At the age of twenty-five he thought himself qualified to appear before the world. The speech for Quintius, [3] delivered 81 B.C. is not his first, but it is one of his earliest. In it he appears as the opponent of Hortensius. At this time Sulla was all-powerful at Rome. He had crushed with pitiless ferocity the remnants of the Marian party; he had reinstated the senate in its privileges, abased the tribunate, checked the power of the knights, and still swayed public opinion by a rule of terror. In his twenty-seventh year, Cicero, by defending S. Roscius Amerinus, [4] exposed himself to the dictator's wrath. Roscius, whose accuser was Sulla's powerful freedman Chrysogonus, was, though innocent, in imminent danger of conviction, but Cicero's staunch courage and irresistible eloquence procured his acquittal. The effect of this speech was instantaneous; the young aspirant was at once ranked among the great orators of the day. In this speech we see Cicero espousing the popular side. The change which afterwards took place in his political conduct may perhaps be explained by his strong hatred on the one hand for personal domination, and by his enthusiasm on the other for the great traditions of the past. Averse by nature to all extremes, and ever disposed towards the weaker cause, he became a vacillating statesman, because his genius was literary not political, and because (being a scrupulously conscientious man, and without the inheritance of a family political creed to guide him) he found it hard to judge on which side right lay. The three crises of his life, his defence of Roscius, his contest with Catiline, and his resistance to Antony, were precisely the three occasions when no such doubts were possible, and on all these the conduct of Cicero, as well as his genius, shines with its brightest lustre. To the speech for Roscius, his first and therefore his boldest effort, he always looked back with justifiable pride, and drew from it perhaps in after life a spur to meet greater dangers, greater because experience enabled him to foresee them. [5] About this time Cicero's health began to fail from too constant study and over severe exertions in pleading. The tremendous calls on a Roman orator's physique must have prevented any but robust men from attaining eminence. The place where he spoke, girt as it was with the proudest monuments of imperial dominion, the assembled multitudes, the magnitude of the political issues on which in reality nearly every criminal trial turned, all these roused the spirit of the speaker to its utmost tension, and awoke a corresponding vehemence of action and voice.