Molon had him stand with his legs apart, his knees rigid, then bend from the waist twenty times to touch the ground on either side of his feet. After that, he made him lie on his back with his hands clasped behind his head and repeatedly sit up without shifting his legs. He made him lie on his front and raise himself solely by the strength of his arms, again twenty times, again without bending his knees. That was the regimen on the first day, and each day afterwards more exercises were added and their duration increased. Cicero again slept soundly, and now had no trouble eating, either.

For the actual declamatory training, Molon took his eager pupil out of the shaded courtyard and into the heat of midday, and had him recite his exercise pieces-usually a trial scene or a soliloquy from Menander-while walking up a steep hill without pausing. In this fashion, with the lizards scattering underfoot and only the scratching of the cicadas in the olive trees for an audience, Cicero strengthened his lungs and learned how to gain the maximum output of words from a single breath. “Pitch you delivery in the middle range,” instructed Molon. “That is where the power is. Nothing high or low.” In the afternoons, for speech projection, Molon took him down to the shingle beach, paced out eighty yards (the maximum range of the human voice), and made him declaim against the boom and hiss of the sea-the nearest thing, he said, to the murmur of three thousand people in the open air, or the background mutter of several hundred men in conversation in the Senate. These were distractions Cicero would have to get used to.

“But what about the content of what I say?” Cicero asked. “Surely I will compel attention chiefly by the force of my arguments?”

Molon shrugged. “Content does not concern me. Remember Demosthenes: ‘Only three things count in oratory. Delivery, delivery, and again: delivery.’”

“And my stutter?”

“The st-st-utter does not b-b-bother me, either,” replied Molon with a grin and a wink. “Seriously, it adds interest and a useful impression of honesty. Demosthenes himself had a slight lisp. The audience identifies with these flaws. It is only perfection which is dull. Now, move farther down the beach and still try to make me hear.”