The golden age of Roman jurisprudence was from the birth of Cicero to the reign of the Emperor Alexander Severus, 222 A.D.; before this period it was an occult science, confined to praetors, pontiffs, and patrician lawyers.  But in the latter days of the republic law became the fashionable study of Roman youth, and eminent masters arose.  The first great lawyer who left behind him important works was Q. Mucius Scaevola, who wrote a treatise in eighteen books on the civil law.  “He was,” says Cicero, “the most eloquent of jurists and the most learned of orators.”  This work, George Long thinks, had a great influence on contemporaries and on subsequent jurists, who followed it as a model.  It is the oldest work from which there are any excerpts in the Digest.

Servius Sulpicius, the friend of Cicero and his fellow-student in oratory, surpassed his teachers Balbus and Gallus, and was the equal in reputation of the great Mucius Scaevola, the Pontifex Maximus, who said it was disgraceful for a patrician and a noble to be ignorant of the law with which he had to do.  Cicero ascribes the great superiority of Servius as a lawyer to the study of philosophy, which disciplined and developed his mind, and enabled him to deduce his conclusions from his premises with logical precision.  He left behind him one hundred and eighty treatises, and had numerous pupils, among whom A. Ofilius and Alfenus Varus, Cato, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Cicero were great lawyers.  Labeo, in the time of Augustus, wrote four hundred books on jurisprudence, spending six months in the year in giving instruction to his pupils and in answering legal questions, and the other six months in the country in writing books.  Like all the great Roman jurists, he was versed in literature and philosophy, and so devoted to his profession that he refused political office.  His rival Capito was equally learned in all departments of the law, and left behind him as many treatises as Labeo.  These two jurists were the founders of celebrated schools, like the ancient philosophers, and each had distinguished followers.  Gaius, who flourished in the time of the Antonines, was a great legal authority; and the recent discovery of his Institutes has revealed the least mutilated fragment of Roman jurisprudence which exists, and one of the most valuable, which sheds great light on ancient Roman law; it was found in the library of Verona.  No Roman jurist had a higher reputation than Papinian, who was praefectus praetorio under Septimius Severus (193 A.D.),—­an office which made him second only to the Emperor, a sort of grand vizier, whose power extended over all departments of the State; he was beheaded by Caracalla.  The great commentator Cujacius declares that he was the first of all lawyers who have been, or who are to be; that no one ever surpassed him in legal knowledge, and no one will ever equal him.  Paulus was his contemporary, and held the same office as Papinian.  He was the most fertile of Roman law-writers, and there is more taken