The aged remember everything that interests them. Cicero quoting Cato the Elder on old age. Section 21.
Cicero's version of Cato the Elder goes on to illustrate his point:
Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age, and when, because of his absorption in literary work, he was thought to be neglecting his business affairs, his sons haled him into court in order to secure a verdict removing him from the control of his property on the ground of imbecility...Thereupon, it is said, the old man read to the jury his play, Oedipus at Colonus, which he had just written and was revising, and inquired: “Does that poem seem to you to be the work of an imbecile?”
Image: Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust, 1788, at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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