BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, EARLIEST EDUCATION
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO1 was born on his father's estate in the district belonging to the municipium of Arpinum on the 3rd of January in the consulate of C. Atilius Serranus and C. Servilius Caepio, 106 B. C. In later times indeed in Roman schools and in the general consciousness of the Latin world the man and the name came in a way to be canonized. It was then perhaps that schoolmasters endowed him with a royal pedigree, as though he were sprung from some Volscian king of old.2 The community of Arpinum was a praefectura before the Marsian war ( 90-89 B. c.), i.e., the chief governing official was sent from Rome; but it became a municipium after that time. That highland country in certain periods of the olden times had been under the rule of Earlier Rome's greatest rivals, the Samnites, as had been the neighboring communities of Sora and Cesennia (Liv. 9, 44). Other notable towns of that region were Atina, Casinum, Aquinum. While the mature Cicero owned villas in many other and more soft and charming spots of Italy, he bore to his birthplace a certain loyalty that seemed to rise with his own rising fame.
The more distant periphery of the capital, places unlike Bovillae, Labicum, Gabii, had not yet been rendered desolate by the doles of grain and the other attractions which the Campus,
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