was the same. They thought that the effect of their oratory would be lessened before a Roman audience if they were supposed to be admirers of a nation whom their countrymen so thoroughly despised. Crassus therefore took care to vaunt his preference for everything Roman, while Antonius thought the safer plan would be to have it supposed that he was wholly ignorant of the exotic article.

There were two schools-we may almost call them parties -of education at Rome in those days. The one was the Latin, the other the Greek school.1 The first who opened a school for instruction in Latin literature there was Lucius Plautius, about the time when young Cicero removed from Arpinum to the capital, and he wished to become a student at his lectures, which were well attended. But he reluctantly yielded to the advice of friends, who thought that he had better devote himself exclusively to Greek. Perhaps the wiser plan would have been to allow a boy of such industry and aptitude to study both; but if the choice lay between the two, beyond all doubt they acted rightly in giving preference to Greek, for Latin literature was then still in its infancy, and the language had not been enriched by the prose of Cicero, Sallust, Varro, and Livy, and by the poetry of Lucretius, Virgil, Catullus, and Horace. The only Latin poets who had then written were Pacuvius, Nævius, and Ennius, and the only Latin histories were the dry and meagre annals of Fabius Pictor, Calpurnius Piso, and others.

Greek, however, had become at this time the fashionable study at Rome, and occupied something of the same position in a course of education that French does amongst ourselves. And Cicero tells us that the language was cultivated in Latium, or, as we should say, in the provinces, even more zealously than in the capital. It was considered the accomplishment of a gentleman, and Greek phrases and

1 About half-a-century before Cicero was boin the Senate passed a resolution banishing philosophers and rhetoricians from Rome. The then censors brought the subject again under the notice of the Senate, saying that men who called them selves "Latin rhetoricians " had introduced a new kind of learning, and their schools were frequented by young men

who idled away their time there for whole days together (ibi homines adolescentulos dies totos desidere). They declared that they did not like the novelty, and called on the Senate to mark its displeasure against both teachers and pupils. They were ordered to shut up their "schools of impudence" (ludum impudentiæ). De Orat. iii. 24.

B.C. 106-91.

INTIMACY WITH ARCHIAS.

9

Greek quotations were everywhere current in good society. Even the sturdy Cato the Censor, who despised the nation and their effeminate character, and who had deemed their literature beneath the attention of a Roman, at last gave way to the prevailing Græco-mania, and, according to a wellknown story, applied himself in extreme old age to the study of the language.) Cicero, as might be expected from his exquisite taste, was passionately fond of Greek literature; and his letters abound in expressions and quotations which prove his intimate familiarity with the rich treasures it contains. One practical reason for learning that language thoroughly was, that he might be able to converse with his Greek teachers, who seem to have been able to speak Latin only imperfectly, and in some cases perhaps not at all. Phædrus, the Epicurean, was one of his instructors, and he speaks of him in terms of peculiar regard.

He was a

He became also a pupil of the poet Archias. Greek who had come to Rome from Antioch when Cicero was five years old, and, according to the usual custom of those days, resided in the house of a Roman patron, the wealthy Lucullus. His reputation as a poet depends exclusively on the speech which Cicero in later years delivered in defence of his former teacher and friend, for not a line of his verses has been preserved; but we know that he composed laudatory poems in honour of some of the noble. families of Rome.

His intimacy with Archias may have awakened in Cicero the desire to be himself also a poet. We are told by Plutarch that when very young he composed a poem called Pontius Glaucus, the hero of which was a fisherman of Boeotia, who, having eaten a certain plant, went mad and sprang into the sea, where he was changed into a sea-god, the place from which he made the fatal spring being afterwards known as the Glaucus-leap. He translated also into Latin verse two Greek poems on astronomy or subjects connected with that science-the Phænomena and Prognostica, or Diosemeia of Aratus, whose works were very popular at Rome. Although he had not the poetic faculty in the proper sense of the word, and frankly acknowledged this himself, he had great facility in the composition of

verses, and amused himself with it at different periods of his life. Some of his productions were long poems, such as the Marius, which seems to have been written during the life of that hero,' and was an epic celebration of his life and exploits; and the poems on his Consulship (de suo Consulatu) and his own Times (de suis Temporibus). It was in one of these, most probably the Consulship, that the unfortunate lines occurred,

and,

Cedant arma togæ, concedat laurea laudi,2

O fortunatum natam me consule Romam !

the jingle of which provoked the ridicule of Juvenal, Quintilian, and Seneca, as well as of the wits of his own day, who were never tired of laughing at him for them, and his enemies took care that nobody should forget them. He however clung to them with true parental fondness for a deformed offspring; and in his treatise De Officiis calls the verse beginning Cedant arma toga "a capital line which I hear is attacked by the wicked and the envious." He must have heard of it often enough. Of his poem on Marius Quintus Mucius Scævola the Augur had such a favourable opinion, that in some complimentary lines he declared that it would endure for endless ages, saying, "Canescet sæclis innumerabilibus." But the old lawyer was neither a poet

nor a prophet.

