6
You, they will say, are the author (for ‘actor’ would understate the case) who has laid down the laws of noble conduct; and no sooner 1s the lump of figs presented than the monkey 1s revealed; your lips are the lips of a philosopher, and your heart is quite other; it is no injustice to say that those sentiments for which you claim admiration have ‘wetted your lips, and left your palate dry” You have not had to watt long for retribution; you spoke unadvisedly in scorn of human needs; and, this little while after, behold you making public renunciation of your freedom! Surely Nemesis was standing behind your back as you drank in the flattering tributes to your superiority; did she not smile in her divine fore-knowledge of the impending change, and mark how you forgot to propitiate her before you assatled the victims whom fortune’s mutability had reduced to such courses?
7
Now I want you to imagine a rhetorician writing on the theme that Aeschines, after bis indictment of Timarchus, was himself proved guilty by eyewitnesses of similar iniquity; would, or would not, the amusement of the audience be heightened by the fact that he had got Timarchus punished for offences excused by youth, whereas he was himself an old man at the time of his own guilt? Why, you are like the quack who offered a cough-mixture which twas to cure instantaneously, and could hardly get the promise out for coughing.
