“O my right hand, how you long to hold the spear,
but in your weakness your longing has come to nothing.”
—Euripides, Hercules 268–269
as quoted by Plutarch in Should an Old Man Engage in Politics?
In April 2020, when Joe Biden had effectively won his party’s nomination to challenge incumbent US President Donald Trump in the coming election and political commentators had begun to fret about both candidates’ ages, I consulted Plutarch of Chaeronea to get his advice about old men engaging in politics. Plutarch was well prepared to offer advice: In addition to being a philosopher, biographer, and priest of Apollo at Delphi, he had been an active politician his whole life, serving his small Greek city during the height of the Roman empire. At seventy years old, he wrote an essay—really, an opinion piece—to argue that good governance required the participation of older politicians. The state does not demand “deeds of the feet or hands” from its aged leaders, he argued, but instead looks for “counsel, foresight, and speech … that imparts sense, wise judgment, and stability.” To use a common metaphor, elders are stationed at the helm to keep the ship of state on course, and they no longer climb the rigging or throw their backs into the rowing. That work is better left to the younger politicians, who possess vigor and ambition but lack the experience required to steer. This division of labor is essential: “If you push out your elders,” Plutarch warns, “you refill political offices with younger people who thirst for glory and power but lack political sense.” Though he would have encouraged us to interrogate the candidates’ abilities and character, Plutarch would have been disappointed to see either man disqualified simply because of his age. Plutarch’s advice for the 2020 election and an epitome of his essay may be found here.
Now it’s summer 2024 and we’ve been witnessing a contest between the same two candidates. Each “old man” has naturally grown four years older, though in this cycle questions about age have been directed almost exclusively at Joe Biden, who has shown more signs of age-related decline than Donald Trump, who’s three years younger. During his time in office, Biden’s speech and movements have been scrutinized and his fitness to run again has been questioned (for example, in this piece from The Atlantic), but his performance at the debate on June 27, when he seemed at times to be confused and fragile, crystallized anxieties about his physical and mental health. The day following the debate, for example, the New York Times ran an editorial under the headline, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” followed ten days later by another editorial urging Democrats to “speak the plain truth” to Biden. The contrast between the two candidates only sharpened after a gunman shot at Trump during a public rally on July 13; the former president managed not only to escape without serious injury but even to emerge looking robust and resilient. In response to criticism, Biden conceded that the debate did not go well, but he was defiant in the face of calls for him to step aside, unwilling to admit any deficiencies that would keep him from winning the election or being an effective president. Though polling showed a majority of Democrats wanted Biden to end his campaign and influential party members were publicly calling for him not to run, for several weeks the president was not listening. When asked in an interview if he would step aside if he were convinced that he could not defeat Trump, he replied that he might, “if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that.” In other words, Biden believed that the decision belonged to him alone. Finally, after intense pressure from within his own party, Joe Biden announced on July 21 he would not seek reelection and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris.
How did the Democrats find themselves in this situation, where they had a candidate for president that most party members did not want? And what advice could Plutarch have offered? Part of the Democrats’ problem may be the tradition of deference to incumbents when it comes to selecting candidates. Biden could claim that he earned his party’s nomination because he won an overwhelming majority of delegates in the primary elections, but of course, as the sitting president, he ran essentially unopposed. (Donald Trump, who refuses to acknowledge his loss in 2020, is effectively the Republican incumbent and similarly faced little opposition in his primary race.) The advantage of incumbency may be an element of a more general deference to established—and older—politicians. Samuel Moyn argued in a recent article that democracies have a problem with gerontocracy, suggesting that our political system allows individuals to accumulate power for themselves and their families as they age, making it difficult for younger politicians to enter the field or advance once they’re in. Biden, of course, is not the only political leader to show the effects of age while in office or to be criticized for serving too long. And yet, many such leaders continue to serve and sometimes even to die in office.
