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

 

claim admiration have ‘wetted your lips, and left your palate dry” You have not had to watt long for retribution; you spoke unadvisedly in scorn of human needs; and, this little while after, behold you making public renunciation of your freedom! Surely Nemesis was standing behind your back as you drank in the flattering tributes to your superiority; did she not smile in her divine fore-knowledge of the impending change, and mark how you forgot to propitiate her before you assatled the victims whom fortune’s mutability had reduced to such courses?

 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.

 Yes, Sabinus, and there is plenty more of the same sort for an accuser like you to urge; the subject is all handles; you can take hold of it anywhere. I have been looking about for my best line of defence. Had I better turn craven, face rightabout, confess my sin, and have recourse to the regular plea of Chance, Fate, Necessity? Shall I humbly beseech my critics to pardon me, remembering that nothing is in a man’s own choice
—we are led by some stronger power, one of the three I mentioned, probably, and are not true agents but guiltless altogether, whatever we say or do? Or will you tell me this might do well enough for one of the common herd, but you cannot have me sheltering myself so? I must not brief Homer; it will not serve me to plead:

 No mortal man e’er yet escaped his fate; 

nor again,

 

 His thread was spun, then when his mother bare him. 

 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.

 Both these pleas, then, being excluded, what is left me but to confess that I have no sound defence to make? I have indeed one anchor yet aboard: I may whine over age and ill health, and their attendant poverty, from which a man will purchase escape at any cost. The situation tempts me to send an invitation to Euripides’s Medea: will she come and recite certain lines of hers on my behalf, kindly making the slight changes needed?—

 Too well I know how monstrous is the deed; 

 My poverty, but not my will, consents, 
And every one knows the place in Theognis, whether I quote it or not, where he approves of people’s flinging themselves to the unplumbed deep from sky-ypointing crags, if one may be quit of poverty that way.