Cicero - Anthony Everitt [14]
Arpinum was (and, now called Arpino, still is) a picturesque hill town some seventy miles or so south of Rome. It was an out-of-the-way spot, and it took up to three days to journey to the capital in comfort. Cicero’s family was part of the local aristocracy; they were landowners and farmers and may also have run a fulling business. Fullers were the Roman equivalents of laundry and dry-cleaning firms: soap had not been invented and clothes were bleached with human and animal urine and various easily found chemicals, such as potash and carbonate of soda, before being washed thoroughly in water and dried. It was an unpleasant job and not one to boast about—just the kind of detail in his past that anyone who was upwardly mobile would wish to forget and an unfriendly critic to expose.
Cicero’s paternal grandfather was a civic worthy and played a leading part in local politics. He was obviously not much of a democrat, for he opposed a motion to adopt secret ballots on the town council. But he had a gift for public administration which a leading Roman statesman of the day recognized: “With your courage and ability, Marcus Cicero, I wish that you had preferred to be active at the political center rather than at the municipal level.” However, like his ancestors, he had no ambitions for a national career and kept his distance from the busy, competitive hub of the Republic’s political life. There was no pressing need to do otherwise, for the central authorities interfered as little as possible in provincial life. Arpinum carried on more or less as it had always done with little fear of external busybodies.
Marcus Cicero had two sons. They both seem to have reacted against his stuffy provincialism and political conservatism. The younger, Lucius, had progressive ideas and was, his nephew said, a humanissimus homo—a most cultivated man. Apparently he aimed to make a mark on the national stage and accompanied the distinguished Roman orator and politician Marcus Antonius (grandfather of the man we know as Mark Antony) on a campaign against pirates in the eastern Mediterranean. His ambitions came to nothing, for he probably died soon after his return.
Lucius’s brief career is an illustration of the importance of connections for anyone wanting to rise up the political ladder. A glance at the Cicero family tree shows how even a relatively undistinguished provincial family far from the center of events was linked by marriage to leading aristocratic clans and ultimately to senior personalities in Rome. Lucius probably got his posting through the good offices of his maternal uncle, Marcus Gratidius, who was a senior officer on Antonius’s staff. Gratidius was a member of another leading local family, but its political leanings (unlike those of the Ciceros) were left-wing and popularis. He married a sister of Arpinum’s most celebrated son, Caius Marius, hammer of the German tribes and a gate-crasher into Roman politics without a drop of noble blood in his veins. Marius himself married a certain Julia, a noblewoman whose later claim to fame was that she was Julius Caesar’s aunt.
Lucius’s elder brother Marcus, our Cicero’s father, was held back from greater things by poor health and was something of a scholar. He lived on the family estate near Arpinum on the River Liris, where he spent much of his time