Miscellanies 1.3.22

Great is the crowd of this kind. Some of them, enslaved to pleasures and wishing to disbelieve, laugh at the truth that is worthy of all reverence, treating the barbarian as a joke. Others, exalting themselves, strive to invent slanders against our words, producing contentious questions, hunters of trifling phrases, zealots for petty arts, wranglers and strap-twisters, as the famous Abderite says. For “twisting is the tongue of mortals,” he says, “and many are the words in it; wide is the range of words of every kind, this way and that”; and “whatever word you speak, such will you hear.” Elated, then, by this art, the wretched sophists, babbling with their own chicanery, laboring their whole life over the distinction of names and the composition and interweaving of words, appear more talkative than turtledoves; tickling and titillating, not manfully, in my opinion, the ears of those who long to be tickled; simply a river of words, but a drop of sense. Indeed, as with old shoes, all the rest of them is weak and falling apart, and only the tongue is left.