Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/285

 OF THE ROMAN EIMPIRE. 267 sidered reason as the instrument of dispute; they in- CHAP, terpreted the laws according to the dictates of private ' ^ ' interest ; and the same pernicious habits might still ad- here to their characters in the public administration of the state. The honour of a liberal profession has in- deed 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 ^, 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 gravity of legal professors, by fur- nishing a rich client with subtilties to confound the plainest truth, and with arguments to colour 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 ignoi'ant 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 dis- missed, when their patience and fortune were almost exhausted ^. III. In the system of policy introduced by Augustus, Themilitary the governors, those at least of the imperial provinces, ° *^^'^** were invested with the full powers of the sovereign ? Maraertinus in Panegyr. vet. xi. 20 ; Asterius apud Photium, p. 1500. I* The curious passage of Ammianus, (1. xxx. c. 4.) in which he paints the manners of contemporary lawyers, affords a strange mixture of sound sense, false rhetoric, and extravagant satire. Godefroy (Prolegom. ad Cod. Theod. c. i. p. 185.) supports the historian by similar complaints, and au- thentic facts. In the fourth century, many camels might have been laden with law-books. Eunapius in Vet. Edesii, p. 72.