Yet this is not an insignificant or a simple thing,
as one might suppose; it requires much skill, no
little shrewdness, and some degree of close study.

 

For slander would not do so much harm if it were
not set afoot in a plausible way, and it would not
prevail over truth, that is stronger than all else, if it
did not assume a high degree of attractiveness and
plausibility and a thousand things beside to disarm
its hearers.

 


Generally speaking, slander is most often directed
against a man who is in favour and on this account is
viewed with envy by those he has put behind him.
They all direct their shafts at him, regarding him as
a hindrance and a stumbling-block, and each one
expects to be first himself when he has routed his
chief and ousted him from favour. Something of
the same sort happens in the athletic games, in footraces. A good runner fram the moment that the
barrier falls
 Races were started in antiquity by the dropping of a
rope or bar. 
thinks only of getting forward, sets
his mind on the finish and counts on his legs to
win for him; he therefore does not molest the man
next to him in any way or trouble himself at ail
about the contestants. But an inferior, unsportsmanlike competitor, abandoning all hope based on
his speed, resorts to crooked work, and the only
thing in the world he thinks of is cutting off the
runner by holding or tripping him, with the idea
that if he should fail in this he would never be able
to win. So it is with the friendships of the mighty.
The man in the lead is forthwith the object of plots,
and if caught off.his guard in the midst of his foes,
he is made away with, while-they are cherished and
are thought friendly because of the harm they
appeared to be doing to others.

 

As for the verisimilitude of their slander, calum-



 

niators are not careless in thinking out that point;
all their work centres on it, for they are afraid to
put in anything discordant or even irrelevant. For
example, they generally make their charges credible
by distorting the real attributes of the man they are
slandering. Thus they insinuate that a doctor is a
poisoner, that a rich man is a would-be monarch, or
that a courtier is a traitor.

 


Sometimes, however, the hearer himself suggests
the starting-point for slander, and the knaves attain
their end by adapting themselves to his disposition.
If they see that he is jealous, they say: “He signed
to your wife during dinner and gazed at her and
sighed, and Stratonice was not very displeased withhim.” In short, the charges they make to him are .
based on passion and illicit love. If he has a bent
for poetry and prides himself on it, they say : “No,
indeed! Philoxenus made fun of your verses, pulled
them to pieces and said that they wouldn’t scan and
were wretchedly composed.” Toa pious, godly man
the charge is made that his friend is godless and
impious, that he rejects God and denies Providence.
Thereupon the man, stung in the ear, so to speak,
by a gadfly, gets thoroughly angry, as is natural, and
turns his back on his friend without awaiting definite
proof.

 

In short, they think out and say the sort of
thing that they know to be best adapted to provoke
the hearer to anger, and as they know the place
where each can be wounded, they shoot their arrows
and throw their spears at it, so that their hearer,
thrown off his balance by sudden anger, will not
thereafter be free to get at the truth; indeed, however much a slandered man may want to defend
himself, he will not let him do so, because he is


 

prejudiced by the surprising nature of what he has’
heard, just as if that made it true.