When everybody was there, he began to speak : "The reason for calling you together is supplied, of course, by our visitor here of yesterday, but I have long wanted to confer with you about the philosophers, and so, being stirred to action by the moon in particular and the criticisms that she makes, I have decided not to put off the discussion any longer.

“There is a class of men which made its appearance in the world not long ago, lazy, disputatious, vainglorious, quick-tempered, gluttonous, doltish, addle-pated, full of effrontery and to age the language of Homer, ‘a uscless load to the soil.Iliad 18, 1U4. Well, these people, dividing themselves into schol and inventing various word-mazes, have called themselves Stoics, Academics, Epicurcans, Peripatetics and other things much more laughable than these. Then, cloaking themselves i in the high- sounding name of Virtue, elevating their eyebrows, wrinkling up their foreheads and letting their beards grow long, they go about hiding loathsome habits under a false garb, very like actors in tragedy ; for if you take away from the latter their masks and_ their gold-embroidered robes, nothing is left but a comical little creature hired for the show at seven drachmas.

“But although that is what they are, they look with scorn on all mankind and they tell absurd stories about the gods; collecting lads who are easy to hoodwink, they rant about their far-famed Virtue’ and teach them their insoluble fallacies ; and in the presence of their disciples they always sing the praise of restraint and) temperance and self-suflicieney and spit at wealth and pleasure, but when they are all by themselves, how can one describe how much they cat, how much they indulge their passions and how they lick the filth off pennies ? “Worst of all, though they themselves do no goéd either in public or in private life but are uscless and superfluous, Neither in war nor in council of any account,Iliad2, 202. nevertheless they accuse everyone clse; they amass biting phrases and school themselves in novel terms of abuse, and then they censure and reproach their fellow-men ; and whoever of them is the most noisy and impudent and reckless in calling names is held to be the champion.