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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: I am about to say, as though I had hit upon some recondite discovery.
Since half of what I have to say is at the present moment still patent
to the eyes of all of us, and as to what belongs to past history, if
we are to believe the testimony of our fathers,[10] things were then
much of a piece with what is going on now. No, what is really
marvellous is that the state, with the fact of so many private persons
growing wealthy at her expense, and under her very eyes, should have
failed to imitate them. It is an old story, trite enough to those of
us who have cared to attend to it, how once on a time Nicias, the son
of Niceratus, owned a thousand men in the silver mines,[11] whom he
let out to Sosias, a Thracian, on the following terms. Sosias was to
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