Cicero - Anthony Everitt [38]
If recuperation was the primary reason for his travels, he also grasped the chance to deepen his professional training. For all his years of study, Cicero was unsatisfied with his technique; he lacked ease of delivery and his oratorical effects were sometimes strained and artificial. He visited various celebrated or fashionable teachers of rhetoric and, never forgetting what he saw as the moral dimension of rhetoric, also spent time on fundamental philosophical studies.
His brother Quintus, a small, choleric man, and his much younger cousin Lucius Cicero, son of the uncle whose early death cut short a promising career, went with him on this classical equivalent of an eighteenth-century grand tour. Two former fellow students, Titus Pomponius Atticus and Marcus Pupius Piso, were welcome additions to a congenial party. They spent six months in Athens and did a good deal of sightseeing.
Not long after their arrival the group was initiated into the secret religious mysteries of Eleusis, a few miles from Athens, which must have come as a shock to Romans brought up to see religion as a set of rules and social rituals. The mysteries were at the heart of a festival of purification and fertility; those taking part witnessed some kind of spiritual reenactment of death and rebirth, involving a descent into the underworld and a vision of the future life. Cicero was profoundly stirred by the experience and believed that of all Athenian contributions to civilization, these transcendental ceremonies were the greatest. Writing near the end of his life in his book On Law, he claimed: “we have learned from them the beginnings of life and have gained the power not only to live happily but also to die with a better hope.”
But what really interested him was Greek philosophy and, as he saw it, its essential interconnection with the art of public speaking. His book On Supreme Good and Evil (De finibus), written more than three decades later, is a series of philosophical dialogues, one of which recalls his stay in Athens. The speakers are the companions of his grand tour and the setting is the Academy, the grove of olive trees containing a gymnasium or exercise ground where Plato had taught and which became a kind of university for the study of philosophy and rhetoric. In the morning the young men attend a class given by the head of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, and in the afternoon they take a stroll in the gardens to enjoy the quiet calm of the place.
According to Plutarch, Cicero “planned that, if he were finally deprived of the chance of following a public career, he would retire to Athens, away from the law and politics, and spend his life here in the quiet pursuit of philosophy.” In fact, although from time to time over the years he was indeed forced into periods of retirement, this never happened. But if he did not go to Athens he made Athens come to him. At his house at Tusculum he would later re-create the Academy, with halls and walks for intellectual debate and meditation, and build a version of Aristotle’s base in Athens, the Lyceum.
In the autumn of 79, Cicero left Athens for Asia Minor. In Rhodes, he sat briefly at the feet of a well-known Stoic philosopher and historian, Posidonius. More important, he consulted a distinguished rhetorician, Apollonius Molon, whom he had heard twice in Rome and whose style was rather more restrained than that of his florid rivals on the Asian mainland. He provided the technical retraining Cicero needed. Molon was, Cicero later recalled,
not only a pleader in real cases [as distinct from theoretical exercises] and an admirable writer but excellent as a judge and critic of faults and a very wise teacher and adviser.… And so I came home after