This mood of mysticism probably lasted only a few months. The reading he went through in seeking justification for his conclusions led him to write the _Hortensius_, that enthusiastic eulogy of philosophy which converted St. Augustine to a new mode of life. In its fragments we find traces of the same un-Roman mysticism. Then in the first _Tusculan Disputation_, which he wrote in May of the same year, he repeated the gist of the argument which he had used in the _Consolatio_ and with nearly as much assurance. However, in this same month he began his first draft of the _Academica_, a careful review of epistemological theory, and this brought him back to his earlier agnosticism. His letters now show less interest in the proposed shrine. In July they cease entirely: it would seem that the “apotheosis” of Tullia was abandoned. Let us take one more illustration. James Bryce once reckoned that Roman law was still influential in the courts of about three hundred million people; and he pointed out that it had gained this capacity because the jurists of the Empire had based every paragraph of the statutes upon the general principle of equity. Stroux, in his brilliant monograph entitled _Summum jus summa injuria_, has recently demonstrated that Cicero, employing Aristotelian rules of rhetoric, exerted a powerful influence upon the reform of Roman Law by emphasizing in his rhetorical treatises the claims of equity as against statute, and of intention (_voluntas_) as against the literal interpretation of the word. This is all to the good. But the process was hardly as simple as that. The Aristotelian rules of rhetoric had worked no vast reforms in Greece, and at Rome they were not likely to prove less arid in practical life if left to the mercy of text-books. Ideas do not readily revive in that impersonal fashion.