"Here six authors examine how the best thinkers and artists of each historical epoch in the West have treated old age. They examine, too, the myths that have grown up around it - especially in our own time, when we firmly believe that never have people grown so old as they now do! - and the images, both visual and verbal, that have been created to encapsulate that thing which we shall all become. Opulently and ingeniously illustrated with reproductions drawn from an astonishingly wide range of eras and media, A History of Old Age provides a welcome and refreshing look at what the subject has meant to the Greeks and the Romans, the medievals, the Romantics, and the modern men and women of rootless urban societies."--Jacket.