25
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.
26
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.
27
‘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.
