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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: VI
There are other points in which this legislator's views run counter to
those commonly accepted. Thus: in other states the individual citizen
is master over his own children, domestics,[1] goods and chattels, and
belongings generally; but Lycurgus, whose aim was to secure to all the
citizens a considerable share in one another's goods without mutual
injury, enacted that each one should have an equal power of his
neighbour's children as over his own.[2] The principle is this. When a
man knows that this, that, and the other person are fathers of
children subject to his authority, he must perforce deal by them even
as he desires his own child to be dealt by. And, if a boy chance to
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