When Rousseau once sent to Voltaire a copy of an ode addressed to Posterity, the sneering critic wittily remarked, Voici une lettre qui n'arrivera jamais à son adresse, and Cicero's epic has met with a similar fate. Both Plutarch and Pliny the younger lavish panegyrics upon his poetry, and Middleton goes so far as to declare that the fragments that time has spared us "are sufficient to convince us that his poetical genius, if it had been cultivated with the same care, would not have been inferior to his oratorical." He adds that "the world always judges of things by compari

1 Drumann (Gesch. Roms, v. 221) ingeniously fixes the date of this poem as B.C. 87, when Cicero therefore was nineteen years old.

2 Plutarch renders laudi by ry VλŵTTY,

so that probably one version of the line was concedat laurea linguæ, which expresses more distinctly the meaning that military is inferior to civil glory. But there is more of alliterative jingle in the laurea laudi.

ÆT. 1-16.

REPUTATION AS A POET.

I I

son, and because he was not so great a poet as Virgil and Horace, he was decried as none at all." But Middleton is as extravagant in his praise as Cicero's detractors were unjust in their censure. He never could have been a great poet, for he had not the divinus afflatus, so finely expressed by Ovid in the line

Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo !

without which there is no real poetry; and he knew it, frankly confessing that his brother Quintus would have made a much better poet than himself. But he had a decided talent for vigorous versification, and the specimens that we find scattered amongst his writings show that he was far superior in point of style and harmony, in choice of diction and facility of expression, to the poets who had hitherto written in the Latin language. Their compositions are full of the most uncouth barbarisms, from which Cicero's poetical works appear to have been wholly free, and I do not doubt that Roman poetry was indebted to him in no slight degree for the advance it made in the hands of Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. It was no small service to weed away such monstrous words and expressions as deface the writings of Pacuvius, Nævius, Attius, and Ennius, who were the authors most in vogue when Cicero first exercised his youthful genius in the art of poetical composition.1

At the age of sixteen, according to the custom of the Roman youth, Cicero was with the usual ceremonies brought before the Prætor in the Forum; and there, in his presence, he formally laid aside the toga prætexta, his boyish dress, and assumed the toga pura or virilis, which indicated that he had arrived at the age of adolescence, and was introduced

into public life. This, however, did not imply that his education was finished, any more than in the case of the change of dress so dear to an English boy when he assumes the dignity of a coat instead of a jacket; and Ovid expressly tells us, with reference to such an occasion

Et studium nobis, quod fuit ante manet.

The change, however, in the case of a Roman boy was much more serious and important. It showed that he had reached an age when he might engage in the active business of life -the precise period when he began to do so of course varying according to his temperament and abilities. The toga prætexta which he had hitherto worn was a white robe with a coloured border, which was also the dress of the Roman magistrates, as distinguished from the plain robe which was worn by unofficial persons, and called the toga pura. And it is impossible not to notice the significance of the costume. The embroidered robe was symbolical of success in the struggle of life, and of the attainment of rank and station in the republic. We may well believe that the boy was clothed in it as a sort of uniform to awaken in his mind the stirrings of ambition, and point out the path to future eminence.

The custom was for the young man to be conducted by his father or other near relation to the Forum, when he was presented to the Prætor, whose tribunal or court was there, and the ceremony of change of dress was performed. He then received the congratulations of his relatives and friends who accompanied him, amidst the applause of the surrounding crowd; for there never was any lack of idlers in the Forum, and, indeed, so numerous were they, that old Cato the Censor once proposed that the ground should be paved with sharp stones to make it a less agreeable lounge. After this the youth was conducted along the Via Sacra, which ran through the Forum up to the Capitol, and a sacrifice was offered at the altar of Jupiter, whose magnificent temple crowned the hill. The rest of the day was spent in festivities at home; and the hero of the hour, now no longer a boy but a man, received presents as on a birthday amongst ourselves.