An industrious man, especially in winter, when this want of artificial light made time most valuable, would often begin his work before daylight; he might have a speech to prepare for the senate, or a brief for a trial, or letters to write, and, as we shall see, as soon as the sun had well risen it was not likely that he would be altogether his own master.  Thus we find Cicero on a February morning writing to his brother before sunrise,[417] and it is not unlikely that the soreness of the eyes of which he sometimes complains may have been the result of reading and writing before the light was good.  In his country villas he could do as he liked, but at Rome he knew that he would have the “turba salutantium” upon him as soon as the sun had risen.  Cicero is the only man of his own time of whose habits we know much, but in the next generation Horace describes himself as calling for pen and paper before daylight, and later on that insatiable student the elder Pliny would work for hours before daylight, and then go to the Emperor Vespasian, who was also a very early riser.[418] After sunrise the whole population was astir; boys were on their way to school, and artisans to their labour.

If Horace is not exaggerating when he says (Sat. i. 1. 10) that the barrister might be disturbed by a client at cock-crow, Cicero’s studies may have been interrupted even before the crowds came; but this could hardly happen often.  As a rule it was during the first two hours (mane) that callers collected.  In the old times it had been the custom to open your house and begin your business at daybreak, and after saluting your familia and asking a blessing of the household gods, to attend to your own affairs and those of your clients.[419] Although we are not told so explicitly, we must suppose that the same practice held good in Cicero’s time; under the Empire it is familiar to all readers of Seneca or Martial, but in a form which was open to much criticism and satire.  The client of the Empire was a degraded being; of the client in the last age of the Republic we only know that he existed, and could be useful to his patronus in many ways,—­in elections and trials especially;[420] but we do not hear of his pressing himself on the attention of his patron every morning, or receiving any “sportula.”  All the same, the number of persons, whether clients in this sense or in the legal sense, or messengers, men of business, and ordinary callers, who would want to see a man like Cicero before he left his house in the morning, would beyond doubt be considerable.  Otherwise they would have to catch him in the street or Forum; and though occasionally a man of note might purposely walk in public in order to give his clients their chance, Cicero makes it plain that this was not his way.[421]