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