the practice at the bar, in which he was already becoming famous; and in
the schools of Athens and Rhodes he obtained a larger view of his art,
both in theory and practice, and returned to Rome to form, not to follow,
a style. Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the foremost representative of the
Asiatic school, was then at the height of his forensic reputation. Within
a year or two Cicero was recognised as at least his equal: it is to the
honour of both, that the eclipse of Hortensius by his younger rival
brought no jealousy or alienation; up to the death of Hortensius, about
the outbreak of the Civil war, they remained good friends. Years
afterwards Cicero inscribed with his name the treatise, now lost, but
made famous to later ages by having been one of the great turning-points
in the life of St. Augustine[4], which he wrote in praise of philosophy
as an introduction to the series of his philosophical works.

The years which followed Cicero's return from the East were occupied,
with the single break of his quaestorship in Sicily, by hard and
continuous work at the bar. His speeches of this date, being non-
political, have for the most part not been preserved. The two still
imperfectly extant, the _Pro Roscio Comoedo_ of 76, and the _Pro Tullio_
of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his
visit to the East, the _Pro Quinctio_ and _Pro Roscio Amerino_, and, with
his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the _De Inventione_, the body
of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods.
These early speeches are carefully composed according to the scholastic
canons then in vogue, the hard legal style of the older courts
alternating with passages of carefully executed artificial ornament.
Their chief interest is one of contrast with his matured style; for they
show, no doubt with much accuracy, what the general level of oratory was
out of which the great Ciceronian eloquence sprang.