or his proposed career, he read logic
with Diodotus the Stoic, studied the action of Esop and Roscius--then the
stars of the Roman stage--declaimed aloud like Demosthenes in private,
made copious notes, practised translation in order to form a written
style, and read hard day and night. He trained severely as an intellectual
athlete; and if none of his contemporaries attained such splendid success,
perhaps none worked so hard for it. He made use, too, of certain special
advantages which were open to him--little appreciated, or at least seldom
acknowledged, by the men of his day--the society and conversation of
elegant and accomplished women. In Scaevola's domestic circle, where the
mother, the daughters, and the grand-daughters successively seem to have
been such charming talkers that language found new graces from their lips,
the young advocate learnt some of his not least valuable lessons. "It
makes no little difference", said he in his riper years, "what style of
expression one becomes familiar with in the associations of daily life".
It was another point of resemblance between the age of Cicero and the
times in which we live--the influence of the "queens of society", whether
for good or evil.

[Footnote 1: These _dicta_, or 'opinions', of the great jurists,
acquired a sort of legal validity in the Roman law-courts, like 'cases'
with us.]

But no man could be completely educated for a public career at Rome until
he had been a soldier. By what must seem to us a mistake in the Republican
system--a mistake which we have seen made more than once in the late
American war--high political offices were necessarily combined with
military command. The highest minister of state, consul or praetor,
however hopelessly civilian in tastes and antecedents, might be sent to
conduct a campaign in Italy or abroad at a few hours' notice. If a man was
a heaven-born general, all went well; if not, he had usually a chance of
learning in the school of defeat. It was desirable, at all events, that he
should have seen what war was in his youth. Young Cicero served his first
campaign, at the age of eighteen, under the father of a man whom he was to
know only too well in after life--Pompey the Great--and in the division of
the army which was commanded by Sylla as lieutenant-general. He bore arms
only for a year or two, and probably saw no very arduous service, or we
should certainly have beard of it from himself; and he never was in camp
again