,
enjoying their willing assistance." There is more of it, which need not
be repeated verbatim, giving the names of those who aided him in Asia:
Menippus of Stratonice--who, he says, was sweet enough to have belonged
himself to Athens--with Dionysius of Magnesia, with [OE]schilus of Cnidos,
and with Xenocles of Adramyttium. Then at Rhodes he came across his old
friend Molo, and applied himself again to the teaching of his former
master. Quintilian explains to us how this was done with a purpose, so
that the young orator, when he had made a first attempt with his
half-fledged wings in the courts, might go back to his masters for
awhile[46].

He was twenty-eight when he started on this tour. It has been suggested
that he did so in fear of the resentment of Sulla, with whose favorites
and with whose practices he had dealt very plainly. There is no reason
for alleging this, except that Sulla was powerful, that Sulla was
blood-thirsty, and that Sulla must have been offended. This kind of
argument is often used. It is supposed to be natural, or at least
probable, that in a certain position a man should have been a coward or
a knave, ungrateful or cruel; and in the presumption thus raised the
accusation is brought against him. "Fearing Sulla's resentment,"
Plutarch says, "he travelled into Greece, and gave out that the recovery
of his health was the motive." There is no evidence that such was his
reason for travelling; and, as Middleton says in his behalf, it is
certain that he "continued for a year after this in Rome without any
apprehension of danger." It is best to take a man's own account of his
own doings and their causes, unless there be ground for doubting the
statement made. It is thus that Cicero himself speaks of his journey:
"Now," he says, still in his Brutus[47], "as you wish to know what I
am--not simply what mark I may have on my body from my birth, or with
what surroundings of childhood I was brought up--I will include some
details which might perhaps seem hardly necessary. At this time I was
thin and weak, my neck being long and narrow--a habit and form of body
which is supposed to be adverse to long life; and those who loved me
thought the more of this, because I had taken to speaking without
relaxation, without recreation with all the powers of my voice, and with
much muscular action. When my friends and the doctors desired me to give
up speaking, I resolved that, rather than abandon my career as an
orator,