Cicero paraphrases a scenario described by Plato centuries earlier:

“There is no distinction between citizen and foreigner; teachers fear their pupils and flatter them; pupils scorn their teachers; the young affect the gravity of age, and old men revert to youthful pranks in order not to be tiresome and displeasing to the young.

. . .

“From this boundless license, the following result inevitably follows: so sensitive and effeminate do the feelings of the citizens become that, if the least restraint is applied to them, they are enraged and cannot endure it. Then they begin to ignore the laws also, and are completely without any master.

. . .

“This extreme of license, which is their only idea of freedom, is a sort of root from which the tyrant springs and, if I may say so, is born. Even as the extreme power of the aristocracy brings about the downfall of the aristocracy, so freedom itself punishes with slavery a people whose freedom has no bounds.”