Pretty much what Zombie said. Evil dudes don't go into education business.

I see Slytherin as a more or less decent chap who just had a bit abrasive personality and extreme ideals (and as we know nothing of the general consensus of the time, it's impossible to say if they really were extreme, or if the other founders just were hippies). You find them everywhere. That doesn't mean he was in any way evil.

 

Leaving a deadly monster under a school for the sole purpose of killing children seems pretty evil to me. Not exactly what I'd call a "decent chap".

You can pull the whole "Slytherin was just misunderstood, he left the basilisk there to defend the school" thing, but if we're going purely on canon here there is nothing to suggest that is the case. All we know is that he left a hidden chamber with a monster that only his heir could access, and all the legends say that he left it there to kill muggleborns. There is no evidence in canon to suggest that this is anything but the truth.

 

We really don't know what the reason for the existence of the basilisk was. I would say it was just his personal pet, given that Slytherin was a parselmouth. The legend about "Slytherin's true heir who comes to purge the unworthy" sounds like some kind of religious messiah myth told by pureblood fanatics more than anything else.

The idea that Slytherin somehow foresaw Riddle and prepared everything for him is exactly like some kind of crappy conspiracy theory (especially as the "purge" eventually resulted in exactly one fatality), and that he really wanted to kill everybody but was more than happy to wait for a millennium is just plain stupid.

 

I'm just not a fan of displaying Slytherin as some kind of mustache-twirling psychopath, because doing that makes the other Founders look stupid for ever working with him or being his friends in the first place. I have to assume that Slytherin is misunderstood to some degree, because the alternative is that all of the other Founders were morons, and I'd rather not believe that.

It is all just fanon speculation, though, I'll agree with you on that.

 

Would it be unreasonable to suggest that perhaps the basilisk was bred for the purposes of magical experimentation? We have Hagrid breeding blast-ended skrewts from firecrabs and manticores in GoF, and it seems a legitimate enough academic interest to have been explored by at least one of the founders. He was a parselmouth, breeding powerful magical serpents that (only) he would have been able to control might have seemed interesting. We also have to remember that it had only gotten that large over the course of a thousand years, he may have had no scope for how it would grow after his death.

In PoA, Muggle persecution of wizards is implied to have been a bit of a joke, with only Wendelin the Weird ever being caught multiple times, and even she was never harmed because of the Flame-Freezing Spell, so that complicates the idea that he considered them a threat.

 

I believe it is said Harpo the Fowl made the first Basilisk.

 

This guy?


Of course, you meant this guy: Herpo the Foul

 

Herpo the Foul is responsible for pioneering the method of creating a Basilisk, yes. However, I would not consider it unreasonable to presume that Slytherin would want to experiment with them. After all, there is currently only one known way to create them. It's not unreasonable in my mind to presume that Slytherin would have been interested in finding others.

 

Agreed. It's canon that Slytherin and Gryffindor were genuine friends, at least for a time because the Sorting Hat says, "For were there such friends anywhere as Slytherin and Gryffindor?" I refuse to believe that Gryffindor would be best friends with Slytherin if he was like the Voldemort of his time. Maybe Slytherin was more nasty and cruel than the other Founders so people exaggerated the history. Or maybe he wasn't bad starting out but he became more bitter or more dark as time went on. Who knows?

I also agree with Lord Raine's last post and with what afrojack was saying. I don't think it's unreasonable that Slytherin might have wanted to experiment with a Basilisk. I personally find it unrealistic that the other Founders didn't know about Slytherin's Chamber under the school when they were the ones who built the school with him. I don't see how Slytherin could construct a whole, massive Chamber without them noticing. And I don't see how he could grow a Basilisk off to the side without them noticing.

There's also the possibility that he raised the Basilisk in front of the Founders, but told them it was to protect the school even though he was keeping it for his own nefarious ends. Still, (and this is just my opinion here) I find it unlikely that Slytherin hated Muggleborns so much that he was willing to have them murdered. What's his motive? I get that he doesn't want to teach them. Okay. That's understandable. But why murder eleven year old kids?

The problem is, there's almost no information about the Founders from canon. That's why writing anything relating to the Founders is so difficult - it's all guesswork. All we know comes from the Sorting Hat (who we can probably assume is at least a semi-reliable source since he knew the Founders), Binns, and Ron. The Sorting Hat mentions that Slytherin is "powerhungry". Binns tells the class about the legend of the Chamber, but then he gets snappish and tells the class he's going back to cold hard fact and not wishy-washy legend. Ron says he knew Slytheirn was loony, but he didn't know Slytherin was the one who started the whole pureblood mania thing.

tl;dr - I don't think Slytherin is as evil as some people think. Something I'd like to see from JKR is more about the founding of Hogwarts and the Founders. Seriously, she could write a whole book on them. I'd buy it.

 

History is written by the victor.

