In the opening pages of Plato's Republic Cephalus tells Socrates that when old men of his acquaintance get together they tend to spend their time bemoaning the lost pleasures of youth. Since sex, feasting and other laddish benefits have been curtailed or withdrawn they feel they might as well not be alive at all. But Cephalus also reports that the poet Sophocles, asked how the sex was going, made this exemplary but prim reply: 'I am very glad to have escaped all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.' Old age, he says, brings freedom from desire; the true cause for complaint is not old age itself but the way people live. 'If they are temperate and contented, old age . . . is only moderately onerous; if they aren't, both old age and youth are hard to bear.'

LRB 13 December 2007 | PDF Download