Imperium

asked if he might borrow me, as one might remove a book on loan, and take me with him to the East. My job would be to supervise arrangements, hire transport, pay teachers, and so forth, and after a year go back to my old master. In the end, like many a useful volume, I was never returned.
    We met in the harbor of Brundisium on the day we were due to set sail. This was during the consulship of Servilius Vatia and Claudius Pulcher, the six hundred and seventy-fifth year after the foundation of Rome. Cicero then was nothing like the imposing figure he later became, whose features were so famous he could not walk down the quietest street unrecognized. (What has happened, I wonder, to all those thousands of busts and portraits, which once adorned so many private houses and public buildings? Can they really all have been smashed and burned?) The young man who stood on the quayside that spring morning was thin and round-shouldered, with an unnaturally long neck, in which a large Adam’s apple, as big as a baby’s fist, plunged up and down whenever he swallowed. His eyes were protuberant, his skin sallow, his cheeks sunken; in short, he was the picture of ill health. Well, Tiro, I remember thinking, you had better make the most of this trip, because it is not going to last long .
    We went first to Athens, where Cicero had promised himself the treat of studying philosophy at the Academy. I carried his bag to the lecture hall and was in the act of turning away when he called me back and demanded to know where I was going.
    “To sit in the shade with the other slaves,” I replied, “unless there is some further service you require.”
    “Most certainly there is,” he said. “I wish you to perform a very strenuous labor. I want you to come in here with me and learn a little philosophy, in order that I may have someone to talk to on our long travels.”
    So I followed him in and was privileged to hear Antiochus of Ascalon himself assert the three basic principles of Stoicism—that virtue is sufficient for happiness, that nothing except virtue is good, and that the emotions are not to be trusted—three simple rules which, if only men could follow them, would solve all the problems of the world. Thereafter, Cicero and I would often debate such questions, and in this realm of the intellect the difference in our stations was always forgotten. We stayed six months with Antiochus and then moved on to the real purpose of our journey.
    The dominant school of rhetoric at that time was the so-called Asiatic method. Elaborate and flowery, full of pompous phrases and tinkling rhythms, its delivery was accompanied by a lot of swaying about and striding up and down. In Rome its leading exponent was Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, universally considered the foremost orator of the day, whose fancy footwork had earned him the nickname “the Dancing Master.” Cicero, with an eye to discovering his tricks, made a point of seeking out all Hortensius’s mentors: Menippus of Stratonicea, Dionysius of Magnesia, Aeschylus of Cnidus, Xenocles of Adramyttium—the names alone give a flavor of their style. Cicero spent weeks with each, patiently studying their methods, until at last he felt he had their measure.
    “Tiro,” he said to me one evening, picking at his customary plate of boiled vegetables, “I have had quite enough of these perfumed prancers. You will arrange a boat from Loryma to Rhodes. We shall try a different tack, and enroll in the school of Apollonius Molon.”
    And so it came about that, one spring morning just after dawn, when the straits of the Carpathian Sea were as smooth and milky as a pearl (you must forgive these occasional flourishes: I have read too much Greek poetry to maintain an austere Latin style), we were rowed across from the mainland to that ancient, rugged island, where the stocky figure of Molon himself awaited us on the quayside.
    This Molon was a lawyer, originally from Alabanda, who had pleaded in the Roman courts brilliantly, and had even been invited to address the Senate in Greek—an unheard-of honor—after which he had retired to Rhodes and opened his rhetorical school. His theory of oratory, the exact opposite of the Asiatics’, was simple: don’t move about too much, hold your head straight, stick to the point, make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, and when you’ve won their sympathy, sit down quickly—“for nothing,” said Molon, “dries more quickly than a tear.” This was far more to