Writers of the classical world had a good deal to say about old age, especially in the arena of carnal desire. Some, such as Ovid, thought it unfair that older women were considered less appealing than the younger variety. In his play The Assembly Women, Aristophanes even offers a dystopian society in which if a man wants to have sex with a young woman, he has to have sex with two old ones first.
These are among the nuggets in this hugely entertaining slim volume. Tom Payne, a schoolmaster whose previous books include Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney, this time takes a playful look at old age, aiming “to hear those voices that offered calm and even hopeful outlooks to the elderly, while having no illusions about the context in which they spoke”.
Payne breaks his material down into thematic chapters such as The Old in Public Life. One learns that Plutarch wrote a treatise called Should the Elderly Run the Country? (Yes, he reckoned.) I enjoyed The Old Mind chapter the most. Dementia existed in the ancient world, but was not as prevalent as now because people died sooner. Practical advice in the Looking Old chapter embraces an ancient Treatment for the Feminine Face: a facepack involving 10 eggs and ground hartshorn.
The ancients shared many of our problems besides failing minds and Payne goes to some trouble to bring their preoccupations to bear on our own society: a sequence of sections is titled Can We Take Anything from This? Cicero is to the fore here, usually speaking through his mouthpiece Cato the Elder. (In his conclusion, Payne appends his own translation of Cicero’s 40-page treatise On Old Age.) The kind of decrepitude the master orator had in mind, writes Payne, “is that which we might imagine the, say, Thatcher government enjoying: once fully engaged with running the nation’s economy and now avidly reading up on fracking to keep mentally active”.
Deploying quotes from Aristotle to Zeno (the book includes a useful cast list for non-classicists, as well as exemplary notes), Payne also mines contemporary sources, from David Walliams’s Gangsta Granny to the pronouncements of health secretary Jeremy Hunt, a Vogue feature and the Bupa website. Cultural stereotypes are debunked: a professor of gerontology announces that the Asian reverence for elders is a myth and that the world’s largest care home – for 5,000 residents – is in China.
Consistently intelligent and witty, Payne is a brilliant expositor of ideas. The ancients would have approved of his refusal to paint in black and white what can only ever be grey. Those faraway voices expressed a multiplicity of views – they seldom agreed with each other and Ovid (whom Payne has previously translated) often doesn’t agree with himself. “But if there’s one thing about old age on which the ancients could agree,” writes Payne, “it’s that you must prepare for it.” The book is a call to arms. “If the world with which an old person struggles is really our perception of old age, then it’s a world we can improve.” Indeed.
Payne’s familiarity with and affection for his classical sources are among the many joys of these pages. You get the impression that he and they are old friends, yakking in the forum or at the Bull and Bush. The Ancient Art of Growing Old is not a threnody for lost youth or a world gone by – there are plenty of those – but a meditative celebration and self-help book. It would make a wonderful gift for anyone hurtling, like me, towards 60.
The Ancient Art of Growing Old is published by Vintage, £14.99. To buy for £11.99, click here
