Servius Sulpicius Rufus

Servius Sulpicius Rufus was the greatest Roman jurist of the republic and is now best known for a letter of condolence. He studied rhetoric with Cicero, gave it up for law on the reported advice that he would never be the better orator, and became the leading authority of his generation: about a hundred and eighty books, of which nothing survives directly, and a school of pupils whose work passes into the later classical jurisprudence and from there into Justinian's Digest. Cicero credited him with turning Roman law from a collection of remembered rules into a subject with a method, capable of being taught by definition and division rather than by apprenticeship. He was consul in 51 BC. In the civil war he tried at length to mediate between Caesar and Pompey, joined Pompey without enthusiasm, was pardoned and made governor of Achaea by Caesar, and was sent by the senate as an envoy to Mark Antony at Mutina in 43 BC despite being seriously ill; he died on the journey, and the senate voted him a public funeral and a statue at Cicero's urging. The letter is from 45 BC, written to Cicero after the death of his daughter Tullia. It describes sailing back from Asia past the ruined towns of Aegina, Megara, Piraeus and Corinth, and asks whether a man should be so moved by the death of one small human being when the corpses of so many towns lie stretched out in one view. It is among the most quoted passages in Latin letters. His son was a poet and a friend of Tibullus. The Digest cites him at second hand through the jurists who followed him. Cicero delivered the Ninth Philippic to obtain the statue for him.

• Lived: 106 CE – 43 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: politician, writer