reason as the instrument of dispute; they
interpreted the laws according to the dictates of private interest and
the same pernicious habits might still adhere to their characters in the
public administration of the state. The honor of a liberal profession
has indeed been vindicated by ancient and modern advocates, who have
filled the most important stations, with pure integrity and consummate
wisdom: but in the decline of Roman jurisprudence, the ordinary
promotion of lawyers was pregnant with mischief and disgrace. The noble
art, which had once been preserved as the sacred inheritance of the
patricians, was fallen into the hands of freedmen and plebeians,
[122] who, with cunning rather than with skill, exercised a sordid and
pernicious trade. Some of them procured admittance into families for the
purpose of fomenting differences, of encouraging suits, and of preparing
a harvest of gain for themselves or their brethren. Others, recluse
in their chambers, maintained the dignity of legal professors, by
furnishing a rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest
truths, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions.
The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who
filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric.
Careless of fame and of justice, they are described, for the most part,
as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a
maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after
a tedious series of years, they were at length dismissed, when their
patience and fortune were almost exhausted. [123]

[Footnote 119: Summa igitur ope, et alacri studio has leges nostras
accipite; et vosmetipsos sic eruditos ostendite, ut spes vos pulcherrima
foveat; toto legitimo opere perfecto, posse etiam nostram rempublicam
in par tibus ejus vobis credendis gubernari. Justinian in proem.
Institutionum.]

[Footnote 120: The splendor of the school of Berytus, which preserved in
the east the language and jurisprudence of the Romans, may be computed
to have lasted from the third to the middle of the sixth century
Heinecc. Jur. Rom. Hist. p. 351-356.]

[Footnote 121: As in a former period I have traced the civil and
military promotion of Pertinax, I shall here insert the civil honors of
Mallius Theodorus. 1. He was distinguished by his eloquence, while he
pleaded as an advocate in the court of the Praetorian praefect. 2.
He governed one of