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Backbiting is a disposition[33] to vilify others. When the backbiter is asked “Who is so and so?” he begins, like the genealogists, with the man’s ancestry. “His father’s name was originally Sosias,[34] but amongst the soldiers it became Sosistratus, and upon registration in the deme, it was again changed to Sosidemus. His mother was a Thracian,—gentle blood! you see. At any rate this jewel’s name was Krinokoraka. Women of that name are of gentle blood in Thrace, so people say! The man himself, with an ancestry like that, is a foul fellow fit for the whipping-post.” In a company where his companions are maligning a man, he of course takes up the attack and says: “For my part I hate him of all men. He is a bad character, as one may see from his face, and as for his meanness, it has no parallel and here is a proof: His wife brought him a dowry of talents of money and yet after the birth of their first child, he gave her but three pence a day for household expenses and forced her to bathe in cold water on the festival of Poseidon in midwinter.” When he is seated with a group, he loves to talk about an acquaintance who has just risen and gone, and his biting tongue does not spare even the man’s kinsfolk. Of his own relatives and friends, he says the vilest things and even maligns the dead. Backbiting is what he calls frankness of speech, democracy, and freedom; and there is nothing he enjoys so much.