Chapter 23. Military Exercises and Mock Battles Should Be Frequently Practiced in Time of Peace, and the Elder Soldiers Should Be Honored
1 In peacetime, let him practice war, training himself continually in every form of combat, refusing none of it; and let him drill both soldiers and everyone together, making teachers and spectators of the exercises out of those too old for combat. For, as the saying goes, gray hair “has something wiser to say than the young.”[1] The old man and the young man are different from each other: the one is the mind, the other the hand; each needs the other. And nothing has so ruined the Roman state as this—that there is no longer a robust old man among those who manage affairs, one whose outer shell has been wrinkled by time while the fruit within has been brought to full ripeness, like a nut in its husk.