1] and equally, Scipio, in that of your brothers,[2] who were born to the expectation of the highest honors, that death is common to all ages. But, it is said, the young man hopes to live long, while the
- ↑ Marcus Porcius Cato Licinianus. He was Cato's only son by his first marriage. He had reached middle life, and died but a few years before his father. He was a man of high character, had become eminent as a jurist, and was praetor elect at the time of his death. His father pronounced his eulogy at his funeral, which was conducted at the lowest possible rate of expense, on the plea of poverty, which the father's miserly disposition probably justified to his own consciousness.
- ↑ Two sons of Aemilius Paullus, who died at the ages of twelve and fifteen, one just before, the other shortly after their father's triumph over Perseus. As his two elder sons had become by adoption members of other families, he was left without legal heir or successor.
