The grandfather was still living when the little Cicero was born; a stout old conservative, who had successfully resisted the attempt to introduce vote by ballot into his native town, and hated the Greeks (who were just then coming into fashion) as heartily as his English representative, fifty years ago, might have hated a Frenchman.  “The more Greek a man knew”, he protested, “the greater rascal he turned out”.  The father was a man of quiet habits, taking no part even in local politics, given to books, and to the enlargement and improvement of the old family house, which, up to his time, seems not to have been more than a modest grange.  The situation (on a small island formed by the little river Fibrenus[2]) was beautiful and romantic; and the love for it, which grew up with the young Cicero as a child, he never lost in the busy days of his manhood.  It was in his eyes, he said, what Ithaca was to Ulysses,

  “A rough, wild nurse-land, but whose crops are men”.

[Footnote 1:  The Equites were originally those who served in the Roman cavalry; but latterly all citizens came to be reckoned in the class who had a certain property qualification, and who could prove free descent up to their grandfather.]

[Footnote 2:  Now known as Il Fiume della Posta.  Fragments of Cicero’s villa are thought to have been discovered built into the walls of the deserted convent of San Dominico.  The ruin known as ‘Cicero’s Tower’ has probably no connection with him.]

There was an aptness in the quotation; for at Arpinum, a few years before, was born that Caius Marius, seven times consul of Rome, who had at least the virtue of manhood in him, if he had few besides.

But the quiet country gentleman was ambitious for his son.  Cicero’s father, like Horace’s, determined to give him the best education in his power; and of course the best education was to be found in Rome, and the best teachers there were Greeks.  So to Rome young Marcus was taken in due time, with his younger brother Quintus.  They lodged with their uncle-in-law, Aculeo, a lawyer of some distinction, who had a house in rather a fashionable quarter of the city, and moved in good society; and the two boys attended the Greek lectures with their town cousins.  Greek was as necessary a part of a Roman gentleman’s education in those days as Latin and French are with us now; like Latin, it was the key to literature (for the Romans had as yet, it must be remembered, nothing worth calling literature of their own); and, like French, it was the language of refinement and the play of polished society.  Let us hope that by this time the good old grandfather was gathered peacefully into his urn; it might have broken his heart to have seen how enthusiastically his grandson Marcus threw himself into this newfangled study; and one of those letters of his riper years, stuffed full of Greek terms and phrases even to affectation, would have drawn anything but blessings from the old gentleman if he had lived to hear them read.