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.