Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/15

106 B.C.] things, finds itself accurately mirrored in these letters. The time lives again before us in the pages of Cicero, and, thanks to him, he and his contemporaries are for us not mere lay-figures but actual flesh and blood.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on the third of January in the year 106 B.C., about the end of the war with Jugurtha. His forefathers had inhabited from time immemorial the town of Arpinum in the Volscian mountains which part Latium from Campania. Cicero was therefore a tribesman of the hardy race whose wars with Rome filled the early pages of Latin history. Some would have it that he was a descendant of Aufidius or Attius Tullius, the Volscian partner and rival of Coriolanus. The struggle with Rome had ended more than 200 years before Cicero was born; after generations of gallant resistance the Volscians of Arpinum were reduced to the lowly position of "citizens without the right of suffrage," living under Roman law and serving in the Roman legions without political privileges either in their own town or in the capital. But the races predestined to political greatness possess the faculty of forgetting that which it is best not to remember; and this invaluable gift of character was not wanting to the Volscians. The memory of their alien origin faded away, and they frankly accepted their place as humble members of the great Roman commonwealth. Their ambition now was to attain the full Roman citizenship, and Rome, at the beginning of the second century before Christ, was still