Piantare alberi. Storie e modelli di crescita nel "Cato maior de senectute" di Cicerone

Is the idea of “growing” and “development” useful to explain a work about senectus? The aim of this paper is to verify if Cicero’s Cato maior may offer a literary portrayal of “growth” in a double way: the biological one, with the human being intended as a mere individual, and the cultural one, relevant to human generations. The use of words and expressions from the rural context seems to enable Cicero to place the elderly in a justified relationship with the others ages of life, as he was rethinking the conflict of generations, because this opposition always talks about the ways every society conceives and describes itself.