Would the oldest magus be a Redcap? You only need a magical Ability to get full benefit from the longevity ritual, and Redcaps, not being Gifted and opened into the arts, cannot enter Twilight. They just accumulate flaws from warping. So their only limit is the level of LR they can get and their luck on Aging rolls.
It is possible, though they would not normally have as high a Lifestyle modifier, would not get a Bronze Cord bonus, would not get things like Lab Health, would not normally have as high a LR as the best ones you will find a Magus having, don't have as much Vis individually, and any time their LR failed they would have to find a Magus to recast it for them (possibly along with designing a whole new ritual if they do not have a copy of their last ritual).
High Warping (10+) does not kill a Magus or send them instantly into Final Twilight, it just requires them to be very careful not to gain 2+ Warping Points at a time. So really a Redcap does not have much advantage here.
It occurs to me that a magus could simply arrange a ritual to survive every aging crisis, tuned to themselves, and literally live forever without even bothering with a longevity ritual. If they either have unaging or can recover characteristics through ritual magic. After all the highest crisis requires a CrCo 40 ritual to survive, so once you have that prepared (spell container, casting tablet...) you are set.
I still think decrepitude 5 kills you regardless of how high your characteristics are. Unaging characters still die from decrepitude, they just appear to have a brief illness and then die.
Okay, valid point, which means that sans a LR you will gain a level of decrepitude every year after age 220...
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My goal is not to figure out how to make a nigh-immortal magus character. My goal is to figure out the likely ages of the Order's most elderly (and therefore most knowledgeable) magi for a few generations back.
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From that, I can figure out the maximum levels of texts on Arts and Knowledges likely to be available in our saga. It will also likely give me an idea of how many magic items we might find "in the wild", and what their Penetration might be where applicable.
Well let me give you a thought experiment. Some magus has an Affinity in one of the Arts, and manages to join a covenant with an abundance of vis in that Art - an Ignem magus who's in a volcano, or some such. I would expect that they could get up to 40 or more in that specific art, and then write a Summa on it. So there could well be a Ignem Level 24 Quality 7 book out there, which needs to be rebound with resonant materials and infused with magic. It takes a number of events to happen - a strong vis source matched with an Affinity, and then not botching too many times while studying vis. There's probably a couple of such works.
I have a hard time with NPCs with Abilities over 12. I know that a properly focused character can have higher, but that's my working assumption. Implicitly, the core book assumes that there could be individuals with a 16, as Level 8 Ability summae are permitted. When I think about magi ages, I assume that they can't get a new LR after age 120, since we now need to find somebody with a Magic Theory over 12 to create it.
Magic items allow Shape and Material Bonus, plus Verditius have all sorts of Mysteries that allow them to supercharge item creation. This allows higher lab totals, but items have costs like uses/day and such. I generally think of magi having a 60 or so lab total in something, and high-end magi with a 100. That defines the size of effects. Most every magus makes a talisman.
For the question of "items in the wild," magi live in covenants, and if their Bonisagus seeker doesn't come back from her exploration, her sodales will likely investigate (and recover her belongings). So I'd say there's a couple thousand items out there - Verditius make a lot, Poor Enchanters enchant a talisman at best, and some were made with expiry and others have been destroyed. You need to think about how freely magic items have been sold to mundanes - Items of Quality are easy to make and very useful.
For items with Penetration, you need those when confronting high-Might entities or other magi. I don't see very many of those, since your own spells get better as you improve your Arts, while an item's effect is fixed at creation (not withstanding MuVi effects added to the item). You can also use Sympathetic magic to greatly improve your Penetration total. If you are building an item for yourself, an attack spell is better than an item effect. Items are always made for a purpose - who made it, and what problem did the item solve?
This discussion boils down to: What's the power level of the campaign? If there's a lot of vis available, magi can get higher Arts and lab totals. This allows them to improve stats, which means there's more books written by people with high Communication scores, and magi live longer, because they can afford 20 pawns for a 100 year old magus to get a new LR. Everything else comes down to that question.
We've still got a lot of world-building ahead of us to fully answer that question. Maybe I can put together some numbers over the weekend to run by the rest of the troupe.
We're likely to be over the high end relative to covenants done under canon rules since we switched to monthly XP equal to normal Seasonal XP for faster character advancement, and our covenant is in a modern setting*.
*My high school English teacher always did marvel at my run-on sentences. I think she'd be right proud of that one.
And yet neither Charles Dickens nor the Apostle Paul would think it even slightly noteworthy! Only 38 words with no major asides or diversions. Contrast the 98-word opening sentence of Oliver Twist, or the absolute ridiculousness of Ephesians 1:3-14 (somewhere in the 250+ word range in English depending on translation, and iirc north of 200 in the original Greek).
You mentioned long sentences and didn't include James Joyce's Ulysses? 
His longest there is a sentence well over 4000 words long.
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Legend of Gilgamesh. Before the invention of punctuation.
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Gilgamesh certainly has punctuation, just not the way we usually think of it.
IIRC sumerian puts verbs at the ends of sentences, thus whenever you see a verb there is an implicit dot (.). Akkadian certainly changed to have Verb-last due to influence from sumerian. There is even an Akkadian participle (-ma) that you add to the end of verbs to signify "this is a verb but the sentence doesnt end here even though the verb would ordinarily suggest that the sentence ends here."
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Okay, Legend of Gilgamesh, as read by a citizen of ancient Rome.
Legend of Gilgamesh would not have been read by a citizen of ancient rome. At least I am unaware of any evidence that ancient romans were even aware of the epic of gilgamesh.
It was lost when the akkadian language went extinct in the 1 century AD or more likely before that time, as Akkadian was for the last 5-600 years only a liturgical language, similar to what latin is today.
Yes, and the whole premise is a joke. Sorry you didn't get it.
Humor is very hard to do over text. Don't feel too down on yourself over it.
Funny thing about the ArM community: even tangents to the discussion are educational sometimes:)