Letter 119: The people who say I've fallen far from real eloquence are actually agreeing with me and disagreeing with you.
**To Eustathius** (359/60)
Those who say I stand at the greatest remove from eloquence are saying the same thing I say, yet they contradict you. For I have never considered myself a rhetorician, but you have never ceased calling me one.
Now if you are divinely inspired, and the gods themselves affirm it, yet these people fight against your judgment — consider who they must be. I marvel at them: they suppose that I once flourished by fortune and have now been extinguished by old age, yet they themselves, surging up out of deep obscurity just now, do not think they owe their success to a fortune that will fly away from them before long.
None of this has the power to sting me. But if I were in pain, I would have a source from which to draw consolation — for such mouths have attacked many who are better than I: you, and your teacher, and his teacher, and his teacher before him.
So then, you, as the most esteemed of philosophers, pray to Justice to change their ways. But I, as the most boorish of ignorant men, ask that same goddess to keep them just as they are.
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