In 90 Cicero reached the age of sixteen, the Roman age of majority, by which time his secondary schooling ended. A special rite of passage marked the moment when a boy became a man, not on his birthday but on or around March 17, the feast day of Liber, the god of growth and vegetation. We do not know where the ceremony took place in Cicero’s case, but bearing in mind his family’s ambitions for him, it would most likely have been in Rome.
About the time Marcus came of age, his father decided that his sons should complete their training in public speaking and study law in the capital. Higher education was exclusively devoted to debate and declamation and was in the hands of a rhetor, a specialist teacher of public speaking. He and other learned men, philosophers or scholars, had much the same status as university professors. However, as academic institutions such as universities did not exist, such men were freelance and often lived in the household of a leading political figure, where they acted as advisers and added to their employers’ prestige. Elder statesmen were also willing to impart their experience and legal and constitutional knowledge to the younger generation.
Access for a couple of provincial teenagers to these informal and exclusive finishing schools was difficult. It could be achieved only through the web of personal connections called clientship (clientela). Society was a pyramid of matching rights and obligations; the basic principle was summed up in the religious formula “do ut des”—“I give so that you give.” A wealthy and powerful man acted as a “patron” for many hundreds or even thousands of “clients.” He guaranteed to look after their interests. He welcomed them to his home and occasionally gave them meals and provided very needy followers with food handouts. He was a source of advice and of business and political contacts. If a client got into trouble with the law his patron would offer his support. In return, a client (if he lived in Rome) would regularly pay a morning call and accompany his patron as he went about his business in the town. He could be recruited as a bodyguard or even a soldier in his army. Neither party could go to law against the other. These networks of mutual aid cut across the social classes and linked the local elites in the various Italian communities, not to mention those in the Empire as a whole, to the center. Clientship was a binding contract and, for lack of other administrative instruments, it was an essential means of holding the Empire together. A family’s client list survived from one generation to the next. Durable bonds could, of course, also be established between equals. Amicitia or “friendly alliance” meant more than personal affection and referred to formal networks between superiors and inferiors.
To get on in society, indeed to survive in it at all, a Roman had to be an effective member not only of his family but also of his town and village, his guild (if he was an artisan or tradesman) or his district. Each of these institutions had a patron, through whom a man was locked into the highest reaches of authority and power. In an age without a welfare state, a banking system and most public services, he had no alternative but to assure his future in these ways. This was why politics was largely conducted on a personal basis and was seen in moral rather than collective terms. The client-list system was not compatible with alliances based on political programs or manifestos of common action.
Like all provincial clients of good social status, the Ciceros had patrons in Rome and they made use of them when finding good teachers for Marcus and Quintus. They were connected in particular to the Leader of the Senate, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus; Marcus Antonius, a distinguished lawyer and politician (who had taken Cicero’s uncle Lucius with him on the expedition against the pirates); and an even more celebrated orator and statesman, Lucius Licinius Crassus, a conservative who understood the need for reform.
Strings were successfully pulled. One of Marcus and Quintus’s maternal uncles, Caius Visellius Aculeo, a legal expert, knew Crassus well and arranged a placement for them. The boys spent a good deal of time at the great orator’s house, an elegant building at an excellent address on the Palatine Hill, where there were columns of Hymettan marble and shade-giving trees—rare features in this city of tufa and brick. They often listened to him discussing contemporary politics and studied with his scholars-in-residence. Marcus was also much impressed by the pure, traditional Latin spoken by Crassus’s wife. In return, the brothers would doubtless have been expected to join the daily crowd of clientes who accompanied leading men when they appeared in public. The larger the following, the greater the prestige.
Cicero also became a pupil of Crassus’s father-in-law, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, then in his eighties and one of the earliest and greatest of Roman jurists. On Scaevola’s death Cicero transferred to a younger cousin of the same name, who was Chief Pontiff, the leading official of the state religion, and had shared the Consulship with Crassus in 95.
His father entrusted him to the care of an older fellow student, Marcus Pupius Piso, who acted as a kind of mentor and kept an eye on him. Later the historian Sallust, a near contemporary, presented this arrangement as a homosexual affair in a lampoon against Cicero: “Didn’t you learn your unbridled loquacity from Marcus Piso at the cost of your virginity?” But this was the kind of insult that Roman public figures routinely exchanged with one another and while something of the sort may have briefly occurred, it is just as likely that it did not.
It was during these years that Cicero’s ambition to become a famous advocate crystallized. He found he had a gift for writing and public speaking. He was swept along by the almost unbearable excitement of the trials in the Forum and the glamour of the lawyer’s job, very much like that of a leading actor.
There were a number of jury courts, specializing in different kinds of crime—treason, murder, extortion and so on. Temporary stands and seating were set up to accommodate those taking part in the proceedings. A Praetor usually presided and between thirty and sixty jurors were appointed by lot for each case, who voted in secret. They were originally Senators, but one of Caius Gracchus’s reforms transferred the right of jury service to equites. This was a highly disputatious issue, especially in cases where Senatorial or commercial interests were in any way at stake. Jurors voted by rubbing off either an A (for absolvo) or a C (for condemno) on either side of voting tablets. Verdicts were often biased and bribery of jurors was common.
Court procedures in ancient Rome are known only in broad outline. Prosecutors opened with a long speech, which the defense sought to rebut, at equal length. Addresses by supporting counsel followed. A water clock ensured that everyone kept to time. Witnesses for either side were then cross-examined. At some stage, the opposing advocates entered into a debate between themselves (altercatio). The case was then adjourned, probably resuming after a day’s interval. There were further speeches by either side and the calling of additional evidence was allowed. The verdict then followed.
Civil cases were heard in two parts; the first before a Praetor who defined the issues in question, and the second, for decision, before a judge or a jury to whom the Praetor had passed his opinion.
Cicero was amazed by the sensational impact a leading advocate could have on his hearers and looked upon his skills as being akin to those of an actor. Despite the fact that the theater was not regarded as a respectable profession, Cicero was fascinated by it and later became a close friend of the best-known actor of his day, Quintus Roscius Gallus. Although he always insisted that oratory and drama were different arts, he modeled his style on Roscius’s performances and those of another actor he knew, Clodius Aesopus (who once became so involved in the part he was playing—that of King Agamemnon, overlord of the Greeks—that he ran through and killed a stagehand who happened to cross the stage).