I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Demosthenes the noblest [6?] orator of all time had been born with a stammer, but had corrected it by patience and concentration. Demosthenes had used the very method that he was now teaching me.

    For Athenodorus made me declaim with my mouth full of pebbles: in trying to overcome the obstruction of the pebbles I forgot about the stammer and then the pebbles were removed one at a time until none remained, and I found to my surprise that I could speak as well as anyone. But only in declamations. In ordinary conversation I still stammered badly. He made it a pleasant secret between himself and me that I could declaim so well. "One day, Cercopithecion, we shall surprise Augustus," he would say. "But wait a little longer." When he called me Cercopithecion ["little marmoset"], it was for affection, not scorn, and I was proud of the name. When I did badly he would shame me by rolling out,
    "Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, remember who you are and what you are doing."

    With Postumus and Athenodorus and Germanicus as my friends I gradually began to win self-confidence.

    Athenodorus told me, the very first day of his tutorship, that he proposed to teach me not facts which I could pick up anywhere for myself, but the -proper presentation of facts. And this he did. One day, for example, he asked me, kindly enough, why I was so excited: [A.D. 2] I seemed unable to concentrate on my task. I told him that I had just seen a huge draught of recruits parading on Mars Field under Augustus' inspection before being sent off to Germany, where war had recently broken out again. "Well," said Athenodorus, still in the same kindly voice, "since this is so much on your mind that you can't appreciate the beauties of Hesiod, Hesiod can wait until to-morrow. After all, he's waited seven hundred years or more, so he won't grudge us another day. And meanwhile, suppose you were to sit down and take your tablets and write me a letter, a short account of all that you saw on Mars Field; as if I had been five years absent from Rome and you were sending me a letter across the sea, say to my home in Tarsus. That would keep your restless hands employed and be good practice too." So I gladly scribbled away on the wax, and then we read the letter through for faults of spelling and composition. I was forced [64] to admit that I had told both too little and too much, and had also put my facts in the wrong order. The passage describing the lamentations of the mothers and sweethearts of the young soldiers, and how the crowd rushed to the bridgehead for a final cheer of the departing column, should have come last, not first. And I need not-have mentioned that the cavalry had horses: people took that for granted. And I had twice put in the incident of Augustus' charger stumbling: once was enough if the horse only stumbled once. And what Postumus had told me, as we were going home, about the religious practices of the Jews, was interesting, but did not belong here because the recruits were Italians, not Jews. Besides, at Tarsus he would probably have more opportunities of studying Jewish customs than Postumus had at Rome.
    On the other hand I had not mentioned several things that he would have been interested to hear--how many recruits there were in the parade, how far advanced their military training was, to what garrison town they were being sent, whether they looked glad or sorry to go, what Augustus said to them in his speech.

    Three days later Athenodorus made me write out a description of a brawl between a sailor and clothes dealer which we had watched together that day as we were walking in the rag-market; and I did much better. He first applied this discipline to my writing, then to my declamations, and finally to my general conversation with him. He took endless pains with me, and gradually I grew less scatter-brained, for he never let any careless, irrelevant, or inexact phrase of mine pass without comment.

    He tried to interest me in speculative