And yet such was the marvelous activity, the all-sided productiveness, of the Ciceronian intellect, that perhaps no human mind has ever so fully exploited all its powers. Moreover, in each intellectual field which he entered, the chances of time have removed nearly every Roman rival, leaving us no choice save to accept Cicero's guidance. There was many another orator, and history of eloquence. There were other practical treatises on rhetoric. Many a notable correspondence was actually preserved and published, though now lost. Even his free transcriptions from Greek philosophical treatises--hastily conned and perhaps imperfectly understood--have acquired, through the disappearance of the Greek scrolls themselves, an ill-deserved authority as to the tenets of the Epicurean and other schools. Before and above all else, Cicero was a pleader. Out of that activity grew his ill-starred political activity, while his other literary tastes were essentially but a solace in times of enforced retirement. With the discussion of his oratory, therefore, we may best combine a rapid outline of his life. By their common birthplace, Arpinum, and by a slight tie of kinship, Cicero was associated with Marius; and he began life, like Disraeli, with radical sympathies. He was the elder son of a wealthy Roman citizen, but no ancestor had ennobled the family by attaining curule office. After a most thorough course of training in Latin and Greek, Cicero began to "practice law." The pleader in ancient Rome was supposed to receive no fee, and even more than with us, found his profession the natural stepping-stone to political honors. At the age of twenty-six, Cicero (in 80 B.C.) defended his first important client in a criminal case. In the closing days of the Sullan proscriptions, young Roscius, of Ameria in Umbria, was charged with murdering his own father in Rome. A pair of Roscius's kinsmen were probably the real culprits, and had arranged with Chrysogonus, a wealthy freedman and favorite of the Dictator, to insert the dead man's name among the outlawed victims and to divide the confiscated estate. The son was persecuted because he resisted this second outrage. Cicero says he is himself protected by his obscurity, though no other advocate has dared to plead for the unlucky youth. In our present text there are some audacious words aimed at Sulla's own measures: they were probably sharpened in a later revision. The case was won, against general expectation. Cicero may have played the hero that day: certainly the brief remainder of Sulla's life was spent by the young democratic pleader traveling in the East,--"for his health," as Plutarch adds, truly enough. At this time his style was chastened and his manner moderated by the teachers of Athens, and especially by Molo in Rhodes.