The use of lrcoOac to mean "policemen" at Athens, and still more closely the German, French and English word "slave" derived from "Slav"), than that the tribe when living in territory it could call its own should have adopted an opprobrious name taken from the language of hostile neighbours (see Strabo vi.
This has been misunderstood in many ways - the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious expression.
They spent their energy in attacking Plato and Aristotle, and hence earned the opprobrious epithet of Eristic. They used their dialectic subtlety to disprove the possibility of motion and decay; unity is the negation of change, increase and decrease, birth and death.