Gaius Cassius Longinus (consul 30)

Gaius Cassius Longinus was a Roman jurist and politician of the first century AD, born around 13 BC, a great nephew of the jurist Servius Sulpicius Rufus and a descendant of the Gaius Cassius Longinus who helped assassinate Julius Caesar. He served as suffect consul in the second half of AD 30, and as a pupil of Masurius Sabinus he became head of the legal school known as the Sabinians, sometimes called the Cassinians after him; his principal work, a multivolume commentary on the civil law, survives only through quotations by later jurists such as Iavolenus. After his consulship he governed the province of Asia from AD 40 to 41 and then the imperial province of Syria from AD 41 to 49. The emperor Nero exiled him to Sardinia in AD 65, and he returned to Rome, by then blind, only after Vespasian became emperor. The historian Tacitus records a speech Cassius gave in the Senate under Nero arguing that four hundred slaves of the murdered senator Lucius Pedanius Secundus should be executed under the ancient rule that all of a murdered master's slaves be put to death, a position he defended on grounds of the public good even while conceding it was unjust to the slaves themselves.