Slander
idea · 5 works · 9 mentions · 19 anchored passages
slander · Slander by words actionable per se · bent of the soul toward the worse · calumniates · calumny · false accusation · false report · false slander · falsehood · lying report
in the texts
Letters
False accusation recurring as a threat against Basil and those he defends.
And the most deserving of all is the man now commended to you by our letter, the most reverend brother Eusebius, who has fallen victim to an unaccountable slander, which it lies with your uprightness alone to scatter.
We ask, then, that at our request you stand by him as he contends in a lawsuit which, as far as the truth is concerned, is contemptible, but which is otherwise full of peril because of the gravity of the slander.
But it seems to me that you are being deafened by those there, men who do nothing, who, to discredit me, say certain things, thinking thereby to establish themselves, if they fasten the most shameful falsehoods upon me.
The Law of Torts
The tort of spoken defamation, actionable generally only upon proof of special damage or certain recognized imputations.
Spoken words are actionable only when special damage can be proved to have been their proximate consequence, or when they convey imputations of certain kinds.
Slander by words actionable per se.
This latter remark applies especially to the law of slander;
On the Embassy
Malicious public accusation, contrasted with common report and treated as shameful and prosecutable.
To Common Report we offer public sacrifice, as to a god, but the slanderer we prosecute, in the name of the people, as a scoundrel.
At many of his charges I was indeed angry, but most of all when he accused me of being a traitor.
On the False Embassy
The allegedly dishonest diplomatic report by which Athens was misled about Philip's intentions.
For he made his lying report, you believed it, the Phocians heard of it, surrendered, and perished, all within a period of five days only.
Aeschines, then, must not escape punishment for deceiving you, merely because Philip deceived the Lacedaemonians and the Phocians.
and then for the four ensuing months the Phocians were not imperilled, until you were deceived, and the Phocians destroyed, by this man’s mendacity.
Characters
The vice of habitually speaking ill of others, disguised by its practitioner as candor or free speech.
Slander is a bent of the soul toward the worse in speech;