you are away from Rome you care to be any where but here.”  “Well,” replied Cicero, “when I get away from town for several days at a time, I do prefer this place; but this I can seldom do.  And indeed I love it, not only because it is so pleasant, so healthy a resort, but also because it is my native land, mine and my father’s too, and because I live here among the associations of those that have gone before me.”

Other homes he purchased at various times of his life, as his means permitted.  The situation of one of them, at Formiae near Cape Caista, was particularly agreeable to him, for he loved the sea; it amused him as it had amused, he tells us, the noble friends, Scipio and Laelius, before him, to pick up pebbles on the shore.  But this part of the coast was a fashionable resort.  Chance visitors were common; and there were many neighbors, some of whom were far too liberal of their visits.  He writes to Atticus on one occasion from his Formian villa:  “As to composition, to which you are always urging me, it is absolutely impossible.  It is a public-hall that I have here, not a country-house, such a crowd of people is there at Formiae.  As to most of them nothing need be said.  After ten o’clock they cease to trouble me.  But my nearest neighbor is Arrius.  The man absolutely lives with me, says that he has given up the idea of going to Rome because he wants to talk philosophy with me.  And then, on the other side, there is Sebosus, Catulus’ friend, as you will remember.  Now what am I to do?  I would certainly be off to Arpinum if I did not expect to see you here.”  In the next letter he repeats the complaints:  “Just as I am sitting down to write in comes our friend Sebosus.  I had not time to give an inward groan, when Arrius says, ‘Good morning.’  And this is going away from Rome!  I will certainly be off to

   ‘My native hills, the cradle of my race.’”

Still, doubtless, there was a sweetness, the sweetness of being famous and sought after, even in these annoyances.  He never ceased to pay occasional visits to Formiae.  It was a favorite resort of his family; and it was there that he spent the last days of his life.

But the country-house which he loved best of all was his villa at Tusculum, a Latin town lying on the slope of Mount Algidus, at such a height above the sea[4] as would make a notable hill in England.  Here had lived in an earlier generation Crassus, the orator after whose model the young Cicero had formed his own eloquence; and Catulus, who shared with Marius the glory of saving Rome from the barbarians; and Caesar, an elder kinsman of the Dictator.  Cicero’s own house had belonged to Sulla, and its walls were adorned with frescoes of that great soldier’s victories.  For neighbors he had the wealthy Lucullus, and the still more wealthy Crassus, one of the three who ruled Rome when it could no longer rule itself, and, for a time at least, Quintus, his brother.  “This,” he writes to his friend Atticus, “is the one spot in which I can get some rest from all my toils and troubles.”