cousins, the sons of Aculeo--the best
schools in the city.[2] The young Marcus shewed extraordinary ability
from the first, and that avidity for reading and study which never
forsook him. As a young man he diligently attended the chambers of
renowned jurisconsults, especially those of the elder and younger
Scaevola, Crassus, and Antonius, and soon found that his calling in life
was oratory. It was not till he was twenty-eight years old,
however--when he had already written much and pleaded many cases--that
he went on a visit of between two and three years to Greece, Asia, and
Rhodes, to study in the various schools of rhetoric and philosophy, and
to view their famous cities (B.C. 79-77). It was after his return from
this tour that his age (he was now thirty-one) made the seeking of
office at Rome possible. From that time his election to the several
offices--quaestorship, aedileship, praetorship, consulship--followed
without any repulse, each in the first year of his age at which he was
legally capable of being elected.

He had doubtless made the acquaintance of Titus Pomponius, afterwards
called Atticus, early in life. But it seems that it was their intimacy
at Athens (B.C. 79), where Atticus, who was three years his senior, had
been residing for several years, that began the very close and warm
friendship which lasted with nothing but the slightest and most passing
of clouds till his death. His brother Quintus was married to Pomponia, a
sister of Atticus; but the marriage turned out unfortunately, and was a
strain upon the friendship of Cicero and Atticus rather than an
additional bond. This source of uneasiness meets us in the very first
letter of the correspondence, and crops up again and again till the
final rupture of the ill-assorted union by divorce in B.C. 44. Nothing,
however, had apparently interrupted the correspondence of the two
friends, which had been going on for a long time before the first letter
which has been preserved.

[Sidenote: Cicero the successful Advocate.]

[Sidenote: Death of Cicero's Father.]

The eleven letters, then, which date before the consulship, shew us
Cicero in full career of success as an advocate and rising official,
not as yet apparently much interested in party politics, but with his
mind, in the intervals of forensic business, engaged on the adornment of
the new villa at Tusculum, the first of the numerous country residences
which his growing wealth or his heightened ideas