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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: Hippagretai, or masters of the horse. Each of these selects one
hundred others, being bound to explain for what reason he prefers in
honour these and disapproves of those. The result is that those who
fail to obtain the distinction are now at open war, not only with
those who rejected them, but with those who were chosen in their
stead; and they keep ever a jealous eye on one another to detect some
slip of conduct contrary to the high code of honour there held
customary. And so is set on foot that strife, in truest sense
acceptable to heaven, and for the purposes of state most politic. It
is a strife in which not only is the pattern of a brave man's conduct
fully set forth, but where, too, each against other and in separate
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