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A Great Orator Mislaid

Ser. Sulpicius Rufus (cos. 51) has seldom gone short of approbation: not only noble and patrician but the first jurist to reach the consulate since Q. Scaevola. When Cicero in 63 spoke in defence of Murena he deprecated and derided the claims of legal erudition. Seventeen years later, composing in dialogue form a history of Roman eloquence, he made handsome amends to Servius, at some length (Brutus 150 ff.). After matching M. Antonius with L. Crassus, the pair of masters who dominated the epoch preceding his own, the expositor brings Crassus into comparison with the jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola (by happy coincidence they shared the fasces in 95). Each was far from incompetent in the science professed by the other. Whereupon the alert Brutus was moved to intervene with a question: might not a similar parallel for excellence obtain between Cicero and Ser. Sulpicius, likewise coeval? The artful device insinuates a long excursus, breaking the chronological order of the whole treatise. Together from early youth and together at Rhodes, the two friends practised the same ‘exercitationes’. In oratory Servius might perhaps have become ‘par principibus’. He preferred the law: in fact he excelled Scaevola and all predecessors, so Cicero affirms, to the ingenuous surprise of the interlocutor. Servius had made a sagacious choice between the two civilian arts. In oratory (first in rank and estimation at Rome) Servius achieved enough for a lawyer and a consul: ‘quantum esset et ad tuendum ius civile et ad obtinendam consularem dignitatem satis’ (Brutus 155). The Brutus furnishes ready and vivid verdicts on speakers of the time. Five consular Lentuli are put on show for style and manner, from Clodianus and Sura to the savage and minatory Crus. All dead, it is true, and they benefit from much indulgence. For Servius no writing of Cicero acclaims a public occasion when the consul displayed his talent – and no appeal to an oration of any kind. For the eloquence of Servius the friend falls back on what the legal works disclose: ‘et litterarum scientiam et loquendi elegantiam’ (153). Posterity is defrauded, the earnest student at a loss.