Antidosis (86-90)

And yet, when anyone devotes his life to urging all his fellow-countrymen to be nobler and juster leaders of the Hellenes, how is it conceivable that such a man should corrupt his followers? What man possessed of the power to discover discourses of this character would try to search for those that are pernicious and have to do with pernicious things, especially a man who has reaped from his works the rewards which I have had?

For the writing and publication of them has won me distinction in many parts of the world and brought me many disciples, no one of whom would have remained with me had they not found in me the very kind of man they expected to find. In fact, although I have had so many pupils, and they have studied with me in some cases three, and in some cases four years, yet not one of them will be found to have uttered a word of complaint about his sojourn with me;

on the contrary, when at the last the time would come for them to sail away to their parents or their friends at home, so happy did they feel in their life with me, that they would always take their leave with regret and tears. Well, then, whom ought you to believe? Those who know intimately both my words and my character, or a sycophant who knows nothing about me at all, but has chosen to make me his victim? Ought you to believe a man who is so unscrupulous and so brazen that,

having indicted me for teaching the kind of eloquence which enables people to gain their own advantage contrary to justice, he has not brought before you the slightest evidence of this but has dwelt from the beginning to the end of his speech on the iniquity of corrupting our youth—as if anyone disputed that, or as if it were necessary for him to prove what all men concede, instead of showing simply that I have been guilty of this offense?

Why, if anyone were to bring this fellow to trial for kidnapping or stealing or highway robbery, and, instead of proving that he had done any of these things, were to hold forth on the iniquity of each of these crimes, my opponent would reply that his accuser was mad and talked like a fool; yet he has, himself, used just such arguments and thinks that you do not see through him.