es, though he did not
conquer him. With the purport, no doubt, of conquering Mithridates, but
perhaps with the stronger object of getting him out of Rome, the army
had been intrusted to him, with the consent of the Marian faction.

Then came those three years, when Sulla was in the East and Marius dead,
of which Cicero speaks as a period of peace, in which a student was able
to study in Rome. "Triennium fere fuit urbs sine armis."[41] These must
have been the years 86, 85, and 84 before Christ, when Cicero was
twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old; and it was this
period, in truth, of which he speaks, and not of earlier years, when he
tells us of his studies with Philo, and Molo, and Diodatus. Precocious
as he was in literature, writing one poem--or translating it--when he
was fourteen, and another when he was eighteen, he was by no means in a
hurry to commence the work of his life. He is said also to have written
a treatise on military tactics when he was nineteen; which again, no
doubt, means that he had exercised himself by translating such an essay
from the Greek. This, happily, does not remain. But we have four books,
Rhetoricorum ad C. Herennium, and two books De Inventione, attributed to
his twentieth and twenty-first years, which are published with his
works, and commence the series. Of all that we have from him, they are
perhaps the least worth reading; but as they are, or were, among his
recognized writings, a word shall be said of them in their proper place.

The success of the education of Cicero probably became a commonplace
among Latin school-masters and Latin writers. In the dialogue De
Oratoribus, attributed to Tacitus, the story of it is given by Messala
when he is praising the orators of the earlier age. "We know well," says
Messala, "that book of Cicero which is called Brutus, in the latter part
of which he describes to us the beginning and the progress of his own
eloquence, and, as it were, the bringing up on which it was founded. He
tells us that he had learned civil law under Q. Mutius Scaevola; that he
had exhausted the realm of philosophy--learning that of the Academy
under Philo, and that of the Stoics under Diodatus; that, not content
with these treatises, he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to
embrace the whole world of art. And thus it had come about that in the
works of Cicero no knowledge is wanting--neither of music, nor of
grammar, nor any other liberal accomplish