“Athenians are here to-day, amongst whom civilisation, learning, religion, agriculture, public law and justice, had their birth, and whence they have been disseminated over all the world:  for the possession of whose city, on account of its exceeding beauty, even gods are said to have contended:  which is of such antiquity, that she is said to have bred her citizens within herself, and the same soil is termed at once their mother, their nurse, and their country:  whose importance and influence is such that the name of Greece, though it has lost much of its weight and power, still holds its place by virtue of the renown of this single city”.

He had forgotten, perhaps, as an orator is allowed to forget, that in the very same speech, when his object was to discredit the accusers of his client, he had said, what was very commonly said of the Greeks at Rome, that they were a nation of liars.  There were excellent men among them, he allowed—­thinking at the moment of the counter-evidence which he had ready for the defendant—­but he goes on to make this sweeping declaration: 

“I will say this of the whole race of the Greeks:  I grant them literary genius, I grant them skill in various accomplishments, I do not deny them elegance in conversation, acuteness of intellect, fluent oratory; to any other high qualities they may claim I make no objection:  but the sacred obligation that lies upon a witness to speak the truth is what that nation has never regarded".[1]

[Footnote 1:  Defence of Val.  Flaccus, c. 4.]

There was a certain proverb, he went on to say, “Lend me your evidence”, implying—­“and you shall have mine when you want it;” a Greek proverb, of course, and men knew these three words of Greek who knew no Greek besides.  What he loved in the Greeks, then, was rather the grandeur of their literature and the charm of their social qualities (a strict regard for truth is, unhappily, no indispensable ingredient in this last); he had no respect whatever for their national character.  The orator was influenced, perhaps, most of all by his intense reverence for the Athenian Demosthenes, whom, as a master in his art, he imitated and well-nigh worshipped.  The appreciation of his own powers which every able man has, and of which Cicero had at least his share, fades into humility when he comes to speak of his great model.  “Absolutely perfect”, he calls him in one place; and again in another, “What I have attempted, Demosthenes has achieved”.  Yet he felt also at times, when the fervour of genius was strong within him, that there was an ideal of eloquence enshrined in his own inmost mind, “which I can feel”, he says, “but which I never knew to exist in any man”.

He could not only write Greek as a scholar, but seems to have spoken it with considerable ease and fluency; for on one occasion he made a speech in that language, a condescension which some of his friends thought derogatory to the dignity of a Roman.