The early years of Cicero were spent partly in his native hills, partly in Rome. He tells that, as far back as he can remember anything, he recollects the help and the encouragement which his childish efforts received from the poet Archias. Archias came to Rome in 102 B.C. (when Cicero would be four years old) and lived as an inmate of the house of Lucullus. When, forty years later, Cicero appeared as counsel for his old tutor, and successfully asserted his claims to the citizenship before a Roman law-court,[1] he told the jury that Archias had more right than any man living to claim the benefit of whatever skill in pleading he possessed, for it was Archias who had first implanted in him the love of those studies which had made him an orator. Throughout life Cicero was an omnivorous reader. His theory was that a man who wished to excel in oratory could not study too much nor make his range of culture too wide; and we gather from his descriptions[2] that he and the group of cousins to which he belonged were trained from the first on this system.
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Cicero's Training
here countless traces of our ancestors. Just look at this country-house; you see it, as it is now, enlarged by the care of my father, who having weak health passed almost all his life here in literary pursuits; but in this very house, I must tell you, when it was a little old-fashioned cottage, like that of Curius in the Sabine country, I was born. And so there is a something, some sort of lurking feeling and fancy, which seems to make me take a peculiar pleasure in it. And why not? when we remember that the wise man of old is said to have rejected immortality that he might see Ithaca once more.
