of Stoicism; but that they applied perhaps half unconsciously the principles of Stoicism to their own legal studies is almost certain.  The combination of legal training and Stoic influence (whether direct or unconscious) seems to have been capable of bringing the Roman aristocratic character to a high pitch of perfection; and it will be pleasant to take this friend of Cicero, whose public career we can clearly trace, and one or two of whose letters we still possess, as our example of a really well spent life in an age when time and talent were constantly abused and wasted.

Sulpicius and Cicero were born in the same year, 106; they went hand in hand in early life, and remained friends till their deaths in 43, Sulpicius dying a few months before Cicero.  They were both attached in early youth to the Scaevola just mentioned, the first of the great series of scientific Roman lawyers.  But the consulship of Cicero made a wide divergence in their lives.  In that year Sulpicius was a candidate for the consulship and failed; and then, resigning further attempts to obtain the highest honour, he retired for the next twelve years into private life, devoting himself to the work which has made his name immortal.  His writings are lost; nothing remains of them but a few chance fragments and allusions; but he was reckoned the second of the great writers on legal subjects, and it is probable that he contributed as much as any of them to the work of making Roman law what it has been as a power in the world, a factor in modern civilisation.  For he treated it, as his friend said of him,[177] with the hand and mind of an artist, laying out his whole subject and distributing it into its constituent parts, by definition and interpretation making clear what seemed obscure, and distinguishing the false from the true in legal principle.  In the splendid panegyric pronounced on him in the senate after his death,[178] Cicero again emphatically declared him to be unrivalled in jurisprudence.  In beautiful but untranslatable language he claims that he was “non magis iuris consultus, quam iustitiae,”—­an encomium which all great lawyers might well envy; he aimed rather at enabling men to be rid of litigation than at encouraging them to engage in it.

From such passages we might conjecture, even if we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was a man of very fine clay, of real humanitas in the widest sense of that expressive word; and this is entirely borne out in other ways.[179] Emerging at last from retirement, he stood again for the consulship in 52 B.C., and was elected.  The year of his office, 51, was the first in which the enemies of Caesar, with Cato at their head, began to attack his position and clamour for his recall from his command; this violent hostility Sulpicius tried, not without temporary success, to restrain, and the fact that a man of so just a mind should have taken this line is one of the best arguments for the reasonableness