The young should be trained to envisage death. Youth in its greatest vigor is subjected to more diseases than old age. If men too young governed the state, all government would fall. The old have already attained what the young only hope for, namely, long years. No actor can play more than one rôle at once. It takes more water to put out a hot fire than a spent one. The young are more prone to die by violence, the old by over-ripeness. The old can oppose tyrants because these can only kill; and their life, being shorter, is worth far less. The young and old should meditate on death till it becomes familiar and this only makes the mind free and easy. Many a soldier has rushed into the mêlée, with no result, when he knew he would be cut to pieces, and Marcus Atilius Regulus went back to his enemies for certain torture and death because he had promised. There is a certain satiety of each stage of life, and always one is fading as another warms up. Perhaps, Cato concludes, our minds are an efflux of some universal mind, and there may be an argument for preëxistence. We have not only interest in, but a kind of right to, posterity. The wisest accept death most easily, although it is by no means clear whether we are dissolved or there is a personal continuation. Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and Onomocritus, an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even entire families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny tells us of a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that in the Punjab people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three centuries pass. Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian, statistics of all centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were collected, there were more than a hundred and seventy of them out of a population of three million, six of whom lived over 150 years. According to Lucian, Tiresias lived 600 years on account of the purity of his life, and the inhabitants of Mount Ethos had the faculty of living a century and a half. He tells us of an Indian race, the Seres who, because of temperate life and very scanty food, lived 300 years, while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king of Cyprus who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among mortals for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes all others and tells of people who lived thousands of years. Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.