[-6-] “In regard to this matter I will say later all that needs to be said, but just now I want to ask the speaker a question or two.  Is it not true that you for your part were nourished by the ills of others and educated in the misfortunes of your neighbors and for this reason are acquainted with no liberal branch of knowledge, that you have established a kind of association here and are always waiting, like the harlots, for a man who will give something, and that having many men in your pay to attract profit to you you pry into people’s affairs to find out who has wronged (or seems to have wronged) whom, who hates whom, and who is plotting against whom?  With these men you make common cause, and through these men you are supported, selling them the hopes that chance bestows, trading in the decisions of the jurors, deeming him alone a friend who gives more and more, and all those enemies who furnish you no business or employ some other advocate, while you pretend not even to know those who are already in your clutch and affect to be bored by them, but fawn upon and giggle at those just approaching, like the mistresses of inns?

[-7-] How much better it were that you too should have been born Bambalio,—­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 in behalf of the innocent, or else preserve the guilty.  Yet you can not do even this effectively, though you wasted three years in Athens.  On what occasion?  By what help?  Why, you always come trembling up to court as if you were going to fight in armor and after speaking a few words in a low and half-dead voice you go away, not remembering a word of the speech you practiced at home before you came, and without finding anything to say on the spur of the moment.  In making affirmations and promises you surpass all mankind in audacity, but in the contests themselves beyond uttering some words of abuse and defamation you are most weak and cowardly.  Do you think any one is ignorant of the fact that you never delivered one of those wonderful speeches of yours that you have published, but wrote them all up afterward, like persons who form generals and masters-of-horse out of day?  If you feel doubtful of this point, remember how you accused Verres,—­though, to be sure, you only gave him an example of your father’s trade, when you made water.

[-8-] “But I hesitate, for fear that in saying precisely what fits your case I may seem to be uttering words that are unfitting for myself.[14] This I will pass over; and further, by Jupiter, also the affairs of Gabinius, against whom, you prepared accusers and then pled his cause in such a way that he was condemned; and the pamphlets which you compose against your friends, in regard to which you feel yourself so guilty that you do not dare to make them public.  Yet it is a most miserable and pitiable state to be in, not to be able to deny these charges which are the most