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Furthermore, there are other disturbances which brothers of nearly the same age must guard against; they are but small, to be sure, yet continuous and frequent, and create a vicious practice of offending and exasperating one another on all occasions, which at last ends in incurable hatred and malevolence. For having once begun to differ in childish matters, about the care of animals and their fights, as, for instance, those of quails or cocks, they then continue to differ about the contests of boys in the palaestra, of dogs on the hunt, and of horses at the races, until they are no longer able to control or subdue their contentious and ambitious spirit in more important matters. So the most powerful of the Greeks in my time, disagreeing first about rival dancers, then about harp-players, and afterwards by continually holding up to invidious comparison the swimming-baths and porticoes and banquet-halls at Aedepsus,Medicinal hot baths in Euboea; Cf. Moralia, 667 c-d. and then manoeuvring for places and positions, and going on to cut off aqueducts and divert their waters, they became so savage and reckless that they were deprived of everything by the despot,Probably Domitian, as Reiske conjectured. and, becoming exiles and paupers and-I had almost said-something other than their former selves, they remained the same only in their hatred for one another. It is therefore of no slight importance to resist the spirit of contentiousness and jealousy among brothers when it first creeps in over trivial matters, practising the art of making mutual concessions, of learning to take defeat, and of taking pleasure in indulging brothers rather than in winning victories over them. For the men of old gave the name of Cadmean Cf. Moralia, 10 a, and the note; the expedition of the Seven against Thebes, in which the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices, died fighting against each other in single combat. victory to no other than that of the brothers at Thebes, as being the most shameful and the worst of victories.
