2. Audacter caluminare, semper aliquid haeret.

Speak slander boldly: something always sticks.

This proverb, recorded among the medieval proverbs by Walther (1688a) and cited by Francis Bacon (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, 8.2.34; Of the Advancement of Learning, 2.23.30) is basically an application - in a negative sense - of the topos of the immortality of the vox populi and of the impossibility (already found in Hesiod; see Entry 1) that it would ever disappear completely. Its origin is in a passage of Plutarch (Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur, 65d), in which Plutarch tells how Medius, an admirer of Alexander the Great, ἐκέλευεν οὖν θαρροῦντας ἅπεσθαι καὶδάκνειν ταῖς διαβολαῖς, διδάσκων ὅτι κἂν θεραπεύσῃ τὸ ἕλκος ὁ δεδηγμένος , ἡ οὐλὴ μενεῖ τῆς διαβολῆς, "advocated boldly attacking and biting by means of slander, saying that, even if the victim manages to recover from the wound, the scar nevertheless remains." The maxim has corresponding versions in French, English and German (Arthaber 199); there are also literary examples, as in the famous scene of slander in Barber of Seville by Beaumarchais or in the carnival scene in Goethe's Faust (2.1) where Alecto says that even if a loving couple make their peace after speaking slander, something always remains.