ut the trouble
of some calculation, how far removed from the period of Christ was the
year 648 A.U.C., in which Cicero was born. To this I will add on the
margin the year of Cicero's life. He was nearly sixty-four when he died.
I shall, therefore, call that year his sixty-third year.

CHAPTER II.

_HIS EDUCATION._

At Arpinum, on the river Liris, a little stream which has been made to
sound sweetly in our ears by Horace,[31] in a villa residence near the
town, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, 106 years before Christ, on the 3d
of January, according to the calendar then in use. Pompey the Great was
born in the same year. Arpinum was a State which had been admitted into
Roman citizenship, lying between Rome and Capua, just within that
portion of Italy which was till the other day called the Kingdom of
Naples. The district from which he came is noted, also, as having given
birth to Marius. Cicero was of an equestrian family, which means as much
as though we were to say among ourselves that a man had been born a
gentleman and nothing more. An "eques" or knight in Cicero's time became
so, or might become so, by being in possession of a certain income. The
title conferred no nobility. The plebeian, it will be understood, could
not become patrician, though he might become noble--as Cicero did. The
patrician must have been born so--must have sprung from the purple of
certain fixed families.[32] Cicero was born a plebeian, of equestrian
rank and became ennobled when he was ranked among the senators because
of his service among the high magistrates of the Republic. As none of
his family had served before him, he was "novus homo," a new man, and
therefore not noble till he had achieved nobility himself. A man was
noble who could reckon a Consul, a Praetor, or an AEdile among his
ancestors. Such was not the case with Cicero. As he filled all these
offices, his son was noble--as were his son's sons and grandsons, if
such there were.

It was common to Romans to have three names, and our Cicero had three.
Marcus, which was similar in its use to the Christian name of one of us,
had been that of his grandfather and father, and was handed on to his
son. This, called the praenomen, was conferred on the child when a babe
with a ceremony not unlike that of our baptism. There was but a limited
choice of such names among the Romans, so that an initial letter will
generally declare to those accustomed to the literature that intended