Quintus Tullius Cicero

He was born into a family of the equestrian order, as the son of a wealthy landowner in Arpinum, some 100 kilometres (62 mi) south-east of Rome.

[1] Around 70 BC, he married Pomponia (sister of his brother's friend Atticus), a dominant woman of strong personality.

[3][page needed] The couple had a son born in 66 BC and named Quintus Tullius Cicero after his father.

[citation needed] During the Second Triumvirate, when the Roman Republic was again in civil war, Quintus, his son, and his brother were all proscribed.

Quintus Cicero also liked old-fashioned and harsh punishments, like putting a person convicted of patricide into a sack and throwing him into the sea.

Such convicts were traditionally "stripped, scourged, sewn up in a sack together with [a] dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey, and thrown into a river or the sea to drown".

[3][page needed] On the positive side, Quintus was utterly honest, even as a governor of a province, in which situation many Romans shamelessly amassed private property for themselves.