Roman life in the days of Cicero. Alfred John Church
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his cousin, young Quintus, are sent to the court of Deiotarus, one of the native princes of Galatia. "The young Ciceros," he writes to Atticus, "are with Deiotarus. If need be, they will be taken to Rhodes." Atticus, it may be mentioned, was uncle to Quintus, and might be anxious about him. The need was probably the case of the old prince himself marching to Cicero's help. This he had promised to do, but the campaign was finished without him. This was in the year 51 B.C., and Marcus was nearly fourteen years old, his cousin being his senior by about two years. "They are very fond of each other," writes Cicero; "they learn, they amuse themselves together, but one wants the rein, the other the spur." (Doubtless the latter is the writer's son.) "I am very fond of Dionysius their teacher: the lads say that he is apt to get furiously angry. But a more learned and more blameless man there does not live." A year or so afterwards he seems to have thought less favorably of him. "I let him go reluctantly when I thought of him as the tutor of the two lads, but quite willingly as an ungrateful fellow." In B.C. 49, when the lad was about half through his sixteenth year, Cicero "gave him his toga." To take the toga, that is to exchange the gown of the boy with its stripe of purple for the plain white gown of the citizen, marked the beginning of independence (though indeed a Roman's son was even in mature manhood under his father's control). The ceremony took place at Arpinum, much to the delight of the inhabitants, who felt of course the greatest pride and interest in their famous fellow-townsman. But it was a sad time. "There and every where as I journeyed I saw sorrow and dismay. The prospect of this vast trouble is sad indeed." The "vast trouble" was the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. This indeed had already broken out. While Cicero was entertaining his kinsfolk and friends at Arpinum, Pompey was preparing to fly from Italy. The war was probably not an unmixed evil to a lad who was just beginning to think himself a man. He hastened across the Adriatic to join his father's friend, and was appointed to the command of a squadron of auxiliary cavalry. His maneuvers were probably assisted by some veteran subordinate; but his I seat on horseback, his skill with the javelin, and his general soldierly qualities were highly praised both by his chief and by his 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 the Lyceum. Here Aristotle had taught, and after Aristotle, Theophrastus, and after him, a long succession of thinkers of the same school. A third institution of the same kind was the garden in which Epicurus had assembled his disciples, and which he bequeathed to trustees for their benefit and the benefit of their successors for all time.
To a Roman of the nobler sort these gardens and buildings must have been as holy places. It was with these rather than with the temples of gods that he connected what there was of goodness and purity in his life. To worship Jupiter or Romulus did not make him a better man, though it might be his necessary duty as a citizen; his real religion, as we understand it, was his reverence for Plato or Zeno. Athens to him was not only what Athens, but what the Holy Land is to us. Cicero describes something of this feeling in the following passage: "We had been listening to Antiochus (a teacher of the Academics) in the school called the Ptolemaeus, where he was wont to lecture. Marcus Piso was with me, and my brother Quintus, and Atticus, and Lucius Cicero, by relationship a cousin, in affection a brother. We agreed among ourselves to finish our afternoon walk in the Academy, chiefly because that place was sure not to be crowded at that hour. At the proper time we met at Piso's house; thence, occupied with varied talk, we traversed the six furlongs that lie between the Double Gate and the Academy; and entering the walls which can give such good reason for their fame, found there the solitude which we sought. 'Is it,' said Piso, 'by some natural instinct or through some delusion that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written? It is thus that I am affected at this moment. I think of Plato, who was, we are told, the first who lectured in this place; his little garden which lies there close at hand seems not only to remind me of him, but actually to bring him up before my eyes. Here spake Speusippus, here Xenocrates, here his disciple Polemo—to Polemo indeed belonged this seat which we have before us.'" This was the Polemo who had been converted, as we should say, when, bursting in after a night of revel upon a lecture in which Xenocrates was discoursing of temperance, he listened to such purpose that from that moment he became a changed man. Then Atticus describes how he found the same charms of association in the garden which had belonged to his own master, Epicurus; while Quintus Cicero supplies what we should call the classical element by speaking of Sophocles and the grove of Colonus, still musical, it seems, with the same song of the nightingale which had charmed the ear of the poet more than three centuries before.
One or other, perhaps more than one, of these famous places the young Cicero frequented. He probably witnessed,