126
A righteous and conscientious verdict is now sufficiently indicated; but I have still, as it seems—not because I have any taste for railing, but because of his calumnies—to state the bare necessary facts about Aeschines, in return for a great many lies. I must let you know who this man, who starts on vituperation so glibly—who ridicules certain words of mine though he has himself said things that every decent man would shrink from uttering—really is, and what is his parentage.
127
Why, if my calumniator had been Aeacus, or Rhadamanthus, or Minos, instead of a mere scandalmonger, a market-place loafer, a poor devil of a clerk, he could hardly have used such language, or equipped himself with such offensive expressions. Hark to his melodramatic bombast: Oh, Earth! Oh, Sun! Oh, Virtue, and all that vaporing; his appeals to intelligence and education, whereby we discriminate between things of good and evil report—for that was the sort of rubbish you heard him spouting.