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 until he took the chief command, thirty-seven years afterwards, as pro-consul in Cilicia.  He was at Rome, leading a quiet student-life—­happily for himself, too young to be forced or tempted into an active part—­during the bloody feuds between Sylla and the younger Marius.

He seems to have made his first appearance as an advocate when he was about twenty-five, in some suit of which we know nothing.  Two years afterwards he undertook his first defence of a prisoner on a capital charge, and secured by his eloquence the acquittal of Sextus Roscius on an accusation of having murdered his father.  The charge appears to have been a mere conspiracy, wholly unsupported by evidence; but the accuser was a favourite with Sylla, whose power was all but absolute; and the innocence of the accused was a very insufficient protection before a Roman jury of those days.  What kind of considerations, besides the merits of the case and the rhetoric of counsel, did usually sway these tribunals, we shall see hereafter.  In consequence of this decided success, briefs came in upon the young pleader almost too quickly.  Like many other successful orators, he had to combat some natural deficiencies; he had inherited from his father a somewhat delicate constitution; his lungs were not powerful, and his voice required careful management; and the loud declamation and vehement action which he had adopted from his models—­and which were necessary conditions of success in the large arena in which a Roman advocate had to plead—­he found very hard work.  He left Rome for a while, and retired for rest and change to Athens.