I think that pretty handily explains why Slytherin is seen to be evil.

 

I hope you realize - in a world where cars, trunks, and tents are bigger on the inside than physics says is possible, and a random wall of the castle grows an extra-dimensional room if you walk by three times while mulling it over, where raw materials can be gotten from anywhere in the world if not made on the spot from nothing at all and an enormous chunk of granite may as well be a feather - how utterly retarded this sounds.

He might have built the Chamber over a long weekend, while Godric was out drinking with the Centaurs or boning Rowena, or he might've built it on a whim the day the school opened, excusing himself to take a leak after all that mead and to get away from the nattering village-people wandering around because Helga flubbed the goddamn Muggle-Repelling Charms - again.

 

My guess? Magic.

It's actually insanely easy to grow a Basilisk "off to the side." You make one by sitting a toad on a chicken egg until it hatches. That's all there is to it. It's explicitly noted in Fantastic Beasts that this made it all but impossible to actually catch someone who was trying to make one, because all you had to do when the authorities showed up was take the toad off the egg, and they've got nothing on you.

If you're referring to the actual process of keeping and taking care of it, you're forgetting that he wouldn't really have had to. The Chamber was (allegedly) made right before Slytherin left the school, which means that Slytherin himself would have spent next to no time actually caring for or raising the Basilisk himself. And either Basilisks don't need food to grow because Magic, or Slytherin somehow used magic to keep it fed, as it hadn't starved to death by the time Riddle showed up. So either way, livestock aren't going to be disappearing, either. There would be no outward signs that a mythical monster of Dragons-Are-Cannon-Fodder proportions was incubating under Hogwarts.

Also, try to keep in mind that multiple attempts have been made in the past to find the Chamber of Secrets. All of them failed. And Albus Dumbledore was involved in the last search fifty years ago, and it would be foolish to assume that he didn't try and find it again during the events of CoS, even though we didn't actually see him doing it, given that the plot follows Harry around, and not Dumbledore. Both times, and all of the times before that, they turned up nothing. So clearly, Slytherin knew a thing or two about hiding stuff from magical and nonmagical detection. Dumbledore is the closest thing to Merlin in Harry Potter canon this side of actual Merlin, so I think it's safe to say that if he couldn't find it, it was hidden pretty damn well. Perhaps even well enough to say that it was "impossible" to find, unless you were a Parseltongue.

 

Alright, point taken. I didn't actually know all you needed to do to make a basilisk was the whole toad on an egg thing. And it's conceivable that Slytherin could have made the Chamber in secret after Hogwarts was built.

At the time, I was thinking that the Founders would have noticed him building his own little thing while they were constructing other parts of the castle but that problem goes away if he made the Chamber afterwards. I don't necessarily think what I said was retarded. Just not well thought through.

Regarding Dumbledore in the Chamber: While it's true that Dumbledore wasn't able to find it, it's also true that Harry, Ron, and Hermione, three second years, were able to determine its location. While a non-Parselmouth couldn't gain access to it the way Harry was able to, a non-Parselmouth could locate it and blast their way through or else learn how to say, "Open" in Parseltongue like Ron did.

That having been said, the fact that the Chamber remained undiscovered for centuries is a testament to how well it was hidden. Just pointing out that not all attempts failed.

 

That didn't happen, and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty goddamn liar.

 

I never said Slytherin did it first, only that he might have been interested in breeding powerful serpents like the basilisk.

Parseltongue seems to be more than just the ability to communicate with snakes, in that it seems Parselmouths can command them with relative ease. He may have been hoping Gryffindor found it one day, or he wanted a way to murder people, get rid of the body, and divert suspicion away from himself all in one, which a basilisk is.

 

Even if you don't want to accept that Slytherin was evil, you have to agree that he was kind of an asshole from what we know. He kept one of the most dangerous animals in the world under a school where a bunch of kids live. He made a massive statue of his own head and made the password to it "Speak to me Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four." It's apparently (according to Binns) a fact that he didn't want to teach muggleborns. His family eventually becomes all but squibs due to inbreeding (though this doesn't say anything about him personally, it's still worth taking into account as it might be due to his influence).

He is at best an egotistical idiot, I suppose. Regardless of whether you want to believe it or not, canon seems pretty clear that he was kind of a bad dude.

 

I'm not saying he wasn't a canonically bad guy. I'm saying the canon sends mixed messages. In one breath we're told that Gryffindor and Slytherin were brofisting BFFs, and five pages later, you get psycho racial supremacy and a general Dark Magic vibe.

There's nothing that really resolves these two conflicting points together in canon. There's no point where someone or something goes "oh, well, yeah, that happened, but that's because [Exposition]." Nobody ever explains this. It's just there.

So when it comes to believing one of the conflicting sides more than the other, I'm going to gravitate towards the "Slytherin was misunderstood" side, if only because it's the side that doesn't make the other Founders look like idiots.