The emperor is at pains to kindle enthusiasm for jurisprudence. He exhorts the students to exert all diligence, so that on the completion of their studies the glorious hope of governing the Empire may be theirs.[495] For, as Gibbon remarks, ‘all the civil magistrates were drawn from the profession of the law.’[496] _Antecessores_[497] or lecturing lawyers were appointed throughout the Empire, and the places where they taught were called ‘stationes’.[498] The course, at any rate in the time of Justinian, lasted five years (_Constitution_, ‘Omnem Reipublicae’, § 5). Learned lawyers like Antistius Labeo under Augustus lectured for six months and devoted six months to writing.[499] When the students dispersed themselves through the provinces there was no lack of opportunity to practise their profession. The court of the Praetorian prefect of the East alone required the services of one hundred and fifty advocates,[500] and the rewards so liberally promised by Justinian for the ‘laudabile vitaeque hominum necessarium advocationis officium’[501] must have created a vast interest in the study of law. Whether it was the fault of the teachers or of the pupils or of the social conditions, it is clear that lawyers had a bad name in the fourth as well as in the fifth century. The vivid and caustic description of Ammianus is well known.[502] He is suspicious of legal cunning and has the soldier’s impatience of rhetoric. We must therefore allow something for his prejudices. But his analysis cannot be wholly false. We may discount his language when he describes the profession as consisting of ‘violenta et rapacissima genera hominum’, but when he enumerates these classes and gives each its special characteristics, we feel that he may exaggerate but that he does not invent. The first class consists of mischief-makers and robbers, ‘odia struentes infesta’. Their oratory is empty and artificial: ‘eloquentiam inanis quaedam imitatur fluentia loquendi’. The second class consists of fraudulent people who make a superstition and a mystery of the law, increasing its entanglements, ‘velut fata natalicia praemonstrantes’, in order to enhance their own importance. Thirdly, there are the unscrupulous advocates who are always ready to sacrifice truth to money or fame. Finally, we have ‘a shameless race, perverse and ignorant—men who, having run away from school too young, scurry about in the nooks and corners of various states’.[503] Cicero is the ideal—‘excellentissimus omnium Cicero’—and Ammianus regards the practice of his day as erring from the good of the past.