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In his treatise De Legibus, which was written two years later than the De Republicâ, when he was fifty-five, and shortly after the murder of Clodius, he represents himself as explaining to his brother Quintus and Atticus, in their walks through the woods of Arpinum, the nature and origin of the laws and their actual state, both in other countries and in Rome.
He is with her at present in his villa at Arpinum, and has Decimus Turanius with him, who is great in belles lettres. The date of my father's death was the 28th of November. That is about all my news. If you light on any articles of vertu suitable for a gymnasium, which would look well in the place you wot of, please don't let them slip.
His father, M. Tullius, lived at Arpinum, an ancient city of the Volscians and afterwards of the Samnites, which had long enjoyed a partial, and from B.C. 188 a complete, Roman franchise, and was included in the Cornelian tribe.
As he was journeying he saw Cicero, and asked him to go to Rome. This Cicero refused, and Cæsar passed on. "I must then use other counsels," said Cæsar, thus leaving him for the last time before the coming battle. Cicero went on to Arpinum, and there heard the nightingales. From that moment he resolved.
By heaven, I would start at once for Arpinum, only that I see that the most convenient place to await your visit is Formiæ: but only up to the 6th of May! For you see with what bores my ears are pestered. What a splendid opportunity, with such fellows in the house, if anyone wanted to buy my Formian property!
Forgetful of all about him, he had not ridden more than a few miles, when he missed the road; his men, ignorant of the country, followed him without hesitation, and so it happened that, on stopping at one of the few farms on their way, to ask how far it still was to Arpinum, he learnt that he must ride back for nearly a couple of hours to regain the track he should have taken.
A Volscian by descent, he belonged to Rome through the accident of birth in the old municipality of Arpinum, which since the early part of the second century had enjoyed full Roman citizenship and therefore gave its citizens the right of suffrage and of honours in the capital.
If Cicero wished to leave Arpinum for one of his villas on the Campanian coast, he would simply have to follow the valley of the Liris until it reached the sea between Minturnae and Formiae, and at the latter place, a lively little town with charming views over the sea, close to the modern Gaeta, he would find another house of his own, the next he added to his possessions after he inherited Arpinum.
There Arpinum and Frusino became subject, the latter town was deprived of a third of its domain, and on the upper Liris in addition to Fregellae the Volscian town of Sora, which had previously been garrisoned, was now permanently converted into a Roman fortress and occupied by a legion of 4000 men. In this way the old Volscian territory was completely subdued, and became rapidly Romanized.
But the parvenu of Arpinum the 'new man', as aristocratic jealousy always loved to call him is by no means insensible to the true honours of ancestry. Tax-gatherers and usurers are as unpopular now as ever the latter very deservedly so.
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