[Footnote 1:  Near the modern town of Frascati.  But there is no certainty as to the site of Cicero’s villa.]

He had his little annoyances, however, even in these happy hours of retirement.  Morning calls were an infliction to which a country gentleman was liable in ancient Italy as in modern England.  A man like Cicero was very good company, and somewhat of a lion besides; and country neighbours, wherever he set up his rest, insisted on bestowing their tediousness on him.  His villa at Formiae, his favourite residence next to Tusculum, was, he protested, more like a public hall.  Most of his visitors, indeed, had the consideration not to trouble him after ten or eleven in the forenoon (fashionable calls in those days began uncomfortably early); but there were one or two, especially his next-door neighbour, Arrius, and a friend’s friend, named Sebosus, who were in and out at all hours:  the former had an unfortunate taste for philosophical discussion, and was postponing his return to Rome (he was good enough to say) from day to day in order to enjoy these long mornings in Cicero’s conversation.  Such are the doleful complaints in two or three of the letters to Atticus; but, like all such complaints, they were probably only half in earnest:  popularity, even at a watering-place, was not very unpleasant, and the writer doubtless knew how to practise the social philosophy which he recommends to others, and took his place cheerfully and pleasantly in the society which he found about him—­not despising his honest neighbours because they had not all adorned a consulship or saved a state.

There were times when Cicero fancied that this rural life, with all its refinements of wealth and taste and literary leisure, was better worth living than the public life of the capital.  His friends and his books, he said, were the company most congenial to him; “politics might go to the dogs;” to count the waves as they rolled on the beach was happiness; he “had rather be mayor of Antium than consul at Rome”; “rather sit in his own library with Atticus in their favourite seat under the bust of Aristotle than in the curule chair”.  It is true that these longings for retirement usually followed some political defeat or mortification; that his natural sphere, the only life in which he could be really happy, was in the keen excitement of party warfare—­the glorious battle-field of the Senate and the Forum.  The true key-note of his mind is to be found in these words to his friend Coelius:  “Cling to the city, my friend, and live in her light:  all employment abroad, as I have felt from my earliest manhood, is obscure and petty for those who have abilities to make them famous at Rome”.  Yet the other strain had nothing in it of affectation, or hypocrisy:  it was the schoolboy escaped from work, thoroughly enjoying his holiday, and fancying that nothing would be so delightful as to have holidays always.  In this, again, there was a similarity between Cicero’s taste and that of Horace.