208 



ROMAN PHILOSOPHY. 



Choice of 

 profession. 



Defence of 

 Roscius 

 Amerinus his 

 first cause. 



His travels. 



Returns to 

 Rome, 

 u. c. 677. 

 A. C. 77. 



Quaestor of 

 Sicily. 



himself with the assistance of Molo, the first rhetorician of the day ; 

 while Diodotus the Stoic exercised him in the argumentative subtleties 

 for which the disciples of Zeno were so celebrated. At the same 

 time he declaimed daily in Greek and Latin with some young noble- 

 men who were competitors in the same race of honours with himself. 



Of the two professions, 1 which, from the existence of external and 

 internal disputes, are inseparable alike from all forms of government, 

 while that of arms, by its splendour and importance, secures the 

 almost undivided admiration of a rising and uncivilised people, legal 

 practice, on the other hand, becomes the path to honours in later and 

 more civilised ages, from the oratorical accomplishments by which it 

 is usually attended. The date of Cicero's birth fell precisely during 

 that intermediate state of things, in which the exclusive glory of 

 military exploits was prejudiced by the very opulence and luxury 

 which they had been the means of procuring ; he was the first Roman 

 who found his way to the highest dignities of the state with no other 

 recommendation than his powers of eloquence, and his merits as a 

 civil magistrate. 2 



The first cause of importance he undertook was his defence of 

 Roscius Amerinus ; in which he distinguished himself by his spirited 

 opposition to Sylla, whose favourite Chrysogonus was prosecutor in 

 the action. This obliging him, according to Plutarch, to leave Rome 

 on prudential motives, he employed his time in travelling for two 

 years under pretence of his health, which, he tells us, 3 was as yet 

 unequal to the exertion of pleading. At Athens he met with T. 

 Pomponius Atticus, whom he had formerly known at school, and 

 there renewed with him a friendship which lasted through life, in 

 spite of the change of interests and estrangements of affection so 

 commonly attendant on turbulent times. 4 Here too he attended the 

 lectures of Antiochus, who, under the name of Academic, taught the 

 dogmatic doctrines of Plato and the Stoics. Though Cicero evinced 

 at first considerable dislike of his philosophical views, 5 he seems 

 afterwards to have adopted the sentiments of the Old Academy, 

 which they much resembled ; and not till late in life to have 

 relapsed into the sceptical tenets of his former instructor Philo." 

 After visiting the principal philosophers and rhetoricians of Asia, in 

 his thirtieth year he returned to Rome, so strengthened and improved 

 both in bodily and mental powers, that he soon eclipsed in speaking 

 all his competitors for public favour. So popular a talent speedily 

 gained him the suffrage of the commons ; and, being sent to Sicily as 

 quaestor, at a time when the metropolis itself was visited with a 



1 Pro MursEna, 14 ; de Orat. i. 9. 



2 In Catil. iii. 6 ; in Pis. 3 ; pro. Sylla, 30 ; pro Dom. 37 ; de Harusp. resp. 23 ; 

 ad Fam. xv. 4. 3 De Clar. Orat. 91 



4 Middleton's Life, vol. i. p. 42, 4to. 5 Plutarch, in Vita". 



6 Warburton, Div. Leg. lib. iii. sec. 3 ; and Vossius, de Nat. Logic, c. viii. 

 sec. 22. 



