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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: any fair public ground of quarrel, but merely out of his private
hatred to the Thebans; and they complained with indignation, that
they, being the majority of the army, should from year to year be
thus exposed to danger and hardship here and there, at the will of
a few persons. It was at this time, we are told, that Agesilaus,
to obviate the objection, devised this expedient, to show the
allies were not the greater number. He gave orders that all the
allies, of whatever country, should sit down promiscuously on one
side, and all the Lacedaemonians on the other: which being done,
he commanded a herald to proclaim, that all the potters of both
divisions should stand out; then all the blacksmiths; then all the
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