.C., is known. The other family was a branch of the Tullii, settled
from an ancient period at Arpinum. This family, four of whose members
are noticed specially below, did not achieve more than municipal
eminence until the time of M. Tullius Cicero, the great orator.

I. MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO (106-43 B.C.), Roman orator and politician, was
born at Arpinum on the 3rd of January 106 B.C. His mother, Helvia, is
said to have been of good family. His father was by some said to have
been descended from Attius Tullius, the Volscian host of Coriolanus,
while spiteful persons declared him to have been a fuller; in any case
he was a Roman knight with property at Arpinum and a house in Rome. His
health was weak, and he generally lived at Arpinum, where he devoted
himself to literary pursuits. Cicero spent his boyhood partly in his
native town and partly at Rome. The poet Archias, he says, first
inspired him with the love of literature. He was much impressed by the
teaching of Phaedrus, the Epicurean, at a period before he assumed the
_toga virilis_; he studied dialectic under Diodotus the Stoic, and in 88
B.C. attended the lectures of Philo, the head of the Academic school,
whose devoted pupil he became. He studied rhetoric under Molo (Molon) of
Rhodes, and law under the guidance of Q. Mucius Scaevola, the augur and
jurisconsult. After the death of the augur, he transferred himself to
the care of Q. Mucius Scaevola, the _pontifex maximus_, a still more
famous jurisconsult, nephew of the augur. His literary education at this
period consisted largely of verse-writing and making translations from
Greek authors. We hear of an early poem named _Pontius Glaucus_ the
subject of which is uncertain, and of translations of Xenophon's
_Oeconomica_ and the _Phenomena_ of Aratus. Considerable fragments of
the latter work are still extant. To this period also belongs his _de
Inventione rhetorica_, of which he afterwards spoke lightly (_de Orat._
i. 5), but which enjoyed a great vogue in the middle ages. Cicero also,
according to Roman practice, received military training. At the age of
seventeen he served in the social war successively under Pompeius Strabo
and Sulla (89 B.C.). In the war between Marius and Sulla his sympathies
were with Sulla, but he did not take up arms (_Sext. Rosc._ 136, 142).

His forensic life begins in 81 B.C., at the age of twenty-five. A speech
delivered in this year, _pro Quinctio_, is still extant; it is concerned
w