"Age steals away all things, even the mind"
About this Quote
Nothing in Virgil's line is sentimental. "Age steals away all things, even the mind" treats time less like a slow fade than a clean crime: theft. The verb choice matters. To be "stolen from" implies you once possessed something real and rightful - vigor, beauty, status, memory - and that its removal is not a fair exchange but an indignity. Virgil isn't just observing decline; he's sharpening it into grievance.
The kicker is "even the mind". In Roman moral imagination, the mind (mens) is the last citadel: the seat of reason, civic competence, and masculine self-mastery. Bodies can fail; a disciplined person should still govern himself. Virgil punctures that comforting hierarchy. Age doesn't merely rough up the exterior; it breaches the core. The subtext is brutal: the one faculty you use to make sense of loss is itself subject to loss.
Context deepens the sting. Virgil writes in an Augustan world obsessed with order, restoration, and legacy. Rome sells itself as newly stable, newly permanent, a project that will outlast any one life. Against that public narrative, the line sounds like a private counter-history: empires promise endurance, but individuals are outpaced by their own biology. The theft is total, and it doesn't negotiate with virtue.
It's also a writer's fear. A poet's capital is attention, memory, judgment - the very tools age can erode. Virgil compresses that professional anxiety into a universal verdict, making decline not just physical tragedy but an existential one: time takes the authoring self.
The kicker is "even the mind". In Roman moral imagination, the mind (mens) is the last citadel: the seat of reason, civic competence, and masculine self-mastery. Bodies can fail; a disciplined person should still govern himself. Virgil punctures that comforting hierarchy. Age doesn't merely rough up the exterior; it breaches the core. The subtext is brutal: the one faculty you use to make sense of loss is itself subject to loss.
Context deepens the sting. Virgil writes in an Augustan world obsessed with order, restoration, and legacy. Rome sells itself as newly stable, newly permanent, a project that will outlast any one life. Against that public narrative, the line sounds like a private counter-history: empires promise endurance, but individuals are outpaced by their own biology. The theft is total, and it doesn't negotiate with virtue.
It's also a writer's fear. A poet's capital is attention, memory, judgment - the very tools age can erode. Virgil compresses that professional anxiety into a universal verdict, making decline not just physical tragedy but an existential one: time takes the authoring self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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