ith a technical point of law and has little literary merit. In the
following year he made his celebrated defence of Sextus Roscius on a
charge of parricide. He subsequently defended a woman of Arretium, whose
freedom was impugned on the ground that Sulla had confiscated the
territory of that town. Cicero then left Rome on account of his health,
and travelled for two years in the East. He studied philosophy at Athens
under various teachers, notably Antiochus of Ascalon, founder of the Old
Academy, a combination of Stoicism, Platonism and Peripateticism. In
Asia he attended the courses of Xenocles, Dionysius and Menippus, and in
Rhodes those of Posidonius, the famous Stoic. In Rhodes also he studied
rhetoric once more under Molo, to whom he ascribes a decisive influence
upon the development of his literary style. He had previously affected
the florid, or Asiatic, style of oratory then current in Rome. The chief
faults of this were excess of ornament, antithesis, alliteration and
assonance, monotony of rhythm, and the insertion of words purely for
rhythmical effect. Molo, he says, rebuked his youthful extravagance and
he came back "a changed man."[1]

He returned to Rome in 77 B.C., and appears to have married at this time
Terentia, a rich woman with a domineering temper, to whom many of his
subsequent embarrassments were due.[2] He engaged at once in forensic
and political life. He was quaestor in 75, and was sent to Lilybaeum to
supervise the corn supply. His connexion with Sicily led him to come
forward in 70 B.C., when curule-aedile elect, to prosecute Gaius Verres,
who had oppressed the island for three years. Cicero seldom prosecuted,
but it was the custom at Rome for a rising politician to win his spurs
by attacking a notable offender (_pro Caelio_, 73). In the following
year he defended Marcus (or Manius) Fonteius on a charge of extortion in
Gaul, using various arguments which might equally well have been
advanced on behalf of Verres himself.

In 68 B.C. his letters begin, from which (and especially those to T.
Pomponius Atticus, his "second self") we obtain wholly unique knowledge
of Roman life and history. In 66 B.C. he was praetor, and was called
upon to hear cases of extortion. In the same year he spoke on behalf of
the proposal of Gaius Manilius to transfer the command against
Mithradates from Lucullus to Pompey (_de Lege Manilia_), and delivered
his clever but disingenuous defence of Aulus Cluentius (_pro Clu