Roman life in the days of CiceroChurch, Alfred John
History
Roman life in the days of Cicero
Church, Alfred John
Rome -- Social life and customs
changing my style of speaking, I might both avert the danger that
threatened my health and also acquire a more self-controlled manner. It
was a resolve to break through the habits I had formed that induced me
to travel to the East. I had practiced for two years, and my name had
become well known when I left Rome. Coming to Athens I spent six months
with Antiochus, the most distinguished and learned philosopher of the
Old Academy, than whom there was no wiser or more famous teacher. At the
same time I practiced myself diligently under the care of Demetrius
Syrus, an old and not undistinguished master of eloquence." To Athens,
then, Cicero always looked back with affection. He hears, for instance,
that Appius is going to build a portico at Eleusis. "Will you think me a
fool," he writes to Atticus, "if I do the same at the Academy? 'I think
so,' you will say. But I love Athens, the very place, much; and I shall
be glad to have some memorial of me there."
The new undergraduate, as we should call him, was to have a liberal
allowance. "He shall have as much as Publilius, as much as Lentulus the
Flamen, allow their sons." It would be interesting to know the amount,
but unhappily this cannot be recovered. All that we know is that the
richest young men in Rome were not to have more. "I will guarantee,"
writes this liberal father, "that none of the three young men [whom he
names] who, I hear, will be at Athens at the same time shall live at
more expense than he will be able to do on those rents." These "rents"
were the incomings from certain properties at Rome. "Only," he adds, "I
do not think he will want a horse."
We know something of the university buildings, so to speak, which the
young Cicero found at Athens. "To seek for truth among the groves of
Academus" is the phrase by which a more famous contemporary, the poet
Horace, describes his studies at Athens. He probably uses it generally
to express philosophical pursuits; taken strictly it would mean that he
attached himself to the sage whose pride it was to be the successor of
Plato. Academus was a local hero, connected with the legend of Theseus
and Helen. Near his grove, or sacred inclosure, which adjoined the road
to Eleusis, Plato had bought a garden. It was but a small spot,
purchased for a sum which maybe represented by about three or four
hundred pounds of our money, but it had been enlarged by the liberality
of successive benefactors. This then was one famous lecture-room.
Another was the Lyceum. Here Aristotle had taught, and after Aristotle,
Theophrastus, and after him, a long succession of thinkers of the same
school. A third institution of the same kind was the garden in which
Epicurus had assembled his disciples, and which he bequeathed to
trustees for their benefit and the benefit of their successors for all
time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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