A short time before one of Cicero’s friends had sent a satisfactory report of the young man’s behavior to his father.  “I found your son devoted to the most laudable studies and enjoying an excellent reputation for steadiness.  Don’t fancy, my dear Cicero, that I say this to please you; there is not in Athens a more lovable young man than your son, nor one more devoted to those high pursuits in which you would have him interested.”

Among the contemporaries of the young Cicero was, as has been said, the poet Horace.  His had been a more studious boyhood.  He had not been taken away from his books to serve as a cavalry officer under Pompey.  In him accordingly we see the regular course of the studies of a Roman lad.  “It was my lot,” he says, “to be bred up at Rome, and to be taught how much the wrath of Achilles harmed the Greeks.  In other words, he had read his Homer, just as an English boy reads him at Eton or Harrow.  “Kind Athens,” he goes on, “added a little more learning, to the end that I might be able to distinguish right from wrong, and to seek for truth amongst the groves of Academus.”  And just in the same way the English youth goes on to read philosophy at Oxford.

The studies of the two young men were interrupted by the same cause, the civil war which followed the death of Caesar.  They took service with Brutus, both having the same rank, that of military tribune, a command answering more or less nearly to that of colonel in our own army.  It was, however, mainly an ornamental rank, being bestowed sometimes by favor of the general in command, sometimes by a popular vote.  The young Cicero indeed had already served, and he now distinguished himself greatly, winning some considerable successes in the command of the cavalry which Brutus afterwards gave him.  When the hopes of the party were crushed at Phillippi, he joined the younger Pompey in Sicily; but took an opportunity of an amnesty which was offered four years afterwards to return to Rome.  Here he must have found his old fellow-student, who had also reconciled himself to the victorious party.  He was made one of the college of augurs, and also a commissioner of the mint, and in B.C. 30 he had the honour of sharing the consulship with Augustus himself.  It was to him that the dispatch announcing the final defeat and death of Antony was delivered; and it fell to him to execute the decree which ordered the destruction of all the statues of the fallen chief.  “Then,” says Plutarch, “by the ordering of heaven the punishment of Antony was inflicted at last by the house of Cicero.”  His time of office ended, he went as Governor to Asia, or, according to some accounts, to Syria; and thus disappears from our view.

Pliny the Elder tells us that he was a drunkard, sarcastically observing that he sought to avenge himself on Antony by robbing him of the reputation which he had before enjoyed of being the hardest drinker of the time.  As the story which he tells of the younger Cicero being able to swallow twelve pints of wine at a draught is clearly incredible, perhaps we may disbelieve the whole, and with it the other anecdote, that he threw a cup at the head of Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law to the Emperor, and after him the greatest man in Rome.