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 disputationseristics, “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.