s
boyhood[397]. In the charming introduction to the second book of
his work _de Legibus_ (on the Constitution), he dwells with genuine
delight on this feeling and these associations; and there too we get
a hint of what Dr. Schmidt tells us is the peculiar charm of the
spot,--the presence and the sound of water; for if he is right, the
villa was placed between two arms of the limpid little river Fibrenus,
which here makes a delta as it joins the larger Liris[398].

But of this house we know for certain neither the site nor the
plan,--not so much indeed as we know about a villa of the brother
Quintus, not far away, the building of which is described with such
exactness in a letter written to the absent owner[399], that Schmidt
thinks himself justified in applying it by analogy to the villa of
the elder brother. But such reasoning is hardly safe. What we do know
about the old house is that it was originally a true villa rustica,--a
house with land cultivated by the owner that Cicero's father, who had
weak health and literary tastes, had added to it considerably, and
that Cicero himself had made it into a comfortable country residence,
with all necessary conveniences. He did not farm the ancestral land
attached to it, either himself or by a bailiff, but let it in small
holdings[400] (praediola), and we could wish that he had told us
something of his tenants and what they did with the land. It was not,
therefore, a real farm-house, but a farm-house made into a pleasant
residence, like so many manor-houses still to be seen in England.
Its atrium had no doubt retired (so to speak) into the rear of the
building, and had become a kitchen, and you entered, as in most
country-houses of this period, through a vestibule directly into a
peristyle: some idea of such an arrangement may be gained from the
accompanying ground-plan of the villa of Diomedes just outside
Pompeii, which was a city house adapted to rural conditions (villa
pseudurbana).[401]

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.
Formiae was a very convenient spot; it lay on the via Appia, and was
thus in direct co