In Ancient Greece, Aristophanes was among the first to mock the old in his plays as being feeble. Euripides also had a negative view of old age; in his play Alcestis, Admetus says ‘Old people always say they long for death—their age crushes them—they have lived too long. All words! As soon as death comes near, not a single one wants to go, and age stops being a burden.’ Nor was Aeschylus in the Agamemnon any more positive:
The riddle of the Sphinx who guarded the entrance to Thebes is well known: what, she asked, has one voice and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed, and goes slowest when it has the most feet? Oedipus, passing by, answered: it is a human being that starts on all fours, is mature on two feet, and then when old has three, as there is also a cane. The Sphinx killed herself when, on this occasion, her riddle was answered correctly.
The philosopher Cicero, who introduced the Romans to Greek thought, was positive about ageing, celebrating the delights of intellectual activities in old age such as civic service, writing, learning a language, and the study of philosophy. But he also listed the difficulties:
As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.
The Roman poet Ovid was also unenthusiastic: ‘Farewell to laughing, happy love and easy sleep’, and ‘Time, oh great destroyer, and envious of old age, together you bring all things to ruin.’ It has been estimated that about 20 per cent of the senators in Rome at any one time would have been 60 years of age or older. Both Cicero and Plutarch, in their own old age, felt that their years did not earn them the respect they merited. The Roman playwright Plautus created sympathetic old male characters, and in one play points out that an old man should be careful to avoid prating about public affairs, or slipping a hand under the dress of a woman whom he does not know. It has been suggested that from Ancient Egypt to the Renaissance the theme of old age was handled by writers in a stereotyped manner, with similar comparisons being made and little attempt to really look at old age deeply.
Respect for the old was an important principle in Judaism. The Old Testament says that we must cherish parents in their old age: ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God’ (Leviticus 19:32). This has been taken to mean that when an old man or woman passes by, you should stand up as a token of respect. Old age may be one reward of those who honour their parents: ‘Honour your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12). The Koran takes a similar view: ‘Be good to parents, whether one or both of them attains old age with thee… neither chide them, but speak unto them words respectful.’ To Buddha, born in 565 BC, old age was a spectacle of misery and sorrow which needed to be eliminated. Against this, the Upanishads, the sacred texts of Hinduism, speak of active and joyful ageing.
Since Jesus was young, this could have made youth more important than old age for early Christians, and early Christianity did little for the old, though the building of hospitals and asylums may have helped them. In the Middle Ages the young ruled the world; even the Popes were mainly young. There were exceptions: Charlemagne ruled until he was 72, and Enrico Dandolo, the twelfth-century Doge of Venice, is infamous for his role in the Fourth Crusade at the age of 90. But in 1380, when Charles V of France, died aged 42, he was regarded as already old.
Eastern civilisations in old times showed respect to the old. The high position of the old in China is due to Confucius (551–479 BC), who gave superiority to the elderly; for him the whole household owed obedience to the oldest man, who had the right of life and death over his children. On his 70th birthday Confucius said: ‘I could follow the dictates of my heart without disobeying the moral law.’ Confucius stated that filial piety ‘… is the root of all virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching.’ The Chinese wanted to grow old, or at least to appear old, because of the privileges enjoyed by older people. When two people of different ages were together, the elder spoke freely and the younger listened respectfully, so the younger man wished to grow older so that he might talk more and listen less. In family life, age brought authority. The young saw the advantage of honouring and obeying their parents; even the middle-aged could profit by the wisdom of the old and feel repaid for supporting them. Several Chinese proverbs illustrate this view: ‘If you wish to succeed, consult three old people’; ‘He who will not accept an old man’s advice will some day be a beggar’; ‘If a family has an old person in it, it possesses a jewel.’ As a result, a man’s 50th birthday in China was marked with reverence. Fathers had the right of life and death over their children.
The old are rarely seen in Western literature in the Middle Ages, though La Morte D’Arthur has the king aged over a hundred and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, makes an old man’s sexual activity revolting. Most seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers are said to have viewed old age as a time of physical decline, and thought that old people were peevish, garrulous and forgetful. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is one of the earliest novels in which a woman’s life is followed until she reaches seventy, and which shows the strength of her character. Moll’s lifestyle was lurid, but her closing words are that she and her husband had determined ‘to spend the rest of our lives in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived’. For Moll, age was a time of cheer and good humour, where one can make up for the failings of a lifetime. Goethe, who wrote Faust at the age of 65, also took a positive line:
Charles Dickens objected to the comparision of old age to childhood, reckoning it as similar as death is to sleep. In The Old Curiosity Shop, little Nell’s grandfather is very kind, but gambles too much. Victor Hugo’s plays had many old characters with positive features. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘All Over’, an old man meets again a woman he loved, but is shocked by how she has aged—only her daughter resembles his early love.
Shangri La is a fictional place in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which may have been inspired by Hilton’s visit to the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, where the inhabitants have been reported to live long and healthy lives. Exercise is an important part of their life, as the mountains are extremely rough terrain. They eat mainly fruit and wheat, barley and millet. They have been called by some researchers ‘The Happiest People on Earth’. The main characters in the novel are taken to a secluded monastery where the monks practice a combination of Christianity and Buddhism and where some are immortal.