This book is the first major study of the ways in which old age was perceived in Western culture and society. Beginning from ancient Palestine and Classical Greece, Minois traces the changing conceptions of the nature, value and burden of the old.

He shows how, in ancient Greece, the cult of youth and beauty, on the one hand, and the reverence for the figure of the Homeric sage, on the other, created an ambivalent attitude towards the aged. This ambiquity appears again in the contrast between the active role that senior citizens played in Roman politics, and their depiction in...