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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: pas' apolol arete}.
Yet the actual means by which he gave currency to these principles is
a point which it were well not to overlook. It is clear that the
lawgiver set himself deliberately to provide all the blessings of
heaven for the good man, and a sorry and ill-starred existence for the
coward.
In other states the man who shows himself base and cowardly wins to
himself an evil reputation and the nickname of a coward, but that is
all. For the rest he buys and sells in the same market-place as the
good man; he sits beside him at play; he exercises with him in the
same gymnasium, and all as suits his humour. But at Lacedaemon there
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