They lost all concern for their common honor or safety, and could bear no advice that tended to reform them.

At this time truth became offensive to those lords the people, and most highly dangerous to the speaker.

The orators no longer ascended the _rostrum_, but to corrupt them further with the most fulsome adulation.

These orators were all bribed by foreign princes on the one side or the other.

And besides its own parties, in this city there were parties, and avowed ones too, for the Persians, Spartans, and Macedonians, supported each of them by one or more demagogues pensioned and bribed to this iniquitous service.
The people, forgetful of all virtue and public spirit, and intoxicated with the flatteries of their orators (these courtiers of republics, and endowed with the distinguishing characteristics of all other courtiers), this people, I say, at last arrived at that pitch of madness, that they coolly and deliberately, by an express law, made it capital for any man to propose an application of the immense sums squandered in public shows, even to the most necessary purposes of the state.