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Updated: May 20, 2025
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.
So, my dear Fannius and Scaevola, we may look upon this as an established fact, that between good men there is, as it were of necessity, a kindly feeling, which is the source of friendship ordained by nature. But this same kindliness affects the many also. For that is no unsympathetic or selfish or exclusive virtue, which protects even whole nations and consults their best interests.
He was a Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius Scaevola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray his honor.
Similarly, having learnt from tradition that of all friendships that between Gaius Laelius and Publius Scipio was the most remarkable, I thought Laelius was just the person to support the chief part in a discussion on friendship which Scaevola remembered him to have actually taken.
Mucius was taken in the act, and whilst he was under examination, a pan of fire was brought to the king, who intended to sacrifice; Mucius thrust his right hand into the flame, and whilst it burnt stood looking at Porsenna with a steadfast and undaunted countenance; Porsenna at last in admiration dismissed him, and returned his sword, reaching it from his seat; Mucius received it in his left hand, which occasioned the name of Scaevola, left-handed, and said, "I have overcome the terrors of Porsenna, yet am vanquished by his generosity, and gratitude obliges me to disclose what no punishment could extort;" and assured him then, that three hundred Romans, all of the same resolution, lurked about his camp, only waiting for an opportunity; he, by lot appointed to the enterprise, was not sorry that he had miscarried in it, because so brave and good a man deserved rather to be a friend to the Romans than an enemy.
"He was so," said I, "in all his other preferments; but he was not tribune till the year after him; and when he sat in the Rostrum in that capacity, Crassus spoke in support of the Servilian law. I must observe, however, that Crassus had not Scaevola for his colleague in the censorship; for none of the Scaevolas ever sued for that office.
To these details may be added a very remarkable circumstance, which I received from another but not less authentic source. I have been assured that the attempt of the German Mutius Scaevola had a marked influence on the concessions which the Emperor made, because he feared that Staps, like him who attempted the life of Porsenna, might have imitators among the illuminati of Germany.
"My opinion," said I, "Brutus, is, that Q. Scaevola, and many others, had a thorough practical knowledge of the law; but that Servius alone understood it as science: which he could never have done by the mere study of the law, and without a previous acquaintance with the art which teaches us to divide a whole into its subordinate parts, to, decide an indeterminate idea by an accurate definition: to explain what is obscure, by a clear interpretation; and first to discover what things are of a doubtful nature, then to distinguish them by their different degrees of probability; and lastly, to be provided with a certain rule or measure by which we may judge what is true, and what false, and what inferences fairly may, or may not be deduced from any given premises.
In both these directions he was ably seconded by Pompey, half a generation later. On the other hand the futile efforts of philosophy to improve the situation were inspired during the earlier period by the chief priest Scaevola, a contemporary of Sulla, and during Pompey's and Caesar's time by Varro, the greatest scholar that Rome ever produced.
This same combination meets us also in the little pictures of the social life of cultivated men which Cicero has left us in some of his dialogues. There the speakers are usually of the nobility, often distinguished members of senatorial families, as in the de Oratore, where the chief personae are Crassus, Antonius, and Scaevola, the conservative triumvirate of the day.
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