M. TULLIUS CICERO was born at Arpinum in B.C. 106, and consequently in the same year as Pompey. His father was of the Equestrian order, and lived upon his hereditary estate near Arpinum, but none of his ancestors had ever held any of the offices of state. Cicero was therefore, according to the Roman phraseology, a New Man (see p. 128)(Fourth paragraph of Chapter XVIII.--Transcriber). He served his first and only campaign in the Social War (B.C. 89), and in the troubled times which followed he gave himself up with indefatigable perseverance to those studies which were essential to his success as a lawyer and orator. When tranquillity was restored by the final discomfiture of the Marian party, he came forward as a pleader at the age of twenty-five. The first of his extant speeches in a civil suit is that for P. Quintius (B.C. 81); the first delivered upon a criminal trial was that in defense of Sex. Roscius of Ameria, who was charged with parricide by Chrysogonus, a freedman of Sulla, supported, as it was understood, by the influence of his patron. In consequence of the failure of his health, Cicero quitted Rome in B.C. 79, and spent two years in study in the philosophical and rhetorical schools of Athens and Asia Minor. On his return to the city he forthwith took his station in the foremost rank of judicial orators, and ere long stood alone in acknowledged pre-eminence; his most formidable rivals--Hortensius, eight years his senior, and C. Aurelius Cotta, who had long been kings of the bar--having been forced, after a short but sharp contest for supremacy, to yield.