Scaevola.
Quintus Mucius Scaevola filled successively most of
the important offices of the State, and was for many
years, and until death, a member of the college of
Augurs. He was eminent for his legal learning,
and to a late and infirm old age was still consulted
in questions of law, never refusing to receive clients
at any moment after daylight. But while he was
regarded as foremost among the jurists of his time,
he professed himself less thoroughly versed in the
laws relating to mortgages than two of his coevals,
to whom he was wont to send those who brought cases
of this class for his opinion or advice. He was
remarkable for early rising, constant industry, and
undeviating punctuality,—at the meetings
of the Senate being always the first on the ground.
No man held a higher reputation than Scaevola for
rigid and scrupulous integrity. It is related
of him that when as a witness in court he had given
testimony full, clear, strong, and of the most damnatory
character against the person on trial, he protested
against the conviction of the defendant on his testimony,
if not corroborated, on the principle, held sacred
in the Jewish law, that it would be a dangerous precedent
to suffer the issue of any case to depend on the intelligence
and veracity of a single witness. When, after
Marius had been driven from the city, Sulla asked
the Senate to declare him by their vote a public enemy,
Scaevola stood in a minority of one; and when Sulla
urged him to give his vote in the affirmative, his
reply was: “Although you show me the military
guard with which you have surrounded the Senate-house,
although you threaten me with death, yon will never
induce me, for the little blood still in an old man’s
veins, to pronounce Marius—who has been
the preserver of the city and of Italy—an
enemy.”
His daughter married Lucius Licinius Crassus, who
had such reverence tor his father-in-law, that, when
a candidate for the consulship, he could not persuade
himself in the presence of Scaevola to cringe to the
people, or to adopt any of the usual self-humiliating
methods of canvassing for the popular vote.
PALIMPSESTS[Footnote: Rubbed again,—the
parchment, or papyrus, having been first polished
for use, and then rubbed as clean as possible, to be
used a second time.]—the name and the thing—are
at least as old as Cicero. In one of his letters
he banters his friend Trebatius for writing to him
on a palimpsest,[Footnote: In palimpsesto.]
and marvels what there could have been on the parchment
which he wanted to erase. This was a device probably
resorted to in that age only in the way in which rigid
economists of our day sometimes utilize envelopes and
handbills. But in the dark ages, when classical
literature was under a cloud and a ban, and when the
scanty demand for writing materials made the supply
both scanty and precarious, such manuscripts of profane
