Hence the complicated principles of jurisprudence and of the Roman constitution became a necessary part of a liberal education. The brilliant orator, indeed, did sometimes affect to look down with contempt on such black-letter and antiquarian lore, and stigmatize it as pedantry;[422] but still common sense compelled the sober-minded to acknowledge the necessity of the study. They saw that in the courts eloquence could only be considered as the handmaid to legal knowledge, even though the saying of Quintilian were true—“_Et leges ipsæ nihil valent nisi actoris idoneâ voce munitæ_.”[423] When, therefore, a Roman youth had completed his studies under his teacher of rhetoric, he not only frequented the forum in order to learn the practical application of the oratorical principles which he had acquired, and frequently took some celebrated orator as a model, but also studied the principles of jurisprudence under an eminent jurist, and attended the consultations in which they gave to their clients their expositions of law. In fact the young Roman acquired his legal knowledge in the _atrium_ of the jurisconsult, somewhat in the same manner that the law student of the present day pursues his education in the chambers of a barrister. He studied the subject practically and empirically rather than in its theory and general principles. Almost all the knowledge which we possess is derived from the labours of writers who flourished long after constitutional liberty had expired. The earliest systematic works on Roman law were the Enchiridion or Manual of Pomponius, and the Institutes of Gaius, who flourished in the times of Hadrian and the Antonines. Both these works were for a long time lost, although numerous fragments were preserved in the Pandects or Digest of Justinian. In 1816, however, Niebuhr discovered a palimpsest MS., in which the Epistles of St. Jerome were written over the erased Institutes of Gaius. But owing to the decisions and interpretations of the great practising jurists, to the want of any system of reporting and recording, and to the numerous misunderstandings of the Roman historians respecting the laws and constitutional history of their country, the whole subject long continued in a state of confusion: new contradictory theories had been gradually introduced, and old difficulties had not been explained and reconciled. Gian Baptista Vico, in his _Scienza Nova_, was the first who dispelled the clouds of error and reduced it to a system; and his example was afterwards so successfully followed by Niebuhr, that modern students can understand the subject more clearly, and have a more comprehensive antiquarian knowledge of it, than the writers of the Augustan age.