 After Pompey’s defeat by Julius Caesar at Pharsalus in 48 BC, Cicero Minor was pardoned by Caesar.Cicero was sent off to Athens by his father to learn philosophy.While he was at Athens he wrote a letter to Tiro, a slave and later freedman of the Cicero family, in which he said that he was practising declamation in Greek with Gorgias but had to let him go, because his father, whom he did not want to offend, had told him to.