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Marius He was reared at the plough, in circumstances so humble that they seemed to preclude him from access even to the municipal offices of Arpinum: he learned early what he practised afterwards even when a general to bear hunger and thirst, the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and to sleep on the hard ground.
He rose, and in reply to Cicero, in a forced tone of humility protested his innocence. He tried also another point. Was he, a man of ancient and noble family; to be hastily condemned by his fellow-nobles on the word of this 'foreigner', as he contemptuously called Cicero this parvenu from Arpinum?
It included, as we have seen, an estate at Arpinum and a house in Rome. And then he had numerous legacies. This is a source of income which is almost strange to our modern ways of acting and thinking. It seldom happens among us that a man of property leaves any thing outside the circle of his family. Sometimes an intimate friend will receive a legacy.
Towns like Arpinum, Fundi and Formiae had been admitted to the citizen body without forfeiting their self-government. Absorption need not now entail the almost penal consequences of the dissolution of the constitution; while the possession of citizenship ensured the right of appeal and a full participation in the religious festivals and the amenities of the capital.
Two-thirds of his life were over, and a name which was to sound throughout the world and be remembered through all ages, had as yet been scarcely heard of beyond the army and the political clubs in Rome. He was born at Arpinum, a Latin township, seventy miles from the capital, in the year 157 B.C. His father was a small farmer, and he was himself bred to the plough.
If there had been any ground for their disagreement, there was nothing to notice. So much for that day. On the morrow we left for Arpinum. Quintus had to remain in the Retreat; I was going to stay at Aquinum.
But a few days remained before that on which the Consular elections, fixed for the eighteenth of October, were to take place in the Campus Martius—whereat, it was already understood that Sergius Cataline, frustrated the preceding year, by the election of the great orator of Arpinum to his discomfiture, was about once more to try the fortunes of himself and of the popular faction.
His birth was now no bar to any social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from Arpinum.
He has also a good deal to say about his brother's household, which, as I have said before, was not very happy. Here is a scene of their domestic life. "When I reached Arpinum, my brother came to me. First we had much talk about you; afterwards we came to the subject which you and I had discussed at Tusculum. I never saw any thing so gentle, so kind as my brother was in speaking of your sister.
"It was, then, thou, whom I saw in the feeble lamplight with the accursed wretch that crosses my path everywhere, the dastard, drivelling dotard of Arpinum; thou that despite thine oath, didst lead him to detect the man, thou hadst sworn to obey, and follow! Thou! it is thou, then, that houndest mine enemies upon my track!
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