Now that I have mentioned lips, what would you
say if your tongue, summoning you to court, let us
suppose, should prosecute you on a charge of injury
and at the mildest, assault, saying: “Ingrate, I took
you under my protection when you were poor and
hard up and destitute of support, and first of all I
made you successful in the theatre, making you now
Ninus, now Metiochus, and then presently Achilles As Ninus, the legendary king of Assyria, he supported a dancer in the role of Semiramis, enacting a plot presumably based on the Greek Ninus Romance (text and translation of the fragments in 8. Gaselee, Daphnis and Chloe [L.C.L.];_ cf. R. M. Rattenbury, New Chapters in the Hist. of Greek Lit., III, pp. 211-223). Opposite to his Metiochus the Phrygian, the dancer played Parthenope; see The Dance, §1. His Achilles was very likely that hero on Scyros, disguised as a girl, with the dancer taking the part of the king’s daughter whom he beguiled, Deidameia; cf. p. 257. 
After that, when you taught boys to spell, I kept you
for a long time; and wien at length you took to
delivering these speeches of yours, composed by other
people, I caused you to be considered a sophist,
attaching to you a reputation which had nothing at
all to do with you. What charge, then, have you to
bring against me, so great that you treat me in this
way, imposing disgraceful tasks and abominable
services? Are not my daily tasks enough, lying,
committing perjury, ladling out such an amount of
silliness and twaddle, or (I should say) spewing out
the nastiness of those speeches? Even at night you
do not allow me, unlucky that I am, to take my rest,
but unaided I do everything for you, am abused,
defiled, treated deliberately like a hand rather than
a tongue, insulted as if I were nothing to you, overwhelmed with so many injuries. My only function
is to talk; other parts have been commissioned to do
such things as those. Oh if only someone had cut
me out, like the tongue of Philomela. More blessed



 

in my sight are the tongues of parents who have eaten
their children!”
 
In Heaven’s name, if your tongue should say that,
acquiring a voice of its own, and getting your beard
to join in the accusation, what response would you
make? The reply, manifestly, which you made
recently to Glaucus when he rebuked you just after a
performance, that by this means you had speedily
become famous and known to everyone, and how could
you have become so notorious by making speeches?
It was highly desirable, you said, to be renowned and
celebrated in any way whatsoever. And then you
might tell it your many nicknames, acquired in
different nations. In that connection I marvel at it
that you were distressed when you heard ‘ nefandous ’
but were not angry over those names.