If this villa was where we hope it was, the great road passed at no great distance from it, in the valley between Tusculum and the Mons Albanus; and by following this for some fifty miles to the south-east through Latium, Cicero would strike the river Liris not far from Fregellae, and leaving the road there, would soon arrive at his native place Arpinum, and his ancestral property.  For this old home he always had the warmest affection; of no other does he write in language showing so clearly that his heart could be moved by natural beauty, especially when combined with the tender associations of his boyhood[397].  In the charming introduction to the second book of his work de Legibus (on the Constitution), he dwells with genuine delight on this feeling and these associations; and there too we get a hint of what Dr. Schmidt tells us is the peculiar charm of the spot,—­the presence and the sound of water; for if he is right, the villa was placed between two arms of the limpid little river Fibrenus, which here makes a delta as it joins the larger Liris[398].

But of this house we know for certain neither the site nor the plan,—­not so much indeed as we know about a villa of the brother Quintus, not far away, the building of which is described with such exactness in a letter written to the absent owner[399], that Schmidt thinks himself justified in applying it by analogy to the villa of the elder brother.  But such reasoning is hardly safe.  What we do know about the old house is that it was originally a true villa rustica,—­a house with land cultivated by the owner that Cicero’s father, who had weak health and literary tastes, had added to it considerably, and that Cicero himself had made it into a comfortable country residence, with all necessary conveniences.  He did not farm the ancestral land attached to it, either himself or by a bailiff, but let it in small holdings[400] (praediola), and we could wish that he had told us something of his tenants and what they did with the land.  It was not, therefore, a real farm-house, but a farm-house made into a pleasant residence, like so many manor-houses still to be seen in England.  Its atrium had no doubt retired (so to speak) into the rear of the building, and had become a kitchen, and you entered, as in most country-houses of this period, through a vestibule directly into a peristyle:  some idea of such an arrangement may be gained from the accompanying ground-plan of the villa of Diomedes just outside Pompeii, which was a city house adapted to rural conditions (villa pseudurbana).[401]

If Cicero wished to leave Arpinum for one of his villas on the Campanian coast, he would simply have to follow the valley of the Liris until it reached the sea between Minturnae and Formiae, and at the latter place, a lively little town with charming views over the sea, close to the modern Gaeta, he would find another house of his own,—­the next he added to his possessions after he inherited Arpinum.  Formiae was a very