Wisdom and old age

The link that connects old age and wisdom is probably very ancient, but it presents significant historical and cultural variations. In general terms, only if wisdom is thought as an end which requires time to be acquired, old age appears as the best moment to obtain it; of course, much depends on the conception and standard of life typical of a particular society, two aspects that affect the way in which ageing is valuated. The greek man depicted in Sophocles and Euripides’ tragedies doesn’t aspire to a long life which will inevitably be full of pain; on the contrary, Plato tells us that it takes a lot of time and a lot of training in good life to become a philosopher, that is one which loves Sophia, so governors in the platonic Republic will be necessarily old aged men. On the other side, Aristotle doesn’t consider old people as good examples of wisdom and excludes them from the government of the polis; moreover, Sophia is not, for Aristotle, the equivalent of Wisdom. At the very end of the republican Rome, Cicero celebrates old age as a state in which man is freed from the foolish mastery of instincts, and some years later Senecas writes to Lucilius that old age is the best moment to take care of oneself, leaving aside political activity. In both cases, the defence of old age is strongly linked to ideological-political underlying motivations that refer to a complex historical moment of transition. In Old Testament, respect is considered as an attitude strongly due to old people, and in New Testament old people frequently are good examples of wisdom, but here the concept of wisdom has a completely new meaning, which refers more to an inner, spiritual knowledge than to a practical one.