Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/254

232 fretting and angering one another ever and anon for small things, which in the end turn into hatred and enmity irreconcilable: for when they have begun to quarrel one with another at their games and pastimes, about the feeding and fighting of some little creatures that they keep, to wit, quails or cocks, and afterwards about the wrestling of their boys and pages at the school, or the hunting of their hounds in the chase, or the caparison of their horses; they can no more hold and refrain (when as they be men) their contentious vein and ambition in matters of more importance: thus the greatest and mightiest men among the Greeks in our time, banding at the first one against another in taking parts with their dancers, and then in siding with their minstrels, afterwards by comparing one with another who had the better ponds or bathing pools in the territory of Edepsus, who had the fairer galleries and walking-places, the statelier halls and places of pleasure, evermore changing and exchanging, and fighting (as it were) for the vantage of a place, striving still by way of odious comparison, cutting and diverting another way the conduct pipes of fountains, are become so much exasperate one against another, that in the meantime they are utterly undone; for the tyrant is come, and hath taken all from them; banished they are out of their own native country; they wander as poor vagabonds through the world, and I may be bold (well near) to say, they are so far changed from that they were afore, that they be others quite, this only excepted, that they be the same still in hatred one to another. Thus it appeareth evidently, that brethren ought not a little to resist the jealousy and contentions which breed among them upon small trifles, even in the very beginning, and that by accustoming themselves to yield and give place reciprocally one to another, suffering themselves to be overcome and take the foil, and joying rather to pleasure and content one another, than to win the better hand one of another: for the victory which in old time they called the Cadmian victory was nothing else but that victory between brethren about the city of Thebes, which is of all other the most wicked and mischievous.

What shall we say moreover? do not the affairs of this life minister many occasions of disagreement and debate even among those brethren which are most kind and loving of all other? yes, verily. But even therein also, we must be careful to let the said affairs to combat alone by themselves, and not to put thereto any passion of contention or anger, as an anchor or hook to catch hold of the parties, and pull them together for