On Brotherly Love (intro-1)

In this essay Plutarch has arranged his material somewhat more methodically than is his usual practice. In chaps. 1-7 he shows that Brotherly Love is in accordance with nature; in 9-19 he tells us how we should conduct ourselves toward a brother: (a) while our parents are alive, (b) when they are dead, (c) when the brother is our inferior, (d) when our superior; and also the reasons for quarrels and the treatment thereof. He closes with some pleasant tales of affection for brothers’ children.

That Plutarch wrote this work after De Adulatore et Amico, De Amicorum Multitudine,[*] and the Life of Cato Minor was demonstrated by C. Brokate (De aliquot Plui. libellis, diss. Güttingen, 1913, pp. 17-24, 58; and see the excellent tables on pp. 47, 61). Plutarch appears to have retained a certain amount of more or less irrelevant material on friendship from his recent work on these treatises, and also to have drawn upon some portions of Theophrastus’s treatise On Friendship.[*]

The essay is No. 98 in the Lamprias catalogue.

The ancient representations of the Dioscuri are called by the Spartans beam-figures [*]: they consist of two parallel wooden beams joined by two other transverse beams placed across them; and this common and indivisible character of the offering appears entirely suitable to the brotherly love of these gods. In like manner do I also dedicate this treatise On Brotherly Love to you, Nigrinus and Quietus,[*] a joint gift for you both who well deserve it. For as to the exhortations this essay contains, since you are already putting them into practice, you will seem to be giving your testimony in their favour rather than to be encouraged to perform them; and the pleasure you will take in acts which are right will make the perseverance of your judgement more firm, inasmuch as your acts will win approval before spectators, so to speak, who are honourable and devoted to virtue.

Now Aristarchus,[*] the father of Theodectes, by way of jeering at the crowd of sophists, used to say that in the old days there were barely seven Sophists, [*] but

that in his own day an equally large number of non-sophists could not easily be found. And according to my observation, brotherly love is as rare in our day as brotherly hatred was among the men of old; when instances of such hatred appeared, they were so amazing that the times made them known to all as warning examples in tragedies and other stage-performances; but all men of to-day, when they encounter brothers who are good to each other, wonder at them no less than at those famous sons of Molione,[*] who, according to common belief, were born with their bodies grown together; and to use in common a fathers wealth and friends and slaves is considered as incredible and portentous as for one soul to make use of the hands and feet and eyes of two bodies.