In that year Sulpicius was a candidate for the consulship and failed; and then, resigning further attempts to obtain the highest honour, he retired for the next twelve years into private life, devoting himself to the work which has made his name immortal.

His writings are lost; nothing remains of them but a few chance fragments and allusions; but he was reckoned the second of the great writers on legal subjects, and it is probable that he contributed as much as any of them to the work of making Roman law what it has been as a power in the world, a factor in modern civilisation.

For he treated it, as his friend said of him,[177] with the hand and mind of an artist, laying out his whole subject and distributing it into its constituent parts, by definition and interpretation making clear what seemed obscure, and distinguishing the false from the true in legal principle.

In the splendid panegyric pronounced on him in the senate after his death,[178] Cicero again emphatically declared him to be unrivalled in jurisprudence.

In beautiful but untranslatable language he claims that he was "non magis iuris consultus, quam iustitiae,"-- an encomium which all great lawyers might well envy; he aimed rather at enabling men to be rid of litigation than at encouraging them to engage in it.
From such passages we might conjecture, even if we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was a man of very fine clay, of real _humanitas_ in the widest sense of that expressive word; and this is entirely borne out in other ways.[179] Emerging at last from retirement, he stood again for the consulship in 52 B.C., and was elected.