BOOK XLVI " With regard to these matters, however, I will say later all that need be said, but just now I want to ask this fellow a question or two. Is it not true, then, that you have been reared amid the ills of others and been educated in the midst of your neighbours' misfortunes, and hence are acquainted with no liberal branch of knowledge, but have established here a kind of council where you are always waiting, like the harlots, for a man who will give something, and with many agents always to attract profits to you, you pry into people's affairs to find out who has wronged, or seems to have wronged, another, who hates another, and who is plotting against another? With these men you make common cause, and through them you support yourself, selling them the hopes that depend upon the turn of fortune, trading in the decisions of the jurors, considering him alone as a friend who gives the most at any particular time, and all those as enemies who are peaceably inclined or employ some other advocate, while you even pretend not to know those who are already in your clutches, and even find them a nuisance, but fawn and smile upon those who at the moment approach you, just as the women do who keep inns ? " Yet how much better it would be for you, too, to have been born Bambalio 1 — if this Bambalio really exists — than to have taken up such a livelihood, in which it is absolutely inevitable that you should either sell your speech on behalf of the innocent, or else save the guilty also ! Yet you cannot do even this effectively, though you spent three years in Athens. When, then, did you ever do so? Or how could you ? Why, you always come to the courts trembling,
See xlv. 47, 4.
II
