But leaving, if you please, this discourse about withdrawing old men from performing their duties to the state, let us make it a little the subject of our consideration and philosophy, how we may enjoin them no exercise unfitting or grievous to their years, the administration of a commonwealth having many parts beseeming and suitable for such persons. For as, if we were obliged to persevere in the practice of singing to the end of our days, it would behoove us, being now grown old, of the many tones and tensions there are of the voice, which the musicians call harmonies, not to aim at the highest and shrillest, but to make choice of that in which there is an easiness joined with a decent suitableness; so, since it is more natural for men to act and speak even to the end of their lives, than for swans to sing, we must not reject action, like a harp that is set too high, but rather let it a little down, accommodating it to such employs in the state as are easy, moderate, and fitting for men in years. For neither do we suffer our bodies to be altogether motionless and unexercised because we cannot any longer make use of spades and plummets, nor yet throw quoits or skirmish in armor, as we have formerly done; but some of us do by swinging and walking, others by playing gently at ball, and some again by discoursing, stir up our spirits and revive our natural heat. Therefore neither let us permit ourselves to be wholly chilled and frozen by idleness, nor yet on the contrary let us, by burthening ourselves with every office or intermeddling with every public business, force on old age, convinced of its disability, to break forth into these exclamations: The spear to brandish, thou, right hand, art bent; But weak old age opposes thy intent. Since even that man is not commended who, in the vigor and strength of his years, imposing all public affairs in general on himself, and unwilling to leave any thing for another (as the Stoics say of Jupiter), thrusts himself into all employs, and intermeddles in every business, through an insatiable desire of glory, or through envy against those who are in some measure partakers of honor and authority in the state. But to an old man, though you should free him from the infamy, yet painful and miserable would be an ambition always laying wait at every election of magistrates, a curiosity attending for every opportunity of judicature or assembling in counsel, and a humor of vain-glory catching at every embassy and patronage. For the doing of these things, even with the favor and good liking of every one, is too heavy for that age. And yet the contrary to this happens; for they are hated by the young men, as leaving them no occasions of action, nor suffering them to put themselves forth; and their ambitious desire of primacy and rule is no less odious to others than the covetousness and voluptuousness of other old men.