at you have established
a kind of association here and are always waiting, like the harlots, for
a man who will give something, and that having many men in your pay to
attract profit to you you pry into people's affairs to find out who has
wronged (or seems to have wronged) whom, who hates whom, and who is
plotting against whom? With these men you make common cause, and through
these men you are supported, selling them the hopes that chance bestows,
trading in the decisions of the jurors, deeming him alone a friend who
gives more and more, and all those enemies who furnish you no business or
employ some other advocate, while you pretend not even to know those who
are already in your clutch and affect to be bored by them, but fawn upon
and giggle at those just approaching, like the mistresses of inns?

[-7-] How much better it were that you too should have been born
Bambalio,--if this Bambalio really exists,--than to have taken up such a
livelihood, in which it is absolutely inevitable that you should either
sell your speech in behalf of the innocent, or else preserve the guilty.
Yet you can not do even this effectively, though you wasted three years
in Athens. On what occasion? By what help? Why, you always come trembling
up to court as if you were going to fight in armor and after speaking a
few words in a low and half-dead voice you go away, not remembering a
word of the speech you practiced at home before you came, and without
finding anything to say on the spur of the moment. In making affirmations
and promises you surpass all mankind in audacity, but in the contests
themselves beyond uttering some words of abuse and defamation you are
most weak and cowardly. Do you think any one is ignorant of the fact that
you never delivered one of those wonderful speeches of yours that you
have published, but wrote them all up afterward, like persons who form
generals and masters-of-horse out of day? If you feel doubtful of this
point, remember how you accused Verres,--though, to be sure, you only
gave him an example of your father's trade, when you made water.

[-8-] "But I hesitate, for fear that in saying precisely what fits your
case I may seem to be uttering words that are unfitting for myself.[14]
This I will pass over; and further, by Jupiter, also the affairs of
Gabinius, against whom, you prepared accusers and then pled his cause in
such a way that he was condemned; and the pamphlets which you compose
against your frien