9
you are seen to have struggled in defence of the Greeks at the expense of your lives, your property, your city, your territory and all you possess, in return for which you are entitled to glory and undying gratitude from all lovers of justice. Therefore, as a result of the counsels I gave, it has been the city’s good fortune to fare best of all the states that resisted Philip and there is the added gain of standing in higher repute than those who co-operated with him.
10
On these grounds, therefore, the gods, while giving favorable oracles to you, are turning back the unjust slander upon the head of him who utters it, and any man would recognize the facts if he chose to examine the practices in which he spends his life. For instance, he does by preference the very things that one might invoke upon him as a curse.
11
He is an enemy to his own parents but a friend to Pausanias the whoremonger, and though he swaggers like a man he allows himself to be used like a woman. He lords it over his own father but submits to degenerates. He regales his fancy with things by which all are disgusted, with foul language and with stories by which his hearers are pained; yet he never ceases to talk, as if he were a simple fellow and the soul of frankness.Blass, who is inclined to reject this letter, calls attention to the Gorgianic antitheses in the preceding passage.
12
I would not have written this had I not wished to stir in you the recollection of the vices that attach to him. For many terrible and shameful things, which a man would shrink from telling and would guard against mentioning in writing and, as I think, would be disgusted to hear of, each one of you, reminded by these words, knows to attach to this man, so that nothing indecent has been uttered by me and this man upon sight is a reminder to all of his own vices. Farewell.
To Heracleodorus
