We have, then, either to show that Aristotle, in making the statements I have just reproduced about Locri, did so for the sake of currying favour or for gain or from some self-interested motive, or if we do not venture to maintain this we must confess that those are wrong and at fault who exhibit to others such animosity and bitterness as Timaeus does to Aristotle.
He calls him arrogant, reckless, and headstrong, and adds that he had the effrontery to attack the city of Locri by stating that the colony consisted of runaway slaves, lackeys, adulterers, and kidnappers.
And all this, he says, is told with such an assumption of trustworthiness that one would take him for one of those back from the campaign who had just by his own power defeated the Persians in a pitched battle at the Cilician gates,
and not for a pedantic and detestable sophist who had just locked up his precious surgeon's shop. Besides this he says he had forced his way into every court and on to every stage and was a glutton and epicure catering for his mouth in everything.
I think that surely such language could scarcely be tolerated even from the lips of some unscrupulous knave making random accusations in a law court; for we must avow that he goes beyond all bounds.
But no chronicler of public affairs, no really leading historian, would ever dare to entertain such thoughts, much less to put them in writing.
Walbank Commentary