For some time after his education was completed, he seems to have wandered up and down Ionia, with very precarious means of support, exercising his profession, among other places, at Antioch, where he must have come into contact more or less with the new sect called "Christians,"—with what result we shall partly see hereafter. By degrees he got into some practice as an advocate: but not meeting with the success which he hoped for in that line, he took to composing orations for others to deliver, and to giving lectures upon rhetoric and the art of public speaking. In this latter capacity he travelled a good deal, as was the custom for all professors in those days, and delivered his lectures and declamations in the towns of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Gaul. It was in the last-named country—always a rich harvest-field, as we gather from Juvenal,[1] for travelling orators and lecturers on law—that he seems to have been most successful, and he continued there for ten years.
Whether he eventually grew tired of his profession, as some expressions in his writings would lead us to think, or whether he had made enough money by it to enable him to devote himself to the more strictly literary life to which his tastes and abilities alike pointed,—-he gave up the study and the practice of Rhetoric in about his fortieth year. He cast off his old mistress, he says, because he had grown tired of her false ways: "she was always painting her face and tiring her head," and otherwise misbehaving herself, and he
- ↑ See his Satires, vii. 175, and xv. 111.
