[De contemptu mundi]

the fiftieth year. Under this age, what kind of days you lead, O man, we leave to your own discernment. For in it, if you wish to use prudence and wisdom, you can discern the good from the evil, and earn for your soul the Elysian fields or the Acherontic realms. The fifth age is that of the senior, that is, gravity, which is the decline from youth into old age, not yet old age, but now no longer youth; for it is the senior age, which the Greeks call presbyteroi elders, for an old man among the Greeks is not called a presbyter, but a geron old man. This age, beginning from the fiftieth year, terminates in the seventieth year. In this age, how many anxieties, hardships, perplexities, and miseries, O little man, do you suffer, I ask, now from the outcome of your children, now from the loss of goods, now from the infirmities of the body, the number of which is infinite, through which our little bodies are invaded! And there is no creature under heaven that is subjected to more diseases and sicknesses. While a man now considers himself strong and healthy, an unexpected infirmity and feverishness invades him. Indeed, there is nothing so stable under heaven that, with the passage of time, it does not bring to nothing. The sixth age is old age, named from senio weariness/tedium, which by no measure of years