Bette Davis said ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies’. If that’s true, we could all use a little help as we approach our twilight years.

Translator Tom Payne turns to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes to learn what the wisest minds of antiquity could tell us about the pleasures and pains of old age. His discoveries are not always palatable (old age is an incurable disease) or inspiring (you’ll live longer if you don’t go to dinner parties), but in the surviving works of the classical world there is also comforting, invigorating and poignant counsel on mental decline, medicine, late love affairs, death and legacy.
Presented in a modern, accessible and playful tone, this lively tour around ancient attitudes to ageing, supplemented by a translation of Cicero’s On Old Age, reveals the true art of growing old gracefully

Tom Payne was born in 1971. He read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and was deputy literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He now lives with his wife and four children in Dorset, where he teaches English and Classics at Sherborne School, and Latin at the Gryphon School. His previous books are Fame: from the Bronze Age to Britney, and a verse translation of Ovid`s The Art of Love