Antidosis (146-150)

“When you say these things to men whose conduct is the opposite of all which has been said, do you not suppose that they will take offense and think that you are showing up the unworthiness of their own lives? For possibly if they had seen that it is through hard work and sacrifice that you provide yourself with the means wherewith to discharge your public duties and to maintain your affairs in general, they would not have felt the same about it.

But in fact they think that these fees which come to you from your foreign pupils are much greater than they actually are, and they consider that you live in greater ease and comfort than not only the people in general but also than those who cultivate philosophy and are of the same profession as yourself. “For they see most of the sophists, excepting those who have embraced your life and ways, showing off their oratory in the public assemblies or in private gatherings, contesting against each other, making extravagant professions, disputing, reviling each other, omitting nothing in the language of abuse,

but in effect damaging their own cause and giving license to their auditors, now to ridicule what they say, sometimes to praise them, most often to despise them, and again to think of them whatever they like. But in you they see a man who has no part in these things,[*] who lives in a manner different from the sophists as well as from laymen, and from those who enjoy many possessions as well as from those who live in want.

It is true that reasonable and intelligent people might perhaps congratulate you on these grounds, but people who are less fortunate and are wont to be more chagrined at the honest prosperity of others than at their own ill fortune cannot fail to be surly and resentful. Knowing, then, that such will be the attitude of your audience, consider well what you had better say and what you had better leave unsaid.”

But I thought as he said these things and I think now that they would be of all men the strangest and most perverse who could take offense at being told that I hold myself at the service of Athens in discharging the liturgies and performing any public duty she enjoins, and yet do not ask to have any part in the allotment of the offices nor in the distribution of the gifts she doles out to others, nor in the privilege of prosecuting or defending cases in the courts.[*]