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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old
king, who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy
answers in a tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus
would have answered, that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus
and Herodotus's Cyrus (like Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's
Socrates) are real pictures of a real character; and that
Herodotus's story, though Xenophon says nothing of it, is true.
He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had
been chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit.
The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All
the rest obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due
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