Lucius Lucilius Balbus was a jurist of the Lucilia gens of ancient Rome who lived in the 1st century BCE.
Balbus was one of the four notable pupils of the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex, and one of the legal instructors of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, the eminent lawyer and distinguished friend of the writer Cicero, who was said to have clearly surpassed his teacher.
He was probably the father of the Lucilius who was the companion of Appius Pulcher in Cilicia, and the brother of Quintus Lucilius Balbus, the Stoic philosopher. Cicero speaks of both the two Balbi as Stoics. The 18th century jurist Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, among others, proposed that the jurist Lucius has been confounded with Quintus the Stoic philosopher, and that it was just Quintus who was the Stoic philosopher and not Lucius.
The jurist was occasionally quoted in the works of Sulpicius; and, in the time of the 2nd century jurist Sextus Pomponius, his writings were on the verge of being lost, and either did not exist in a separate form, or, at least, were in the hands of few. In giving advice and pleading causes his manner was slow and deliberate.
References
- van den Berg, Christopher S. (2023). "Truthmaking and the Past". The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus: The Invention of Literary History. Cambridge University Press. p. 109. ISBN 9781009281348. Retrieved 2025-01-12.
- Cicero, Fam. 3.4
- Fritsen, Angela; Ijesewijn, Josef; Fantazzi, Charles, eds. (1991). "Virginis Dei Parentis Ovatio". Early Writings 2: Epistula Forti, Vita Ioannis Dullardi, Christi Triumphus, Ovatio Mariae, Clipeus Christi, Praelectio in Quartum Rhetoricorum Ad Herennium; Praelectio in Convivia Philelphi. Brill Publishers. p. 95. Retrieved 2025-01-12.
- Cicero, de Orat. 3.21
- Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, Historia juris civilis Romani ac Germanici § 149
- Digest i. tit. 2. s. 42
- Cicero, Brut. 42, pro Quint. 16, 17
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Graves, John Thomas (1870). "Balbus, L. Lucilius". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1.