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, he possibly took part (for
strangers were admitted to membership) in, the celebrations with which
the college of Athenian youths (Ephebi) commemorated the glories of
their city, the procession to the tombs of those who died at Marathon,
and the boat-races in the Bay of Salamis. That he gave his father some
trouble is only too certain. His private tutor in rhetoric, as we should
call him, was a certain Gorgias, a man of ability, and a writer of some
note, but a worthless and profligate fellow. Cicero peremptorily ordered
his son to dismiss him; and the young man seems to have obeyed and
reformed. We may hope at least that the repentance which he expresses
for his misdoings in a letter to Tiro, his father's freedman, was
genuine.