Plutarch understood the problem of deference, which he expressed in terms of envy. Older politicians benefit from constituencies who prefer the familiar to the unknown and only grudgingly bestow public honors and offices on new politicians. “Dogs bark at visitors they don’t recognize,” Plutarch says, quoting the philosopher Heraclitus, “and so envy fights against people just getting their start on the speaker’s platform—knocking at the door, so to speak—and does not allow them to enter.” In Plutarch’s world, the speaker’s platform was the public stage where politicians earned their reputations by giving rousing speeches and accepting coveted civic honors. It could be hard to break into local politics, but a politician born into a prestigious family, or one who managed over many years to fight his way past the barking dog, would eventually be treated with mildness, as opposed to the “savageness or anger” that greeted the newcomer. There is, in fact, a paradox when it comes to our treatment of elders. “Now on the one hand,” Plutarch explains, “people attack every other form of superiority and argue especially over virtue, birth, and ambition, as though they would deprive themselves of whatever honors they granted to someone else. But on the other hand, the primacy that is earned over time, which is properly called ‘the privilege of age,’ is not begrudged but is rather conceded.” We actually feel good about ourselves, and we impress others, when we defer to our elders. Thus, we’ve created a system where, as Moyn argued, power is accumulated as people age, and once this power’s been acquired, its exercise is rarely challenged.
What check is there on an older politician who declines to let go of power or, at least, to allow others to share it? Moyn, acknowledging that “few give up power if they aren’t forced to do so,” doesn’t offer any practical solutions. For Plutarch, who viewed most political problems through an ethical lens, the solution lay in the goodwill and wisdom of the leaders. And failing that, he put his hope in their sense of shame. Though he was adamant that elder politicians should not be disqualified simply on account of age, he was equally steadfast in his belief that they must know for themselves when to quit. He hoped that politicians could “read the room,” to use a modern idiom, and that concern for their reputations would shape their behavior. “The love of holding office that asserts itself at every election, the meddlesomeness that watches for every opportunity to appear in court or at a council meeting, and the love of honor that grasps at every embassy, all of this is wearying and miserable,” he wrote. When a public servant does these things at an advanced age “even with a sense of benevolence,” Plutarch warns, “he is overbearing and produces the opposite of the desired outcome.” Biden, however, for a long time professed to be immune from such moral pressure. In a press conference on July 11, he declared, “I’m not in this for my legacy. I’m in this to complete the job that I started.” The risk for Democrats, apart from finding Biden overbearing, was that he would overestimate the support he’d receive in the general election and that he wouldn’t, after all, be able to finish the job he started. That was a risk Democrats were unwilling to take.
If Biden had followed Plutarch’s direction, he might have declined to run for a second term, rather than wait to be forced out. This would have given Democrats the chance to conceive of a future without him. “We elders should take up offices while at the same time trying to avoid them,” Plutarch advised, speaking to himself as well as his readers. “We ought not be asking for them but begging ourselves off, on the principle that we do not take leadership roles for ourselves but rather we surrender ourselves to being leaders.” That is to say, once your reputation is established, it’s arrogant and unseemly to assert yourself. The Democrats certainly know Biden well, and they know where to find him. If he had declined to run, or at least expressed reluctance, they might have come to him and asked him to be their nominee anyway. “This approach possesses a certain dignity and decorum,” Plutarch explains, “when your native city elects you, summons you, and awaits you, and you return with honor and goodwill to accept the office they have bestowed on you.” A summons to serve would have provided the mandate that Biden did not receive from the pro forma primary elections, and which he could have used to silence his critics this summer.
Of course, if Biden had declined, the Democrats almost certainly would have thanked him for his service and nominated someone else. But a lifetime of public service must eventually come to an end, and Plutarch would argue that it’s better to know where you stand than to overstay your welcome. This he demonstrated with an anecdote about Menecrates, a Spartan elder who was also eager to finish the job he started.
“Every day the ephors, who ran the Spartan government, used to reserve a chair near the doors of the town hall for Menecrates. They would often get up from their deliberations and go out to him, to ask him questions and get his advice on the most important matters, for they found him wise and intelligent whenever they consulted him. And once, after he had lost his physical strength entirely and was spending his days at home and for the most part bedridden, the ephors summoned him. He arose and started to walk, barely and with great difficulty making his way forward. Along the way to the town hall, he met some young boys and asked them if they knew of anything that imposed a greater obligation than obeying one’s master, to which they answered, ‘The inability to obey.’ Menecrates reasoned, then, that he had reached the limit of his useful service, and he returned home.”
In case his point is not clear enough, Plutarch goes on to state the moral of the story in the form of a proverb, one that many Democrats wish Joe Biden had taken to heart long ago: “Our willingness to obey the call to public service should not wear out before our ability to respond, but once our willingness to obey has been abandoned by our ability to respond, we should not force ourselves to serve.”
Jeffrey Beneker is professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the editor and translator of How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership, and the author of The Passionate Statesman: Eros and Politics in Plutarch’s “Lives.” He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.