Antidosis

These are the requirements they set up, and yet they have never heard me make such promises, nor have they ever seen like results in the other arts and disciplines. On the contrary, all knowledge yields itself up to us only after great effort on our part, and we are by no means all equally capable of working out in practice what we learn. Nay, from all our schools only two or three students turn out to be real champions,[*](That is, champions in the contests of oratory.) the rest retiring from their studies into private life.[*](As distinguished from the professional life of public orators and teachers of oratory. Cf. 204.)

And yet how can we fail to deny intelligence to those who have the effrontery to demand powers which are not found in the recognized arts of this which they declare is not an art and who expect greater advantages to come from an art in which they do not believe than from arts which they regard as thoroughly perfected?

Men of intelligence ought not to form contrary judgements about similar things[*](Cf. 253; Isoc. 8.114.) nor refuse to recognize a discipline which accomplishes the same results as most of the arts. For who among you does not know that most of those who have sat under the sophists have not been duped nor affected as these men claim,