THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 106.2 (2010-2011) 229-236 PRESIDENTIALADDRESS DE SENECTUTE STUDIORUM: ON OLD AGEAND ANTIQUITY1 hree score and eleven years ago, my great predecessor Hubert McNeil Poteat, of what was then Wake Forest College, addressed this meeting in Iowa City as CAMWS president for 1938.2 Times were tough—res adversae, indeed; the Great Depression was still weighing down everyone’s dreams, Hitler’s Germany was a threat to Europe and a second World War was imminent. My parents in northern Indiana had just graduated from high school and were headed for a nearby business college, after which they started married life in the shadow of the European war thatwould bring an end to the Depression at a terrible cost of lives and destruction of the cities and cultural monuments of the Old World. Poteat (whom I never knew) was a great orator—he had taught Cicero for many years and had used Ciceronian rhetoric to good advantage both in and out of the classroom;3 and Cicero was in part the subject of his address to that meeting of CAMWS in 1938. But I shall not, in this company, emulate Poteat’s rhetoric for 2009 and another Depression, lest Tacitus’ sententia about Domitius Afer be applied to me: aetas extrema multum etiam eloquentiae dempsit, dum fessa mente retinet silentii impatientiam (“extreme old age deprived him of much of his eloquence as well, as in spite of his weary mind he held on to an impatience of silence,” Ann. 4.52). 1 These remarks were given in a slightly different form as the presidential address at the annual meeting of CAMWS in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 3, 2009. 2 “Some Reflections onRoman Philosophy,” Classical Journal 33.9 (1938) 514-522. 3 A sample from that presidential address: “Rome was once a little frightened community of shepherds squatting precariously by the Tiber-side and surrounded by dozens of more or less similar communities. Who knows or cares anything about Veii and Fidenae and Ardea now? Rome grew slowly and steadily and invincibly, and one after another of her neighbors fell before the might of her armies and the indomitable, dogged persistence of her will to victory. Hamilcar, Hannibal, Antiochus, Vercingetorix were swept aside as she moved grandly down her appointed road— checked here and there by a Pyrrhus, an Arminius; halting and stumbling now and again, as civil strife hurled brothers against brothers; but eventually mistress of the world and builder of a civilization which has inspired the just wonder and admiration of all the ages. Why? I am profoundly convinced that it was because the prisca virtus Romana and the mores maiorum were substantially what Augustus believed they were” (above, n. 2, pp. 521-522). T 230 ROBERTW.ULERY, JR. I do not begin, as Cicero said, in the voice of a Tithonus (omnem sermonem tribuimus non Tithono),4 that Tithonus cited by Sappho in the newly discovered fragment of her poetry.5 These are not to be the maundering reflections of a teacher growing old amid a crowd of ever-young students and young colleagues, as M. L. West remarked about the conclusion of Sappho’s fragment: “Tithonus lived on, growing ever more grey and frail, while his consort remained young and beautiful—just as Sappho grows old before a cohort of protégées who, like undergraduates ,are always young.”6 That image brought to mind the following lines, from W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928): An aged man isbuta paltrything, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap itshandsand sing. Or in Latin: Senex est quoddam mendicum, sagum pannosum in baculo, nisi Anima complodans cantet.7 To begin with the obvious: Classics is at the outset the parent of the scholar, an authority with a demanding standard for the young scholar to meet, and years pass with that sense of striving to satisfy the demands of that parent (whether embodied in one’s senior professors or not), until late in life one realizes that the tables have been turned, that the parent has become the child, weak and in need of care, and the child has become the parent, feeding and protecting and assisting...