Apology For ‘the Dependent Scholar’ (6-10)

You, they will say, are the author (for ‘actor’ would understate the case) who has laid down the laws of noble conduct; and no sooner 1s the lump of figs presented than the monkey 1s revealed; your lips are the lips of a philosopher, and your heart is quite other; it is no injustice to say that those sentiments for which you

Now I want you to imagine a rhetorician writing on the theme that Aeschines, after bis indictment of Timarchus, was himself proved guilty by eyewitnesses of similar iniquity; would, or would not, the amusement of the audience be heightened by the fact that he had got Timarchus punished for offences excused by youth, whereas he was himself an old man at the time of his own guilt? Why, you are like the quack who offered a cough-mixture which twas to cure instantaneously, and could hardly get the promise out for coughing.

On the other hand, I might avoid that plea as wanting in plausibility, and say that I did not accept this association under the temptation of money or any prospects of that kind, but in pure admiration of the wisdom, strength, and magnanimity of my patron’s character, which inspired the wish to partake his activity. But I fear I should only have brought on myself the additional imputation of flattery. It would be a case of ‘one nail drives out one nail,’ and this time the one left in would be the bigger; for flattery is the most servile, and consequently reckoned the worst, of all vices.