Young Cicero went through the regular curriculum—­grammar, rhetoric, and the Greek poets and historians.  Like many other youthful geniuses, he wrote a good deal of poetry of his own, which his friends, as was natural, thought very highly of at the time, and of which he himself retained the same good opinion to the end of his life, as would have been natural to few men except Cicero.  But his more important studies began after he had assumed the ‘white gown’ which marked the emergence of the young Roman from boyhood into more responsible life—­at sixteen years of age.  He then entered on a special education for the bar.  It could scarcely be called a profession, for an advocate’s practice at Rome was gratuitous; but it was the best training for public life;—­it was the ready means, to an able and eloquent man, of gaining that popular influence which would secure his election in due course to the great magistracies which formed the successive steps to political power.  The mode of studying law at Rome bore a very considerable resemblance to the preparation for the English bar.  Our modern law-student purchases his admission to the chambers of some special pleader or conveyancer, where he is supposed to learn his future business by copying precedents and answering cases, and he also attends the public lectures at the Inns of Court.  So at Rome the young aspirant was to be found (but at a much earlier hour than would suit the Temple or Lincoln’s Inn) in the open hall of some great jurist’s House, listening to his opinions given to the throng of clients who crowded there every morning; while his more zealous pupils would accompany him in his stroll in the Forum, and attend his pleadings in the courts or his speeches on the Rostra, either taking down upon their tablets, or storing in their memories, his dicta upon legal questions.[1] In such wise Cicero became the pupil of Mucius Scaevola, whose house was called “the oracle of Rome”—­scarcely ever leaving his side, as he himself expresses it; and after that great lawyer’s death, attaching himself in much the same way to a younger cousin of the same name and scarcely less reputation.  Besides this, to arm himself at all points for 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