Arpinum

A hilltop town southeast of Rome. Birthplace of both Cicero and the general Gaius Marius. From this small town came two men who shaped the late Republic.

Arpinum sat in the hills of Latium about seventy miles from Rome, a town of modest landowners that had held full Roman citizenship for barely a century when Cicero was born there in 106 BCE. Coming from such a place made him a new man, with no consul anywhere in his ancestry, which in Roman politics was a permanent disadvantage he never stopped answering. He kept a villa there all his life, and wrote that a man has two fatherlands, the one that bore him and the one that took him in.