Let us now look at Timaeus's own deliberate statement, and compare with Aristotle's the account he himself gives of this identical colony, so that we may discover which of the two deserves such an accusation.
He tells us, then, in the same Book, that he investigated the history of the colony, no longer applying the test of mere probability, but personally visiting the Locrians in Greece proper.
He states that in the first place they showed him a written treaty, still preserved between them and the emigrants, with the following phrase at the outset, "As parents to children."
In addition there were decrees that citizens of either town were citizens of the other. When they heard Aristotle's account of the colony they expressed astonishment at that author's recklessness.
Proceeding afterwards to the Italian Locri he says he found their laws and customs also were such as beseemed not a pack of rascally slaves but a colony of freemen.
For certainly there were penalties fixed in their code for kidnappers as well as for adulterers and runaway slaves, which would not have been the case had they been aware that they themselves sprang from such men.
Walbank Commentary