the Republic, and had been six times Consul, failed to gather fresh
laurels. Rome was falling into that state of anarchy which was the
cause of all the glory and all the disgrace of Cicero's life, and was
open to the dominion of any soldier whose grasp might be the least
scrupulous and the strongest. Marius, after a series of romantic
adventures with which we must not connect ourselves here, was
triumphant only just before his death, while Sulla went off with his
army, pillaged Athens, plundered Asia Minor generally, and made terms
with Mithridates, though he did not conquer him. With the purport, no
doubt, of conquering Mithridates, but perhaps with the stronger object
of getting him out of Rome, the army had been intrusted to him, with
the consent of the Marian faction.

Then came those three years, when Sulla was in the East and Marius
dead, of which Cicero speaks as a period of peace, in which a student
was able to study in Rome. "Triennium fere fuit urbs sine armis."[41]
These must have been the years 86, 85, and 84 before Christ, when
Cicero was twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old; and
it was this period, in truth, of which he speaks, and not of earlier
years, when he tells us of his studies with Philo, and Molo, and
Diodatus. Precocious as he was in literature, writing one poem--or
translating it--when he was fourteen, and another when he was
eighteen, he was by no means in a hurry to commence the work of his
life. He is said also to have written a treatise on military tactics
when he was nineteen; which again, no doubt, means that he had
exercised himself by translating such an essay from the Greek. This,
happily, does not remain. But we have four books, Rhetoricorum ad C.
Herennium, and two books De Inventione, attributed to his twentieth
and twenty-first years, which are published with his works, and
commence the series. Of all that we have from him, they are perhaps