Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/22

8 , or rather I should say lovable, is this feeling of good neighbourship, which keeps the constant fashion of the olden time, not shadowed by thoughts of evil, not practised in untruths, not veneered with false colours, undisciplined in the arts of the suburb and of the city. In all Arpinum there was not a man but strove his utmost for Plancius, not one in Sora, not one in Casinum, not one in Aquinum. All that well-peopled district of Venafrum and Allifæ, all that rugged mountainous faithful plain-dealing clannish land of ours felt that it was honoured in his advancement and dignified in his dignity." Cicero himself shared the feelings which he so finely describes. It is always with a throb of pleasure that he betakes himself to his mountain home. "Ad montes patrios, et ad incunabula nostra." In speaking of it he loves to borrow the language of the home-sick Ulysses as he sets his face toward Ithaca. "Rugged is she, but nurse of a worthy breed of sons; never can I see anything to glad my heart like that land." The little town still stands in the Volscian highlands, and over its gate the traveller may read an inscription which the burgesses have put up to commemorate their two great townsmen Marius and Cicero.

The family of Cicero had held for many generations a place of honour and influence in this little community. They belonged to the upper-middle class in fortune and position, a class which (from a reminiscence of the time when wealth determined the nature of military service) the Romans named "the equestrian order." They had never ventured