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