6
Consequently I have felt all the more a moved to write this essay, feeling sure I should not fail to secure two most honorable rewards.The use of the dual savors of poetry. For when I have described the good qualities you possess, I hope that at one and the same time I shall prove you to be worthy of admiration and myself not senseless if I love you, being what you are; and secondly, in tendering the advice that is most urgently needed I believe I shall present proof of my own goodwill and furnish a basis for our mutual friendship.
7
And yet it does not escape me that it is difficult to describe your character in keeping with your deserts and that it is more hazardous still to give advice when the adviser is bound to make himself answerable for his advice to the one who accepts it.Blass notes a parallel in Dem. 18.189, but it is remote. It is my judgement, however, that, while it becomes the recipients of merited eulogies to baffle by the excess of their real virtue the ability of those who praise them, yet in my counsel I shall not miss the mark, being well aware that no advice could be innocently carried out if proffered by men who are senseless and quite ruined by incontinence, not even if they advise supremely well, but that not even the advice that is only moderately pondered can altogether miss the mark if tendered by men who choose to live pure and self disciplined lives.
