29
When everybody was there, he began to speak: "The reason for calling you together is supplied, of course, by our visitor here of yesterday, but I have long wanted to confer with you about the philosophers, and so, being stirred to action by the moon in particular and the criticisms that she makes, I have decided not to put off the discussion any longer.
29
“There is a class of men which made its appearance in the world not long ago, lazy, disputatious, vainglorious, quick-tempered, gluttonous, doltish, addle-pated, full of effrontery and to age the language of Homer, ‘a uscless load to the soil.Iliad 18, 1U4. Well, these people, dividing themselves into schol and inventing various word-mazes, have called themselves Stoics, Academics, Epicurcans, Peripatetics and other things much more laughable than these. Then, cloaking themselves i in the high- sounding name of Virtue, elevating their eyebrows, wrinkling up their foreheads and letting their beards grow long, they go about hiding loathsome habits under a false garb, very like actors in tragedy; for if you take away from the latter their masks and_ their gold-embroidered robes, nothing is left but a comical little creature hired for the show at seven drachmas.
