d more country-houses than
belong even to the wealthiest of English nobles. One such house at least
Cicero inherited from his father. It was about three miles from Arpinum,
a little town in that hill country of the Sabines which was the
proverbial seat of a temperate and frugal race, and which Cicero
describes in Homeric phrase as

"Rough but a kindly nurse of men."

In his grandfather's time it had been a plain farmhouse, of the kind
that had satisfied the simpler manners of former days--the days when
Consuls and Dictators were content, their time of office ended, to plow
their own fields and reap their own harvests. Cicero was born within its
walls, for the primitive fashion of family life still prevailed, and the
married son continued to live in his father's house. After the old man's
death, when the old-fashioned frugality gave way to a more sumptuous
manner of life, the house was greatly enlarged, one of the additions
being a library, a room of which the grandfather, who thought that his
contemporaries were like Syrian slaves, "the more Greek they knew the
greater knaves they were," had never felt the want; but in which his
son, especially in his later days, spent most of his time. The garden
and grounds were especially delightful, the most charming spot of all
being an island formed by the little stream Fibrenus. A description put
into the mouth of Quintus, the younger son of the house, thus depicts
it: "I have never seen a more pleasant spot. Fibrenus here divides his
stream into two of equal size, and so washes either side. Flowing
rapidly by he joins his waters again, having compassed just as much
ground as makes a convenient place for our literary discussions. This
done he hurries on, just as if the providing of such a spot had been his
only office and function, to fall into the Liris. Then, like one adopted
into a noble family, he loses his own obscurer name. The Liris indeed he
makes much colder. A colder stream than this indeed I never touched,
though I have seen many. I can scarce bear to dip my foot in it. You
remember how Plato makes Socrates dip his foot in Ilissus." Atticus too
is loud in his praises. "This, you know, is my first time of coming
here, and I feel that I cannot admire it enough. As to the splendid
villas which one often sees, with their marble pavements and gilded
ceilings, I despise them. And their water-courses, to which they give
the fine names of Nile or Euripus, who would not lau