and his voice required careful management; and the loud declamation and
vehement action which he had adopted from his models--and which were
necessary conditions of success in the large arena in which a Roman
advocate had to plead--he found very hard work. He left Rome for a while,
and retired for rest and change to Athens.

The six months which he spent there, though busy and studious, must have
been very pleasant ones. To one like Cicero, Athens was at once classic
and holy ground. It combined all those associations and attractions which
we might now expect to find in a visit to the capitals of Greece and
of Italy, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Poetry, rhetoric, philosophy,
religion--all, to his eyes, had their cradle there. It was the home of
all that was literature to him; and there, too, were the great Eleusinian
mysteries--which are mysteries still, but which contained under their
veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an
enlightened pagan. There can be little doubt but that Cicero took this
opportunity of initiation. His brother Quintus and one of his cousins were
with him at Athens; and in that city he also renewed his acquaintance with
an old school-fellow, Titus Pomponius, who lived so long in the city, and
became so thoroughly Athenian in his tastes and habits, that he is better
known to us, as he was to his contemporaries, by the surname of Atticus,
which was given him half in jest, than by his more sonorous Roman name. It
is to the accidental circumstance of Atticus remaining so long a voluntary
exile from Rome, and to the correspondence which was maintained
between the two friends, with occasional intervals, for something like
four-and-twenty years, that we are indebted for a more thorough insight
into the character of Cicero than we have as to any other of the great
minds of antiquity; nearly four hundred of his letters to Atticus, written
in all the familiar confidence of private friendship by a man by no
means reticent as to his personal feelings, having been preserved to us.