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In this manner is the greatest and most dangerous disturbance that ever happened in Delphi said to have been occasioned by Crates, whose daughter Orgilaus, the son of Phalis, being about to marry, it happened that the cup they were using in the espousals brake asunder of itself; which he taking for an ill omen, left his bride, and went away with his father. Crates a little after, charging them with taking away a certain golden vessel, used in the sacrifices, caused Orgilaus and his brother, unheard, to be precipitated from the top of a rock to the bottom, and afterwards slew several of their most intimate friends, as they were at their devotions in the temple of Providence. After many such things were perpetrated, the Delphians, putting to death Crates and his companions in the sedition, out of their estates which they called excommunicated, built the temples in the lower part of the town. In Syracuse also there were two young men, betwixt whom there was an extraordinary intimacy, one of which, having taken into his custody his friend’s catamite, vitiated him in his absence. The other at his return, by way of retaliation, debauched his companion’s wife. Then one of the ancient senators, coming into the council, proposed the banishing of them both before the city was ruined by their filling it with enmity. Yet did not he prevail; but a sedition arising on this occasion by very great calamities overturned a most excellently constituted commonweal. You have also a domestical example in the enmity between Pardalus and Tyrrhenus, which wanted little of destroying Sardis by embroiling it in revolt and war on little and private differences. A statesman therefore is not to slight the little offences and heart-burnings which, as diseases in a body, pass speedily from one to another, but to take them in hand, suppress, and cure them. For, as Cato says, by attention and carefulness great matters are made little, and little ones reduced to nothing. Now there is no better artifice of inuring men to this, than the showing one’s self easily pacified in his own private differences, persisting without rancor in matters of the first importance, and managing none with obstinacy, contending wrath, or any other passion, which may work sharpness or bitterness in necessary disputes. For as they bind certain round muffles about the hands of those who combat at buffets, that in their contests there may not arrive any fatal accident, the blows being soft and such as can do no great harm; so in such suits and processes with one’s fellow-citizens, it is best to manage the dispute by making use of pure and simple pretences, and not by sharpening and empoisoning matters, as if they were weapons, with calumnies, malice, and threats, to render them pernicious, great, and public. For he who in this manner carries himself with those with whom he has affairs will have others also subject to him. But contentions about public matters, where private grudges are taken away, are soon appeased, and bring no difficult or fatal mischiefs.
