Ancients on oldies: tips on ageing from the Romans are all Greek to Richard Ingrams

A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th birthday of my Ancient History tutor George Cawkwell. There were toasts and speeches, including one from George himself and my fellow student Robin (now Lord) Butler, who did a brilliant imitation of George getting all excited when describing the battle of Marathon and reverting, temporarily, to his native New Zealand accent.

In the company of such men, not forgetting another fine speechmaker, Edward Enfield, also one of George’s pupils, I felt ill at ease. There they were, overflowing with classical allusions, and there was I, wondering how I could have forgotten almost everything I had known about the ancient world including the battle of Marathon. Yet from the age of seven, when I first started learning Latin, up until my 24th year when I left Oxford, allowing for a two-year gap for National Service, I had done almost nothing but study Latin and Greek. And now I could remember scarcely anything about either of them. Show me a piece of Latin prose and it is all Greek to me.

The Ancient Art of Growing Old by Tom Payne, who teaches classics at Sherborne, helps me to understand, to some extent, how and why I have let George Cawkwell down. It is a scholarly but reasonably light-hearted essay about the classical view of old age — ancients on oldies, in other words. Not surprisingly, there is a heavy emphasis on Cicero, who wrote a short book — De Senectute — on the subject. It is hard to overemphasise the effect that the mere mention of Cicero can have on a man who as a schoolboy had to sweat blood translating his speeches into English, usually with the help of a (forbidden) crib.