I cannot understand how we establish the length of our lives. I see that the wise greatly shorten it at the expense of common opinion. How, young Cato said to those who wanted to prevent him from killing himself, am I at this age to be reproached for abandoning life too soon? He was only forty-eight. He considered this age to be very old and very advanced, considering how few men reach it: and those who talk about it, that I don’t know what course, which they call natural, promises a few years beyond that, they could do it, if they had a privilege that exempted them from such a large number of accidents to which each of us is exposed by a natural subjection, which can interrupt this course that they promise themselves.
What a dream it is to expect to die from a lack of strength that comes with extreme old age, and to set ourselves this goal in our lifetime, given that it is the rarest and least common type of death of all? We call it the only natural death, as if it were unnatural for a man to break his neck in a fall, to suffocate in a shipwreck, to be taken unawares by the plague or pleurisy, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to all these inconveniences. Let us not flatter ourselves with these fine words: by chance, we should rather call natural what is general, common and universal.
Dying of old age is a rare, singular and extraordinary death, and all the less natural than the others; it is the last and extreme kind of dying: the further away it is, the less likely it is; it is the boundary beyond which we will not go, and which the law of nature has prescribed so as not to be exceeded; but it is its rare privilege to make us last until then. It is an exemption that it grants by special favor to only one person in the space of two or three centuries, relieving him of the obstacles and difficulties that it has thrown in its path in this long career. Thus, my opinion is to consider that the age we have reached is an age that few people reach. Since ordinary men do not reach that point, it is a sign that we are well ahead. And, since we have passed the usual limits, which is the true measure of our life, we must not expect to go any further: Having escaped so many opportunities to die, where we see the world stumbling, we must recognize that an extraordinary fortune like the one that sustains us, and which is out of the ordinary, should not last us for long.
It is a defect in the laws themselves that they have this foolish idea: they do not want a man to be capable of managing his property until he is twenty-five years old; and he will hardly be capable of managing his life until then. Augustus cut five years from the old Roman ordinances and declared that it was sufficient for those who took on a judicial role to be thirty years old. Servius Tullius exempted knights who had passed forty-seven years from the duties of war; Augustus reduced this to forty-five. There seems to be little point in sending men into retirement before the age of fifty-five or sixty.
I would advise that we extend our vacation and occupation as much as possible for the public good, but I think the fault lies on the other side, in not getting involved in it soon enough. This person had been a universal judge of the world at the age of nineteen, and wants us to be thirty to judge the position of a gutter. As for me, I believe that our souls are defined at the age of twenty as they should be, and that they promise everything they can. No soul that has not given a very clear demonstration of its strength at that age has ever given proof of it since.
Natural qualities and virtues show what they have of vigorous and beautiful in that period of life, or never: “If the thorn pricks us when we are born, it hardly ever pricks,” they say in the Dauphiné. Of all the beautiful human actions that have come to my knowledge, of whatever kind they may be, I think I would have a greater share, in numbering those that have been produced, and in ancient centuries and in our own, before the age of thirty years, than after; Yes, in the lives of the men themselves, often.
Can I not say with complete confidence that Hannibal and Scipio, his great adversary, did so? They spent the better part of their lives in the pursuit of the glory they had acquired in their youth: great men from then on in the eyes of all others, but by no means in their own eyes. As for me, I am certain that, since that age, both my mind and my body have declined rather than improved, and gone backwards rather than forwards. It is possible that for those who use their time well, knowledge and experience grow with life; but vivacity, promptness, firmness, and other qualities that are much more ours, more important and essential, wither and languish.
Where the body has already been shaken by the strong forces of age and the limbs have fallen by blunted strength, the intellect limps, the tongue and mind are delirious. (Lucretius)
Sometimes it is the body that is the first to succumb to old age, sometimes it is the soul; and I have seen enough people whose brains weakened before their stomachs and legs; and the more dangerous it is, the less noticeable it is to the sufferer and the more it comes on suddenly. For this reason, I complain about the laws, not because they leave us too late for the job, but because they make us do it too late. It seems to me that, considering the frailty of our life, and how many ordinary and natural pitfalls it is exposed to, we should not attribute so much of it to birth, idleness, and apprenticeship.