For if he had had better fortune in getting a pupil, perhaps he might have turned out a more strict and dignified man himself; but chance has led him into a habit of writing in this manner, very unworthy of a philosopher; if at least philosophy does, as is reported, comprehend the whole system of virtue, and duty, and living properly; and a man who professes it appears to me to have taken on himself a very serious and difficult character. [72] But the same chance has polluted the man, who was quite ignorant of what he was professing when he called himself a philosopher, with the mud and filth of that fellow's most obscene and intemperate flock.
And when he had praised the achievements of my consulship, (and I feel that the panegyric of that basest of men was almost a discredit to me myself,) “it was not,” says he, “any odium that you incurred by your conduct then, which injured you, but your verses.” It was too great a punishment that was established, I trust, by you when you were consul, for a poet, whether he were a bad one, or too free an one. For you wrote—
Arms to the gown must yield.