Panathenaicus (16-20)

But why wonder at those who are by nature envious of all superior excellence, when certain even of those who regard themselves as superior and who seek to emulate me and imitate my work are more hostile to me than is the general public? And yet where in the world could you find men more reprehensible—for I shall speak my mind even at the risk of appearing to some to discourse with more vehemence and rancor than is becoming to my age—where, I say, could you find men more reprehensible than these, who are not able to put before their students even a fraction of what I have set forth in my teaching but use my discourses as models and make their living from so doing, and yet are so far from being grateful to me on this account that they are not even willing to let me alone but are always saying disparaging things about me?

Nevertheless, as long as they confined themselves to abusing my discourses, reading them in the worst possible manner side by side with their own, dividing them at the wrong places, mutilating them, and in every way spoiling their effect, I paid no heed to the reports which were brought to me, but possessed myself in patience. However, a short time before the Great Panathenaia,[*] they stirred me to great indignation.

For some of my friends met me and related to me how, as they were sitting together in the Lyceum,[*] three or four of the sophists of no repute— men who claim to know everything and are prompt to show their presence everywhere—were discussing the poets, especially the poetry of Hesiod and Homer, saying nothing original about them, but merely chanting their verses and repeating from memory the cleverest things which certain others had said about them in the past.[*]

It seems that the bystanders applauded their performance, whereupon one of these sophists, the boldest among them, attempted to stir up prejudice against me, saying that I hold all such things in contempt and that I would do away with all the learning and the teaching of others, and that I assert that all men talk mere drivel except those who partake of my instruction. And these aspersions, according to my friends, were effective in turning a number of those present against me.

Now I could not possibly convey to you how troubled and disturbed I was on hearing that some accepted these statements as true. For I thought that it was so well known that I was waging war against the false pretenders to wisdom and that I had spoken so moderately, nay so modestly, about my own powers that no one could be credited for a moment who asserted that I myself resorted to such pretensions.