[Sidenote: E] There is, then, nothing to prevent an aged man from advancing the public good in many a department of statesmanship. He has the best of means thereto: reason, judgement, plain-speaking, and ‘_thought discreet_‘, as the poets say. It is not merely our hands and feet or the strength of our bodies that are part and parcel of the possessions of the State. Most important are the mind and the beauties of the mind—temperance, justice, and wisdom. It is monstrous that, as these come late and [Sidenote: F] slowly to their own, our house and farm and other goods and chattels should get the benefit of them, while, in a public way, to our country and our fellow-citizens, we make ourselves of no further use because of ‘time’. For what time takes away from our powers of active effort is less than what it adds to those of guidance and statesmanship. It is for this reason that, when Hermes is represented in an elderly form, though he has no hands or feet, his virile parts are tense—an indirect way of saying that there is little need for old men’s bodies to be hard at work, so long as their power of reasoned speech is—as it ought to be—vigorous and generative. Footnote 34: The text here is corrupt. Footnote 35: i.e. Epicurean. Footnote 36: Member of a religious council which met at Delphi and represented the chief states of all Greece. ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES [Sidenote: 138 B] TO POLLIANUS AND EURYDICE WITH PLUTARCH’S BEST WISHES. When they were shutting you in your bridal chamber, the ancestral ritual was duly applied to you by the priestess of Demeter. I believe that now, if reason also were to take you in hand and join in the nuptial song, it would prove of some service, and would support the tune as prescribed.