We know something of the university buildings, so to speak, which the young Cicero found at Athens.  “To seek for truth among the groves of Academus” is the phrase by which a more famous contemporary, the poet Horace, describes his studies at Athens.  He probably uses it generally to express philosophical pursuits; taken strictly it would mean that he attached himself to the sage whose pride it was to be the successor of Plato.  Academus was a local hero, connected with the legend of Theseus and Helen.  Near his grove, or sacred inclosure, which adjoined the road to Eleusis, Plato had bought a garden.  It was but a small spot, purchased for a sum which maybe represented by about three or four hundred pounds of our money, but it had been enlarged by the liberality of successive benefactors.  This then was one famous lecture-room.  Another was the Lyceum.  Here Aristotle had taught, and after Aristotle, Theophrastus, and after him, a long succession of thinkers of the same school.  A third institution of the same kind was the garden in which Epicurus had assembled his disciples, and which he bequeathed to trustees for their benefit and the benefit of their successors for all time.

To a Roman of the nobler sort these gardens and buildings must have been as holy places.  It was with these rather than with the temples of gods that he connected what there was of goodness and purity in his life.  To worship Jupiter or Romulus did not make him a better man, though it might be his necessary duty as a citizen; his real religion, as we understand it, was his reverence for Plato or Zeno.  Athens to him was not only what Athens, but what the Holy Land is to us.  Cicero describes something of this feeling in the following passage:  “We had been listening to Antiochus (a teacher of the Academics) in the school called the Ptolemaeus, where he was wont to lecture.  Marcus Piso was with me, and my brother Quintus, and Atticus, and Lucius Cicero, by relationship a cousin, in affection a brother.  We agreed among ourselves to finish our afternoon walk in the Academy, chiefly because that place was sure not to be crowded at that hour.  At the proper time we met at Piso’s house; thence, occupied with varied talk, we traversed the six furlongs that lie between the Double Gate and the Academy; and entering the walls which can give such good reason for their fame, found there the solitude which we sought.  ‘Is it,’ said Piso, ’by some natural instinct or through some delusion that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written?  It is thus that I am affected at this moment.  I think of Plato, who was, we are told, the first who lectured in this place; his little garden which lies there close at hand seems not only to remind me of him, but actually to bring him up before my eyes.  Here spake Speusippus, here Xenocrates, here his disciple