censorial rank, published a systematic treatise called _Tripertita_,
which was long afterwards held in reverence as containing the _cunabula
iuris_, the cradle out of which the vast systems of later ages sprang.
Fifty years later, in the circle of the younger Scipio, begins the
illustrious line of the Mucii Scaevolae. Three members of this family,
each a distinguished jurist, rose to the consulate in the stormy
half-century between the Gracchi and Sulla. The last and greatest of the
three represented the ideal Roman more nearly than any other citizen of
his time. The most eloquent of jurists and the most learned of orators,
he was at the same time a brilliant administrator and a paragon of
public and private virtue; and his murder at the altar of Vesta, in the
Marian proscription, was universally thought the most dreadful event
Of an age of horrors. His voluminous and exhaustive treatise on Civil
Law remained a text-book for centuries, and was a foundation for the
Writings of all later Roman jurists.

The combination of jurisconsult and orator in the younger Scaevola was
somewhat rare; from an early period the two professions of jurist and
pleader were sharply distinguished, though both were pathways to the
highest civic offices. Neither his father nor his cousin (the other two
of the triad) was distinguished in oratory; nor were the two great
contemporaries of the former, who both published standard works on civil
law, Manius Manilius and Marcus Junius Brutus. The highest field for
oratory was, of course, in the political, and not in the purely legal,
sphere; and the unique Roman constitution, an oligarchy chosen almost
wholly by popular suffrage, made the practice of oratory more or less of
a necessity to every politician. Well-established tradition ascribed to
the greatest statesman of the earlier Republic, Appius Claudius Caecus,
the first institution of written oratory. His famous speech in the senate
against peace with Pyrrhus was cherished in Cicero's time as one of the