[Footnote: It was customary for youth in training for honorable
positions in the State to attach themselves especially to men of
established character and reputation, to attend them to public places,
and to remain near them whenever anything w"as to be learned from their
conversation, their legal opinions, their public harangues, or their
pleas before the courts. Distinguished citizens deemed themselves
honored by a retinue of such attendants. Cicero, in the _De Officiis_,
says that a young man may best commend himself to the early esteem and
confidence of the community by such an intimacy.] I thus laid up in my
memory many of his elaborate discussions of important subjects, as well
as many of his utterances that had both brevity and point, and my
endeavor was to grow more learned by his wisdom. After his death I stood
in a similar relation to the high-priest Scaevola, [Footnote: As Cicero
says, the most eloquent of jurists, and the most learned jurist among
the eloquent. He was at the same time pre-eminent for moral purity and
integrity. It was he, who, as Cicero (_De Officiis_, iii. 15) relates,
insisted on paying for an estate that he bought a much larger sum than
was asked for it, because its price had been fixed far below its actual
value.] whom I venture to call the foremost man of our city both in
ability and in uprightness. But of him I will speak elsewhere. I return
to the Augur. While I recall many similar occasions, I remember in
particular that at a certain time when I and a few of his more intimate
associates were sitting with him in the semicircular apartment
[Footnote: Latin, _hemicyclio,_ perhaps, a semicircular seat.] in his
house where he was wont to receive his friends, the conversation turned
on a subject about which almost every one was then talking, and which
you, Atticus, certainly recollect, as you were much in the society of
Publius Sulpicius; namely, the intense hatred with which Sulpicius, when
Tribune of the people, opposed Quintus Pompeius, then Consul, [Footnote:
The quarrel arose from the zelous espousal of the Marian faction by