Treatises on Friendship and Old Age | Page 9

may eliminate affection from relationship, you cannot
do so from friendship. Without it relationship still exists in name,
friendship does not. You may best understand this friendship by
considering that, whereas the merely natural ties uniting the human race
are indefinite, this one is so concentrated, and confined to so narrow a
sphere, that affection is ever shared by two persons only or at most by a
few.
6. Now friendship may be thus defined: a complete accord on all
subjects human and divine, joined with mutual goodwill and affection.
And with the exception of wisdom, I am inclined to think nothing
better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods. There are

people who give the palm to riches or to good health, or to power and
office, many even to sensual pleasures. This last is the ideal of brute
beasts; and of the others we may say that they are frail and uncertain,
and depend less on our own prudence than on the caprice of fortune.
Then there are those who find the "chief good" in virtue. Well, that is a
noble doctrine. But the very virtue they talk of is the parent and
preserver of friendship, and without it friendship cannot possibly exist.
Let us, I repeat, use the word virtue in the ordinary acceptation and
meaning of the term, and do not let us define it in high-flown language.
Let us account as good the persons usually considered so, such as
Paulus, Cato, Gallus, Scipio, and Philus. Such men as these are good
enough for everyday life; and we need not trouble ourselves about
those ideal characters which are nowhere to be met with.
Well, between men like these the advantages of friendship are almost
more than I can say. To begin with, how can life he worth living, to use
the words of Ennius, which lacks that repose which is to be found in
the mutual good-will of a friend? What can be more delightful than to
have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute
confidence as to yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if
you have no one to share your joy? On the other hand, misfortunes
would be hard to bear if there were not some one to feel them even
more acutely than yourself. In a word, other objects of ambition serve
for particular ends-riches for use, power for securing homage, office for
reputation, pleasure for enjoyment, health for' freedom from pain and
the full use of the functions of the body. But friendship embraces
innumerable advantages. Turn which way you please, you will find it at
hand. It is everywhere; and yet never out of place, never unwelcome.
Fire and water themselves, to use a common expression, are not of
more universal use than friendship. I am not now speaking of the
common or modified form of it, though even that is a source of
pleasure and profit, but of that true and complete friendship which
existed between the select few who are known to fame. Such friendship
enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and
sharing it.

7. And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this
certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future
and forbids weakness and despair. In the face of a true friend a man
sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his
friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend's strength is
his; and in his friend's life he enjoys a second life after his own is
finished. This last is perhaps the most difficult to conceive. But such is
the effect of the respect, the loving remembrance, and the regret of
friends which follow us to the grave. While they take the sting out of
death, they add a glory to the life of the survivors. Nay, if you eliminate
from nature the tie of affection, there will be an end of house and city,
nor will so much as the cultivation of the soil be left. If you don't see
the virtue of friendship and harmony, you may learn it by observing the
effects of quarrels and feuds. Was any family ever so well established,
any State so firmly settled, as to be beyond the reach of utter
destruction from animosities and factions? This may teach you the
immense advantage of friendship.
They say that a certain philosopher of Agrigentum, in a Greek poem,
pronounced with the authority of an oracle the doctrine that whatever in
nature and the universe was unchangeable was so in virtue of the
binding force of friendship; whatever was changeable was so by the