But the truth is that these men care for naught save enriching themselves at the expense
 of the youth. It is their “philosophy” applied to eristic disputations eristics, “wordy wrangling” “mere disputation for its own
 sake”; cf. General Introd., Vol. I, p. xxi and Isoc.
 13.1 . that effectively produces this result; for these rhetoricians, who
 care nothing at all for either private or public affairs, take most pleasure in those
 discourses which are of no practical service in any particular. These young men, to be sure, may well be pardoned for holding such views; for in all
 matters they are and always have been inclined toward what is extraordinary and
 astounding. But those who profess to give them training are deserving of censure because,
 while they condemn those who deceive in cases involving private contracts in business and
 those who are dishonest in what they say, yet they themselves are guilty of more
 reprehensible conduct; for the former wrong sundry other persons, but the latter inflict
 most injury upon their own pupils. And they have caused mendacity to increase to such a degree that now certain men, seeing
 these persons prospering from such practices, have the effrontery to write that the life
 of beggars and exiles is more enviable than that of the rest of mankind, and they use this
 as a proof that, if they can speak ably on ignoble subjects, it follows that in dealing
 with subjects of real worth they would easily find abundance of arguments. The most ridiculous thing of all, in my opinion, is this, that by these arguments they
 seek to convince us that they possess knowledge of the science of government, when they
 might be demonstrating it by actual work in their professed subject; for it is fitting
 that those who lay claim to learning and profess to be wise men should excel laymen and be
 better than they, not in fields neglected by everybody else, but where all are rivals.
 But as it is, their conduct resembles that of an athlete who, although pretending to be
 the best of all athletes, enters a contest in which no one would condescend to meet him.
 For what sensible man would undertake to praise misfortunes? No, it is obvious that they
 take refuge in such topics because of weakness.