Soc. Yes, but what I am bent on teaching you is that while you feel no such bashfulness and timidity before the wisest and strongest of men, you are ashamed of opening your lips in the midst of weaklings and dullards. (6) Is it the fullers among them of whom you stand in awe, or the cobblers, or the carpenters, or the coppersmiths, or the merchants, or the farmers, or the hucksters of the market-place exchanging their wares, and bethinking them how they are to buy this thing cheap, and to sell the other dear--is it before these you are ashamed, for these are the individual atoms out of which the Public Assembly is composed? (7) And what is the difference, pray, between your behaviour and that of a man who, being the superior of trained athletes, quails before a set of amateurs? Is it not the case that you who can argue so readily with the foremost statesmen in the city, some of whom affect to look down upon you--you, with your vast superiority over practised popular debaters--are no sooner confronted with a set of folk who never in their lives gave politics a thought, and into whose heads certainly it never entered to look down upon you--than you are afraid to open your lips in mortal terror of being laughed at? (6) Cf. Cic. "Tusc." v. 36, 104; Plat. "Gorg." 452 E, 454 B. (7) Cf. Plat. "Protag." 319 C. See W. L. Newman, op. cit. i. 103. Well, but you would admit (he answered) that sound argument does frequently bring down the ridicule of the Popular Assembly. Soc. Which is equally true of the others. (8) And that is just what rouses my astonishment, that you who can cope so easily with these lordly people (when guilty of ridicule) should persuade yourself that you cannot stand up against a set of commoners. (9) My good fellow, do not be ignorant of yourself! (10) do not fall into that commonest of errors--theirs who rush off to investigate the concerns of the rest of the world, and have no time to turn and examine themselves. Yet that is a duty which you must not in cowardly sort draw back from: rather must you brace ourself to give good heed to your own self; and as to public affairs, if by any manner of means they may be improved through you, do not neglect them. Success in the sphere of politics means that not only the mass of your fellow-citizens, but your personal friends and you yourself last but not least, will profit by your action. (8) {oi eteroi}, i.e. "the foremost statesmen" mentioned before. Al. "the opposite party," the "Tories," if one may so say, of the political clubs. (9) Lit. "those... these." (10) Ernesti aptly cf. Cic. "ad Quint." iii. 6. See below, III. ix. 6; IV. ii. 24. VIII