Roman life in the days of Cicero | Page 9

comrades. After the defeat at Pharsalia he waited with his father at Brundisium till a kind letter from Caesar assured him of pardon. In B.C. 46 he was made aedile at Arpinum, his cousin being appointed at the same time. The next year he would have gladly resumed his military career. Fighting was going on in Spain, where the sons of Pompey were holding out against the forces of Caesar; and the young Cicero, who was probably not very particular on which side he drew his sword, was ready to take service against the son of his old general. Neither the cause nor the career pleased the father, and the son's wish was overruled, just as an English lad has sometimes to give up the unremunerative profession of arms, when there is a living in the family, or an opening in a bank, or a promising connection with a firm of solicitors. It was settled that he should take up his residence at Athens, which was then the university of Rome, not indeed exactly in the sense in which Oxford and Cambridge are the universities of England, but still a place of liberal culture, where the sons of wealthy Roman families were accustomed to complete their education. Four-and-twenty years before the father had paid a long visit to the city, partly for study's sake. "In those days," he writes, "I was emaciated and feeble to a degree; my neck was long and thin; a habit of body and a figure that are thought to indicate much danger to life, if aggravated by a laborious profession and constant straining of the voice. My friends thought the more of this, because in those days I was accustomed to deliver all my speeches without any relaxation of effort, without any variety, at the very top of my voice, and with most abundant gesticulation. At first, when friends and physicians advised me to abandon advocacy for a while, I felt that I would sooner run any risk than relinquish the hope of oratorical distinction. Afterwards I reflected that by learning to moderate and regulate my voice, and changing my style of speaking, I might both avert the danger that threatened my health and also acquire a more self-controlled manner. It was a resolve to break through the habits I had formed that induced me to travel to the East. I had practiced for two years, and my name had become well known when I left Rome. Coming to Athens I spent six months with Antiochus, the most distinguished and learned philosopher of the Old Academy, than whom there was no wiser or more famous teacher. At the same time I practiced myself diligently under the care of Demetrius Syrus, an old and not undistinguished master of eloquence." To Athens, then, Cicero always looked back with affection. He hears, for instance, that Appius is going to build a portico at Eleusis. "Will you think me a fool," he writes to Atticus, "if I do the same at the Academy? 'I think so,' you will say. But I love Athens, the very place, much; and I shall be glad to have some memorial of me there."
The new undergraduate, as we should call him, was to have a liberal allowance. "He shall have as much as Publilius, as much as Lentulus the Flamen, allow their sons." It would be interesting to know the amount, but unhappily this cannot be recovered. All that we know is that the richest young men in Rome were not to have more. "I will guarantee," writes this liberal father, "that none of the three young men [whom he names] who, I hear, will be at Athens at the same time shall live at more expense than he will be able to do on those rents." These "rents" were the incomings from certain properties at Rome. "Only," he adds, "I do not think he will want a horse."
We know something of the university buildings, so to speak, which the young Cicero found at Athens. "To seek for truth among the groves of Academus" is the phrase by which a more famous contemporary, the poet Horace, describes his studies at Athens. He probably uses it generally to express philosophical pursuits; taken strictly it would mean that he attached himself to the sage whose pride it was to be the successor of Plato. Academus was a local hero, connected with the legend of Theseus and Helen. Near his grove, or sacred inclosure, which adjoined the road to Eleusis, Plato had bought a garden. It was but a small spot, purchased for a sum which maybe represented by about three or four hundred pounds of our money, but it had been enlarged by the liberality of successive benefactors. This then was one famous lecture-room. Another was