ILLUSTRATIONS. CICERO; FROM A BRONZE MEDAL STRUCK BY THE TOWN OF PAGE I 19 36 62 65 CICERO'S VILLA, FORMIÆ TEMPLE OF JUPITER CAPITOLINUS : RESTORED BY CAV. CANINA MAUSOLEUM OF AUGUSTUS 80 92 ON the steep side of one of the Volscian hills, below which the river Liris, now the Garigliano, flowed in a winding channel to the sea, and on the northern frontier of what has since been known as the Terra di Lavoro in the kingdom of Naples, lay the ancient town of Arpinum. The banks of the river were thickly wooded with lofty poplars, and a grove of oaks extended to the east, where, not far off, the little river Fibrenus, now the Fibreno, in the midst of one of the loveliest of Italian landscapes, mingled its ice-cold waters with the waters of the Liris. Before its confluence with the larger stream it divided into two channels and rushed rapidly past a small and beautiful island, now called the Isola di Carnello; and lower down, at the point where the two rivers met, another island was B formed, since known as the Isola San Paolo, or San Domenico, from a Dominican monastery which in later times was erected there and still remains. In this pleasant spot, at the point where the Liris and the Fibrenus met, amidst hills and rocks and woods, on the third of January, B.C. 106, Cicero was born.1 His family was old and respectable, but was of the plebeian and not of the patrician order. It was not ennobled ----that is, none of its members had filled any curule office; not even an ædileship, which was the lowest step in the ladder of rank that entitled a citizen to the honour of the ivory chair, and which, like all the other magistracies at Rome, was, at all events in the later centuries of the republic, open to plebeian and patrician families alike. It belonged to the equestrian class, and had long been settled in the neighbourhood of Arpinum. There was indeed a tradition at Rome that the Tullian gens was of royal descent; and Plutarch alludes to it, saying, that some persons carried back the origin of the family to Tullus Attius, a king of the Volscians, who waged war not without honour against the Romans. Cicero himself, like Napoleon, smiled at the efforts to make out for him an illustrious pedigree; and, alluding to the funeral orations at Rome as a fertile source of the falsification of family history, said, that an instance of it would be an assertion by him that he was descended from Manius Tullius, the patrician who was consul with Servius Sulpicius ten years after the expulsion of the Tarquins." Arpinum had received the Roman franchise some time before, so that the inhabitants enjoyed the full rights of citizens. of the Great Republic. The family name of Cicero was most probably derived, like those of the Lentuli, Fabii, Pisones, and others, from the fact that some ancestor had been known as a successful cultivator of the humble vegetable called cicer; but another less complimentary theory is that it was given in consequence of a personal defect in the face of one of his progenitors in fact a wart or car 1 The consuls for the year were C. Atilius Serranus and Q. Servilius Cæpio. According to the Julian reformed calendar the date of Cicero's birth would be October, B.C. 107. " 2 The word Tullius seems originally to have meant "spring" or "rivulet.' Tullios alii dixerunt esse silanos, alii rivos, alii vehementes projectiones sanguinis arcuatim fluentis.- Festus. |