Rhetorum praeceptor

I was bundled out neck and crop, yet even then I was not at a loss for the necessaries of life. No, I enjoy the name of a speaker, and prove myself such in the courts, generally playing false to my clients, although I promise the poor fools to deliver their juries to them.[*](He is an accomplished praevaricator, not only selling out to the other side, but extracting money from his own clients under pretext of bribing the jury. ) To be sure I am generally unsuccessful, but the palm-leaves at my door are green and twined with fillets, for I use them as bait for my victims.[*](For palm-branches as a token of success at the bar see Juvenal 7, 118, and Mayor’s note. ) But even to be detested by everyone, to be notorious for the badness of my character and the still greater badness of my speeches, to be pointed out with the finger—‘ There he is, the man who, they say, is foremost in all iniquity !’—seems to me no slight achievement.

“This is the advice which I bestow upon you. By Our Lady of the Stews, I bestowed it upon myself long ago, and am deeply grateful to myself for it.”

Well, the gentleman will end his remarks with that, and then it is up to you. If you heed what he has said, you may consider that even now you are where in the beginning you yearned to be; and nothing can hinder you, as long as you follow his rules, from holding the mastery in the courts, enjoying high favour with the public, being attractive, and marrying, not an old woman out of a comedy, as did your law-giver and tutor, but Rhetoric, fairest of brides. Consequently, Plato’s famous phrase about driving full-tilt in a winged car can be applied by you to yourself with a better grace than by him to Zeus! As for me, I am spiritless and fainthearted, so I will get out of the road for you, and stop trifling with Rhetoric, being unable to recommend myself to her by qualifications like those of yourself and your friend. Indeed, I have stopped already ; so get the herald to proclaim an uncontested victory and take your tribute of admiration, remembering only this, that it is not by your speed that you have defeated us, through proving yourself more swift of foot than we, but because you took the road that was easy and downhill.