Salazar Slytherin

Salazar Slytherin is one of the four witches and wizards who founded Hogwarts around a thousand years ago, first named in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, where the Sorting Hat sings of the founders and the houses that carry their names. Slytherin house bears his, along with the serpent emblem and a taste for ambition, cunning, and resourcefulness in the students it selects. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets fills in the founder himself as History of Magic tells it: a gifted wizard of the medieval age who came to argue that magical learning should stay within all-magic families, quarrelled with the other founders over admitting Muggle-born students, and left the school. Legend adds that he built a hidden chamber in the castle before he went, a story teachers dismiss and students happily retell.