same year as Pompey. His father was of the Equestrian order, and
lived upon his hereditary estate near Arpinum, but none of his ancestors
had ever held any of the offices of state. Cicero was therefore,
according to the Roman phraseology, a New Man (see p. 128)(Fourth
paragraph of Chapter XVIII.--Transcriber). He served his first and only
campaign in the Social War (B.C. 89), and in the troubled times which
followed he gave himself up with indefatigable perseverance to those
studies which were essential to his success as a lawyer and orator. When
tranquillity was restored by the final discomfiture of the Marian party,
he came forward as a pleader at the age of twenty-five. The first of his
extant speeches in a civil suit is that for P. Quintius (B.C. 81); the
first delivered upon a criminal trial was that in defense of Sex.
Roscius of Ameria, who was charged with parricide by Chrysogonus, a
freedman of Sulla, supported, as it was understood, by the influence of
his patron. In consequence of the failure of his health, Cicero quitted
Rome in B.C. 79, and spent two years in study in the philosophical and
rhetorical schools of Athens and Asia Minor. On his return to the city
he forthwith took his station in the foremost rank of judicial orators,
and ere long stood alone in acknowledged pre-eminence; his most
formidable rivals--Hortensius, eight years his senior, and C. Aurelius
Cotta, who had long been kings of the bar--having been forced, after a
short but sharp contest for supremacy, to yield.

Cicero's reputation and popularity already stood so high that he was
elected Quaestor (B.C. 76), although, comparatively speaking, a stranger,
and certainly unsupported by any powerful family interest. He served in
Sicily under Sex. Peducaeus, Praetor of Lilybaeum. In B.C. 70 he gained
great renown by his impeachment of Verres for his oppression of the
Sicilians, whom he had ruled as Praetor of Syracuse for the space of
three years (B.C. 73-71). The most strenuous exertions were made by
Verres, backed by some of the most powerful families, to wrest the case
out of the hands of Cicero, who, however, defeated the attempt, and
having demanded and been allowed 110 days for the purpose of collecting
evidence, he instantly set out for Sicily, which he traversed in less
than two months, and returned attended by all the necessary witnesses.
Another desperate effort was made by Hortensius, now Consul elect, who
was counsel for the defendant