Cicero - Anthony Everitt [15]
We do not know what crops were grown on the estate, but for wealthier landowners olives and grapevines were popular. Grain would have been sown on the plain below Arpinum, and grass fields would have supported sheep, goats and oxen. Timber was a valuable commodity and it is likely that willows were cultivated by the river to provide baskets and panniers for transporting agricultural products. Oak was a useful source of acorns for pigs. Doubtless, there would have been an orchard and a vegetable garden near the house.
The Ciceros lived out a grand version of the Roman ideal of the good life, although, with the arrival of empire, untold wealth and urbanization, it was more honored in the breach than the observance. This ideal consisted of a small farm which a man could manage himself or with the help of a steward and which would provide most of his family’s food. For the well-to-do, of course, the hard work of tilling the land and bringing in the harvest was done by slaves and local farm laborers. But the myth was a tenacious plant and, half a century after Cicero’s death, the poet Horace showed that it still exerted a persuasive force. “This is what I prayed for!” he wrote. “A piece of land not so very large, with a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a bit of woodland.”
It was in such easy, calm surroundings that Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC. His arrival was easy and quick and apparently his mother, Helvia, suffered few labor pains. About two years later he was joined by a younger brother, called Quintus.
Roman names conveyed in quite a complicated way a good deal of information about their bearers. First came the praenomen, or personal name. There were only a few in general currency: Marcus was one of the most popular, but so were Caius or Gaius, Lucius, Quintus, Sextus and Publius. Annoyingly for historians, eldest sons usually bore the same first names as their fathers. Next came the nomen or family name: Tullius was an ancient name borne by Rome’s sixth king; a legendary leader of the Volscians, familiar from the story of Coriolanus, was called Attius Tullus.
Finally, the cognomen, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.”
Sometimes individuals were granted additional cognomina to mark a military success. So the famous Publius Cornelius Scipio was given the additional appellation of “Africanus” after he defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama in Africa.
As the young Cicero grew up he gradually learned the realities of the Roman world. In the first place, he was fairly lucky to survive; as many as one in five children died in their infancy and only about two thirds of those born reached maturity. By another stroke of good fortune, he was one of about 400,000 Roman citizens. He found himself near the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. Aristocrats stood at the apex. Rural gentry