Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and joining me today is Professor Tim Parkin, who holds the Elizabeth and James to Toolless Chair of Classics at the University of Melbourne.

This is episode CIII. Old Age in the Roman world.

Classical authors such as Cicero and Plutarch would have us believe that the elderly were revered, active citizens of ancient Rome.

But on closer inspection that may not be the case,

and older people might not have the power and respect in the Roman society that we first supposed.

Here's Tim Parkin.

There's a common perception that old age in the Roman Empire is maybe, you know, generally speaking,

40 years is a good old age to live for not just in the Roman Empire

but I suppose in antiquity and when you go back further in time that people died earlier.

It's a very common misconception people assume that we live longer today than we've ever lived in the past.

And that's certainly true.

More of us live into what we call old age.

But it certainly happened in antiquity that some people lived well into their 60s, 70s or beyond.

It's just that so many people would have died very young in infancy or in early childhood.

If you survive infancy in early childhood, chances are you're going to go on to live into your

40s or 50s. So some people felt old when they were in their 40s that turned gray

Morris Horace complains about his gray hairs, but other people at 60 say

that they feel like old age is approaching in antiquity. So just as we tend not to

set a direct limit on when someone changes from being middle age to old,

the ancients didn't either, I don't think. It depended upon how you felt it depended upon your circumstances.

To say someone was old at 40 would be regarded as extreme I would have thought. Cicero for example at the age of 62 says

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