we remember that Sulla was still in power, rescues, at any rate, in
regard to this period of his life, the character of the orator from
that charge of cowardice which has been imputed to him.

It is necessary here, in this chapter devoted to the education of
Cicero, to allude to his two first speeches, because that education
was not completed till afterward--so that they may be regarded as
experiments, or trials, as it were, of his force and sufficiency.
"Not content with these teachers"--teachers who had come to Rome from
Greece and Asia--"he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to
embrace the whole world of art." These words, quoted a few pages back
from the treatise attributed to Tacitus, refer to a passage in the
Brutus in which Cicero makes a statement to that effect. "When I
reached Athens,[45] I passed six months with Antiochus, by far the
best known and most erudite of the teachers of the old Academy, and
with him, as my great authority and master, I renewed that study of
philosophy which I had never abandoned--which from my boyhood I had
followed with always increasing success. At the same time I practised
oratory laboriously with Demetrius Syrus, also at Athens, a well-known
and by no means incapable master of the art of speaking. After that I
wandered over all Asia, and came across the best orators there, with
whom I practised, enjoying their willing assistance." There is more of
it, which need not be repeated verbatim, giving the names of those who
aided him in Asia: Menippus of Stratonice--who, he says, was sweet
enough to have belonged himself to Athens--with Dionysius of Magnesia,
with Oeschilus of Cnidos, and with Xenocles of Adramyttium. Then at
Rhodes he came across his old friend Molo, and applied himself again
to the teaching of his former master. Quintilian explains to us how
this was done with a purpose, so that the young orator, when he had
made a first attempt with his half-fledged wings in the courts, might