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, The Panathenaic festival was
 celebrated in Athens each year but with
 special magnificence every fourth year, when it was called 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, A sacred enclosure on the right bank of the
 Ilissus , dedicated to Apollo—a gymnasium and
 exercise ground, but was also frequented by philosophers. Here Aristotle and his pupils
 were wont to gather. 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. Other sophists made
 much of the study and elucidation of the poets, but there is no evidence that Isocrates
 did. See Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit 2, pp. 46 ff. 
 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.