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“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell
“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius
Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks generally abhorred aging as it represented a decline from highly prized youth and vigor. However older warriors, elder philosophers and statesmen were typically well treated. Ironically, the Spartans who valued the physical ideal most also were those who most valued the wisdom of elderly citizens. In the 7th century B.C. they set up the Gerousia, a counsel of 28 men and two kings who were all over age 60 to control the city-state and manage community affairs.
In the sixth century, Pythagoras popularized the idea that four elements (earth, fire, air, water) with corresponding qualities (dry, hot, cold, wet) and seasons (autumn, summer, spring, winter) formed the foundation for the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The essence of the theory was that the four humors were balanced in health whereas an imbalance would produce a change in temperament or illness. Later, Theophrastus (who succeeded Aristotle in the Peripatetic School of ancient philosophy) linked personality to the humors: those with excess blood were sanguine, those with an abundance of phlegm were phlegmatic, too much yellow bile produced a choleric personality, and those with too much black bile were melancholic.
In about the fourth century B.C. Hippocrates developed a theory of aging positing that each individual has a finite quantity of innate heat or vital force. Each person uses this force at a unique rate and the heat can be replenished but not fully to the previous level. Thus the reserve diminishes until death and the manifestations of aging are the result of this loss. The loss of innate heat was looked upon not as the result of supernatural influences or a process that can be halted, but rather as the natural and normal course of things. Hippocrates felt that one must assist nature rather than work against it, and his advice for longevity was moderation and the maintenance of daily activities.
About a century later Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) expounded (in his typically interminable detail) a theory of aging and death in his book On Youth and Old Age on Life and Death and on Respiration. His theory builds on Hippocrates’ view of heat as an essential quality of life. According to Aristotle everything that lives has a soul whose seat is in the heart and which cannot exist without natural heat. The soul is combined at birth with innate heat and requires heat to survive in the body. Life consists of maintaining this heat in its relationship to the soul. Aristotle likened the innate heat to a fire which is maintained and provided with fuel. Just as a fire can run out of fuel or be put out, innate heat also could be extinguished or exhausted. Continuing to produce the heat requires fuel and as the fuel is used up the flame diminishes as in old age. A feeble flame is more easily extinguished than the strong flame of youth. Left undisturbed the flame goes out as the fuel is exhausted and the person dies of old age.
Ancient Rome
The Ancient Romans were aware of the many lines of thought on aging and death held elsewhere in the world. Marcus Cicero (106-43 B.C.) acknowledged that old age can mean exclusion from the young: "What I find most lamentable about old age is that one feels that now one is repulsive to the young." But he also saw older people as a source of great wisdom ("States have always been ruined by young men and saved by the old.") and believed that a stable old age was based on a stable youth.
The height of ancient contributions to conceptions of aging and health was reached with Galen, a Roman physician who lived about 200 A.D. In essence Galen reconciled the theory of the four humors (Pythagoras) with the idea of inner heat (Hippocrates and Aristotle), as well as monotheism and notions of the spirit. In Galen’s view the body is the instrument of the soul. The soul is maintained in the body by heat which is in turn derived from the humors. Over the course of life we gradually dehydrate and the humors evaporate. In youth and midlife, this dehydration causes all of our vessels to increase in width and thus all the parts become strong and attain their maximal power. However, as time progresses and the organs become even drier we experience a gradual loss of function and vitality. This drying also causes us to become thinner and more wrinkled and our limbs to become weak and unsteady in their movements. This condition of old age is the innate destiny of every mortal creature. When at last the dryness is complete and the humors evaporate, the body’s vital heat is extinguished.
Christians, Jews and Islamic Arabs adopted the philosophical basis of Galen’s theory. His grand synthesis represents the culmination of all previous ideas on aging and his whole medical system, including his approach to aging, was the authoritative influence on medical thought and practice for more than 19 centuries.
