CLASHIST3051

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CLAS/HIST3051

• Old Age in Greece and Rome

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What is Our Attitude to the Elderly?

• Old-folks' homes?
• Medicare
• Drug costs
• In-home care
• The senate
• The Prime Minister / Mr. Martin

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Ancient Conception of Old Age

• Heracles encountering 'Geras', old age
• His characteristics?

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Ancient Physiology of Aging

• Aristotle due to loss of body heat and moisture
• Thus constipation of old-age Hippocratic
  Aphorisms 2.53
• Thus also difficulty in urination

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Concurs With Greek Myth

• Tithonus, carried away ('raped') by the Dawn
• Begs to be made immortal, but forgot to ask for
  unending youth
• Then begs to die

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Result, and Metaphor for Old Age

• He is turned into a grasshopper as a mercy
• others in similar stories are cicadas

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Complaint Against Old Age

• What kind of life, what kind of joy is there
  without golden Aphrodite? When painful old age
  overtakes a man and makes him ugly outside and
  foul-minded within, then wretched cares eat away
  at his heart and no longer does he rejoice to
  gaze upon the sun Mimnermos 1
• old age hated because it is not youth

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Youth Culture Achilles

• Hero of the Iliad

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Happy Old Age Odysseus

• Solon growing old, learning many things
• Solon Tellus, the happiest of all, dies seeing
  his sons and grandsons
• Greeks on war

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Philosophers on Old Age

• Democritus The flower of old age is sophrosune
  (self-control)
• Plato worthy of worship

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Political Corroboration

• All states gerousia, or senate
• Athens overseers of choirs of boys, discipliners
  of boys over forty yrs.

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Greek Terms and Boundaries

• Neoi to end of twenties
• presbuteroi (presbyterian) from thirties to
  sixties
• gerontes (gerontology, etc.) after that
• middle age a less common concept

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Women

• Referred to as gune (gunaikes, pl.) until an
  older phase
• graia, then
• Pejorative term, don't know exactly what it means
  (Garland post-menopausal)
• The graiai from myth

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Menopause

• Seen as precarious, dangerous, like menarche
• In both cases, interventions proposed by, e.g.
  Soranus, to make transition less abrupt

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Support for the Elderly

• Threat of legal 'action concerning mistreatment
  of parents' in Athens
• Magistrates asked do you treat your parents
  well
• Women with sons were provided with state welfare
• Jury duty depicted as full of lazy old men

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• Old Age in Rome

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The Senatorial Elite

• Senatores gt senex, old man
• based on system of paterfamilias
• Roman burial
• Term for ancestors maiores

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Cicero's Dialogue On Old Age

• Takes Platonic approach, with Roman bias
• Admits debate about old age

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Mortality

• Canada's median age is 38
• Canadian Median age at death amazingly in 70s,
  lower among native Canadians by as much as a
  decade

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Roman Mortality

• Study of grave inscriptions by Hopkins
• Men mid-40s
• Women mid-30s
• Should we adjust this picture to account for
  whole population?

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Long Life

• Sophocles in his nineties, still composed tragedy
• Socrates put to death in his early eighties
• Emperor Augustus in his seventies

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Further Reading

• Cicero De Senectute
• Aristophanes' Wasps
• Aristotle's On the Long-Lived