On Sulla's side lay what chance there was of returning to the old ways.

When Sulla was declared Dictator, it was presumed that the Republic was restored.

But not on this account should it be supposed that Cicero regarded the proscriptions of Sulla with favor, or that he was otherwise than shocked by the wholesale robberies for which the proscription paved the way.

This is a matter with which it will be necessary to deal more fully when we come in our next chapter to the first speeches made by Cicero; in the very first of which, as I place them, he attacks the Sullan robberies with an audacity which, when 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.