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 (like the Ciceros), businessmen and merchants, made up the second tier in Roman society; they tended to avoid entering national politics, for members of the Senate were not allowed to accept public contracts or to engage in overseas trade. Originally a military class, they were called equites or knights—that is, men who were rich enough to buy a horse for a military campaign.
Beneath them were the mass of the people: shopkeepers, artisans, smallholders and, at the bottom of the pile, landless farmworkers. Living standards could be low and uncertain and the struggle against poverty was unremitting. Competition for jobs was fierce.
However, there was one group even less fortunate than the plebs: the slaves. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome’s ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens. In the city of Rome it is estimated that slaves amounted to about a quarter of the population in Cicero’s day. Many household servants were slaves. In the case of the Cicero family, the surviving evidence suggests that they were treated kindly.
Both Cicero and his brother followed the common practice of freeing domestic slaves as a reward for good service or allowing them to buy their freedom. This automatically gave them Roman citizenship and the sons of freedmen were eligible for public office. Most ex-slaves continued to work for their former owners, for whom emancipation had a number of advantages. The hope of eventual freedom helped to discourage slave revolts; and allowing a slave to purchase his liberty either from his savings or by mortgaging his future labor ensured a return on the owner’s investment, which would not be forthcoming in the event of the slave’s (perhaps costly) illness and death.
The dominant figure in the lives of Marcus and Quintus was their father. By tradition the paterfamilias was the absolute master of his family. On his own property he could act as he pleased. He was entitled to torture or kill his slaves and to put his wife or children to death. His word went and there was no right of appeal.
By contrast, women were cast as demure, silent and usually unseen helpmeets. They managed the household and devoted much time to spinning or weaving (the classical equivalent of knitting). They were not given personal names and even sisters were known simply by their nomen—by today’s standards, not only demeaning but extremely confusing. Their essential function was to find a husband and they could be married off as young as twelve years of age (although consummation was usually delayed for a couple of years or so). Most marriages were arranged and in the upper classes were a means of forging political and economic alliances.
Romantic attachment was felt to be beside the point. If a wife was seen in public with her husband, any display of affection was universally felt to be indecent. Less than a century before Cicero’s birth, Cato the Censor, self-appointed guardian of traditional Roman values, expelled a candidate for the Consulship from the Senate on the grounds that he had kissed his wife in broad daylight and in front of their daughter.
Unsurprisingly, Helvia is a shadowy figure, although she seems to have been a sharp-eyed housewife. Quintus recalled “how our mother in the old days used to seal up the empty bottles, so that bottles drained on the sly could not be included in the empties.” It is curious that throughout his copious writings Cicero himself never once mentions her: this may simply be a consequence of the low status of women, but perhaps his silence reflects some unhappiness in his childhood, which may in turn have helped to create the adult man with all his multiple insecurities.
In practice, Roman society was not exactly as it seemed on the surface. In the final years of the Roman Republic old conventions were decaying and bonds were loosening. Young men were more rebellious than their fathers had been; those who lived in Rome increasingly left home before marriage and set up house in small apartments in the city center, where they learned how to have a good time on little money.