And your censors will find no lack of illustrations against you; some
will compare you to the tragic actor; on the stage he is Agamemnon or
Creon or great Heracles; but off it, stripped of his mask, he is just
Polus or Aristodemus, a hireling liable to be hissed off, or even whipped
on occasion, at the pleasure of the audience. Others will say you have
had the experience of Queen Cleopatra's monkey: the docile creature used
to dance in perfect form and time, and was much admired for the
regularity and decorum of its movements, adapted to the voices and
instruments of a bridal chorus; alas, one day it spied a fig or almond a
little way off on the ground; flutes and measures and steps were all
forgotten, the mask was far off in several pieces, and there was he
chewing his find.

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 is the
lump of figs presented than the monkey is 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 wait 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 assailed 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 his indictment of Timarchus, was himself proved guilty