Calumniae non temere credundum

Lucian of Samosata

The Works of Lucian of Samosata, complete, with exceptions specified in thepreface, Vol. 4. Fowler, H. W. and Fowlere, F.G., translators. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1905.

It must be added that there are persons who, if they subsequently learn that they have condemned a friend in error, are too much ashamed of that error to receive or look him in the face again; you might suppose the discovery of his innocence was a personal injury to them.

It is not, then, too much to say that life is made miserable by these lightly and incuriously credited slanders. Antea said to Proetus, after she had solicited and been scorned by Bellerophon:;

  • Die thou the death, if thou slay not the man
  • That so would have enforc’d my chastity!
    • By the machinations of this lascivious woman, the young man came near perishing in his combat with the Chimera, as the penalty for continence and loyalty to his host. And Phaedra, who made a similar charge against her stepson, succeeded in bringing down upon Hippolytus a father’s curse, though God knows how innocent he was.

    ‘Ah, yes,’ I fancy some one objecting; ‘but the traducer sometimes deserves credit, being known for a just and a wise man; then he ought to be listened to, as one incapable of villany.” What? was there ever a juster man than Aristides? yet he led the opposition to Themistocles and incited the people against him, pricked by the same political ambition as he. Aristides was a just man in all other relations; but he was human, he had a gall, he was open to likes and dislikes.

    And if the story of Palamedes is true, the wisest of the Greeks, a great man in other respects too, stands convicted of hatching

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    that insidious plot[*](Odysseus.); the ties that bind kinsmen, friends, and comrades in danger, had to yield to jealousy. To be a man is to be subject to this temptation.

    It is superfluous to refer to Socrates, misrepresented to the Athenians as an impious plotter, to Themistocles or Miltiades, suspected after all their victories of betraying Greece; such examples are innumerable, and most of them familiar.

    What, then, should a man of sense do, when he finds one friend’s virtue pitted against another’s truth? Why, surely, learn from Homer’s parable of the Sirens; he advises sailing past these ear-charmers; we should stuff up our ears; we should not open them freely to the prejudiced, but station there a competent hall-porter in the shape of Judgement, who shall inspect every vocal visitor, and take it on himself to admit the worthy, but shut the door in the face of others. How absurd to have such an official at our house door, and leave our ears and understandings open to intrusion!

    So, when any one comes to you with a tale, examine it on its merits, regardless of the informant’s age, general conduct, or skill in speech. The more plausible he is, the greater need of care. Never trust another’s judgement—it may be in reality only his dislike—but reserve the inquiry to yourself; let envy, if such it was, recoil upon the backbiter, your trial of the two men’s characters be an open one, and your award of contempt and approval deliberate. To award them earlier, carried away by the first word of slander—why, God bless me, how puerile and mean and iniquitous it all is!

    And the cause of it, as we started with saying, is ignorance, and the mystery that conceals men’s characters. Would some God unveil all lives to us, Slander would retire discomfited to the bottomless pit; for the illumination of truth would be over all.

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