it was with them. The old state of things--that
oligarchy which has been called a Republic--had made Rome what it was;
had produced power, civilization, art, and literature. It had enabled
such a one as Cicero was himself to aspire to lead, though he had been
humbly born, and had come to Rome from an untried provincial family. To
him the Republic--as he fancied that it had been, as he fancied that it
might be--was all that was good, all that was gracious, all that was
beneficent. On Sulla's side lay what chance there was of returning to
the old ways. When Sulla was declared Dictator, it was presumed that the
Republic was restored. But not on this account should it be supposed
that Cicero regarded the proscriptions of Sulla with favor, or that he
was otherwise than shocked by the wholesale robberies for which the
proscription paved the way. This is a matter with which it will be
necessary to deal more fully when we come in our next chapter to the
first speeches made by Cicero; in the very first of which, as I place
them, he attacks the Sullan robberies with an audacity which, when we
remember that Sulla was still in power, rescues, at any rate, in regard
to this period of his life, the character of the orator from that charge
of cowardice which has been imputed to him.

It is necessary here, in this chapter devoted to the education of
Cicero, to allude to his two first speeches, because that education was
not completed till afterward--so that they may be regarded as
experiments, or trials, as it were, of his force and sufficiency. "Not
content with these teachers"--teachers who had come to Rome from Greece
and Asia--"he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to embrace
the whole world of art." These words, quoted a few pages back from the
treatise attributed to Tacitus, refer to a passage in the Brutus in
which Cicero makes a statement to that effect. "When I reached
Athens,[45] I passed six months with Antiochus, by far the best known
and most erudite of the teachers of the old Academy, and with him, as my
great authority and master, I renewed that study of philosophy which I
had never abandoned--which from my boyhood I had followed with always
increasing success. At the same time I practised oratory laboriously
with Demetrius Syrus, also at Athens, a well-known and by no means
incapable master of the art of speaking. After that I wandered over all
Asia, and came across the best orators there, with whom I practised