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The right course, indeed, would have been for us not to take up arms against one another in the beginning, since the tradition is that the first strangers to whom Triptolemus,1 our ancestor, revealed the mystic rites of Demeter and Core were Heracles, your state's founder, and the Dioscuri, your citizens; and, further, that it was upon Peloponnesus that he first bestowed the seed of Demeter's fruit. How, then, can it be right,2 either that you should ever come to destroy the fruit of those very men from whom you received the seed, or that we should not desire those very men, to whom we gave the seed, to obtain the greatest possible abundance of food? But if it is indeed ordered of the gods that wars should come among men, then we ought to begin war as tardily as we can, and, when it has come, to bring it to an end as speedily as possible.”
1 Triptolemus of Eleusis had, according to the legend, carried from Attica throughout Greece both the cult of Demeter and the knowledge of her art — agriculture. Heracles was the traditional ancestor of the Spartan kings (cp. III. iii.) while the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, were putative sons of Tyndareus of Sparta.
2 371 B.C.
Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 1 and 2. Carleton L. Brownson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. vol. 1:1918; vol. 2: 1921.
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