On the Peace (121-125)

These considerations you should bear in mind and not pay heed to those who gratify you for the moment, while caring nothing for the future, nor to those who profess to love the people, but are in fact the bane of the whole state; since in times past also when men of this character took over the supremacy of the rostrum,[*] they led the city on to such a degree of folly that she suffered the fate which I described a moment ago.

And indeed what is most astonishing of all in your conduct is that you prefer as leaders of the people, not those who are of the same mind as the men who made Athens great, but those who say and do the same kind of things as the men who destroyed her power; and you do this albeit knowing full well that it is not alone in making the city prosperous that good leaders are superior to the base,

but that our democracy itself under the leadership of the former remained unshaken and unchanged for many years,[*] whereas under the guidance of these men it has already, within a short period of time,[*] been twice overthrown, and that, furthermore, our people who were driven into exile under the despots and in the time of the Thirty were restored to the state, not through the efforts of the sycophants,[*] but through those leaders who despised men of that character and were held in the highest respect for their integrity.[*]

Nevertheless, in spite of the many things which remind us how the city fared under both kinds of leadership, we are so pleased with the depravity of our orators that, although we see that many of our other citizens have been stripped of their patrimony because of the war and of the disorders which these sycophants have caused, while the latter, from being penniless, have become rich,[*] yet we are not aggrieved nor do we resent their prosperity

but remain patient with a condition of affairs wherein our city is reproached with doing violence to the Hellenes and extorting money from them,[*] while these men reap the harvest,[*] and wherein our people, who are told by the sycophants that they ought to rule over the rest of the world, are worse off than those who are slaves to oligarchy,[*] while these men, who had no advantage to start with, have risen because of our folly from a mean to an enviable position.