CHAPTER VI.

COUNTRY LIFE.

A Roman of even moderate wealth—­for Cicero was far from being one of the richest men of his time—­commonly possessed more country-houses than belong even to the wealthiest of English nobles.  One such house at least Cicero inherited from his father.  It was about three miles from Arpinum, a little town in that hill country of the Sabines which was the proverbial seat of a temperate and frugal race, and which Cicero describes in Homeric phrase as

   “Rough but a kindly nurse of men.”

In his grandfather’s time it had been a plain farmhouse, of the kind that had satisfied the simpler manners of former days—­the days when Consuls and Dictators were content, their time of office ended, to plow their own fields and reap their own harvests.  Cicero was born within its walls, for the primitive fashion of family life still prevailed, and the married son continued to live in his father’s house.  After the old man’s death, when the old-fashioned frugality gave way to a more sumptuous manner of life, the house was greatly enlarged, one of the additions being a library, a room of which the grandfather, who thought that his contemporaries were like Syrian slaves, “the more Greek they knew the greater knaves they were,” had never felt the want; but in which his son, especially in his later days, spent most of his time.  The garden and grounds were especially delightful, the most charming spot of all being an island formed by the little stream Fibrenus.  A description put into the mouth of Quintus, the younger son of the house, thus depicts it:  “I have never seen a more pleasant spot.  Fibrenus here divides his stream into two of equal size, and so washes either side.  Flowing rapidly by he joins his waters again, having compassed just as much ground as makes a convenient place for our literary discussions.  This done he hurries on, just as if the providing of such a spot had been his only office and function, to fall into the Liris.  Then, like one adopted into a noble family, he loses his own obscurer name.  The Liris indeed he makes much colder.  A colder stream than this indeed I never touched, though I have seen many.  I can scarce bear to dip my foot in it.  You remember how Plato makes Socrates dip his foot in Ilissus.”  Atticus too is loud in his praises.  “This, you know, is my first time of coming here, and I feel that I cannot admire it enough.  As to the splendid villas which one often sees, with their marble pavements and gilded ceilings, I despise them.  And their water-courses, to which they give the fine names of Nile or Euripus, who would not laugh at them when he sees your streams?  When we want rest and delight for the mind it is to nature that we must come.  Once I used to wonder—­for I never thought that there was any thing but rocks and hills in the place—­that you took such pleasure in the spot.  But now I marvel that when