locum, ubi beati aevo sempiterno fruantur."




CHAPTER II.

HIS EDUCATION.


At Arpinum, on the river Liris, a little stream which has been made to
sound sweetly in our ears by Horace,[31] in a villa residence near the
town, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, 106 years before Christ, on the
3d of January, according to the calendar then in use. Pompey the Great
was born in the same year. Arpinum was a State which had been admitted
into Roman citizenship, lying between Rome and Capua, just within that
portion of Italy which was till the other day called the Kingdom of
Naples. The district from which he came is noted, also, as having
given birth to Marius. Cicero was of an equestrian family, which means
as much as though we were to say among ourselves that a man had been
born a gentleman and nothing more. An "eques" or knight in Cicero's
time became so, or might become so, by being in possession of a
certain income. The title conferred no nobility. The plebeian, it will
be understood, could not become patrician, though he might become
noble--as Cicero did. The patrician must have been born so--must have
sprung from the purple of certain fixed families.[32] Cicero was born
a plebeian, of equestrian rank and became ennobled when he was ranked
among the senators because of his service among the high magistrates
of the Republic. As none of his family had served before him, he was
"novus homo," a new man, and therefore not noble till he had achieved