On Brotherly Love (2-3)

And yet the illustration of such common use by brothers Nature has placed at no great distance from us; on the contrary, in the body itself she has contrived to make most of the necessary parts double and brothers and twins[*]: hands, feet, eyes, ears, nostrils; and she has thus taught us that she has divided them in this fashion for mutual preservation and assistance, not for variance and strife. And when she separated the very hands into a number of unequal fingers, she supplied men with the most accurate and skilful of instruments, so that Anaxagoras[*] of old assigned the reason for man’s wisdom and intelligence to his having hands. The contrary of this, however, seems to be true[*]: it is not because man acquired hands that he is wisest of animals;

it is because by nature he was endowed with reason and skill that he acquired instruments of a nature adapted to these powers. And this fact is obvious to everyone: Nature from one seed and one source has created two brothers, or three, or more, not for difference and opposition to each other, but that by being separate they might the more readily co-operate with one another. For indeed creatures that had three bodies and an hundred hands, if any such were ever really born, being joined together in all their members, could do nothing independently and apart from one another, as may brothers, who can either remain at home or reside abroad, as well as undertake public office and husbandry through each other’s help if they but preserve that principle of goodwill and concord which Nature has given them. But if they do not, they will differ not at all, I think, from feet which trip up one another and fingers which are unnaturally entwined and twisted by each other.[*] But rather, just as in the same body the combination of moist and dry, cold and hot, sharing one nature and diet, by their consent and agreement engender the best and most pleasant temperament and bodily harmony-without which, they say, there is not any joy or profit either in wealth or

In that kingly rule which makes men

Like to gods[*] -

but if overreaching and factious strife be engendered in them, they corrupt and destroy the animal most shamefully; so through the concord of brothers both family and household are sound and flourish, and friends and intimates, like an harmonious choir, neither do nor say, nor think, anything discordant;

Even the base wins honour in a feud[*]:

a slandering servant, or a flatterer who slips in from outside, or a malignant citizen. For as diseases in bodies which cannot accept their proper diet engender cravings for many strange and harmful foods, so slander and suspicion entertained against kinsmen ushers in evil and pernicious associations which flow in from outside to fill the vacant room.[*]

It is true that the Arcadian prophet[*] of necessity manufactured for himself, according to Herodotus, a wooden foot, deprived as he was of his own; but the man who quarrels with his brother, and takes as his comrade a stranger from the market-place or the wrestling-floor, appears to be doing nothing but cutting off voluntarily a limb of his own flesh and blood, and taking to himself and joining to his body an extraneous member. Indeed it is our very need, which welcomes and seeks friendship and comradeship, that teaches us to honour and cherish and keep our kin, since we are unable and unfitted by Nature to live friendless, unsocial, hermits’ lives. Wherefore Menander[*] rightly says,

Not from drink or from daily revelling

Do we seek one to whom we may entrust

Our life, father. Do we not think we’ve found

Great good in but the shadow of a friend?

For most friendships are in reality shadows and imitations and images of that first friendship which Nature implanted in children toward parents and in brothers toward brothers; and as for the man who does not reverence or honour this friendship, can he give any pledge of goodwill to strangers? Or what sort of man is he who addresses his comrade as brother in salutations and letters, but does not care even to walk with his own brother when they are going the same way? For as it is the act of a madman to adorn the effigy of a brother and at the same time to beat and mutilate the brother’s body, even so to reverence and honour the name brother in others, but to hate and shun the person himself, is the act of one who is not sane and has never yet got it into his head that Nature is the most holy and great of sacred things.[*]