On Brotherly Love (6-7)

So Peisistratus,[*] marrying for a second time when his sons were full grown, said that because he considered them to be honourable and good he wished to become the father of more children like them. Excellent and just sons will not only love each other the more because of their parents, but will also love their parents the more because of each other; so will they always both think and say that, though they owe their parents gratitude for many favours, it is most of all for their brothers that they owe it,[*] since these are truly the most precious and delightful of all the possessions they have received from them. Well indeed has Homer[*] also depicted Telemachus as reckoning his brotherless condition a misfortune:

The son of Cronus thus has doomed our race

To have one son alone.

But Hesiod[*] does not well in advising an only son to inherit his father’s estate - and that too when he was himself a pupil of the Muses,[*] who, in fact, received this name[*] just because they were always together (homou ousas) in concord and sisterly affection.[*]

Now, as regards parents, brotherly love is of such sort that to love ones brother is forthwith a proof of love for both mother and father; and again, as

regards children, for them there is no lesson and example comparable to brotherly love on their father’s part. And, on the other hand, the contrary is a bad example for children who inherit, as from a father’s testament, his hatred of brothers. For a man who has grown old in law-suits and quarrels and contentions with his brothers, and then exhorts his children to concord,

Healer of others, full of sores himself,[*]

weakens the force of his words by his own actions. If, at any rate, Eteocles[*] of Thebes had said with reference to his brother,[*]

To where the sun and stars rise would I go,

And plunge beneath the earth-if this I could-

To hold Dominion, greatest of the gods,

and then had proceeded to exhort his own children[*]

Revere Equality, which ever binds

Friend to friend, state to state, allies unto

Allies: Nature made equal rights secure,

who would not have despised him? And what sort of man would Atreus have been, if, after serving his brother that dinner,[*] he had then proceeded to preach to his own children:

And yet the use of friends, fast joined with ties Of blood, alone brings help when troubles flow?[*]

Therefore it is fitting to cleanse away completely hatred of brothers, which is both an evil sustainer of parents in their old age[*] and a worse nurturer of children in their youth. And it is also a cause of slander and accusations against such brothers; for their fellow-citizens think that, after having been so closely bound together by their common education, their common life together, and their kinship, brothers could not have become deadly enemies unless each were aware of many wicked deeds committed by the other. There must be, they infer, great reasons for the breaking-up of a great goodwill and affection. For this reason it is not easy to effect a reconciliation of brothers; for just as things which have been joined together, even if the glue becomes loose, may be fastened together again and become united, yet if a body which has grown together is broken or split, it is difficult to find means of welding or joining it; so friendships knitted together through long familiarity, even though the friends part company, can be easily resumed again, but when brothers have once broken the bonds of Nature,[*] they cannot readily come together, and even if they do, their reconciliation bears with it a filthy hidden sore of suspicion. Or rather, every enmity between man and man which steals into the heart in company with the most painful emotions - contentiousness, anger, envy, remembrance of wrongs - causes pain and perturbation of mind; but when the enmity is toward a brother, with whom it is necessary to share sacrifices and the family’s sacred rites, to occupy the same sepulchre, and in life, perhaps, the same or a neighbouring habitation - such an enmity keeps the painful situation ever before our

eyes, and reminds us every day of the madness and folly which has made the sweetest countenance of the nearest kinsman become most frowning and angry to look upon, and that voice which has been beloved and familiar from boyhood most dreadful to hear. And though they see many other examples of brothers using the same house and table and undistributed estates and slaves, yet they alone maintain different sets of friends and guests, considering as hostile everything dear to their brothers - and that too though all the world may readily reflect that while friends and boon-companions may be taken as booty, and relatives by marriage and familiars may be obtained [*] when the old ones, like arms or implements, have been lost, yet the acquisition of another brother is impossible,[*] as is that of a new hand when one has been removed or that of a new eye when one has been knocked out; rightly, then, did the Persian[*] woman declare, when she chose to save her brother in place of her children, that she could get other children, but not another brother, since her parents were dead.