On Brotherly Love (intro-4)

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.

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.[*]

I remember, for instance, that in Rome I undertook to arbitrate between two brothers, of whom one had the reputation of being a philosopher. But he was, as it appears, not only as a brother but also as a philosopher, masquerading under a false name and appellation; for when I asked him to conduct himself as brother to brother and as philosopher to layman, What you say, said he, as to his being a layman, is correct, but I account it no momentous or important matter to have sprung from the same loins. As for you, said I, it is obvious that you

consider it no important or momentous matter to have sprung from any loins at all. But certainly all other philosophers, even if they do not think so, at least do affirm with constant iteration that both Nature and the Law, which upholds Nature, have assigned to parents, after gods, first and greatest honour[*]; and there is nothing which men do that is more acceptable to gods than with goodwill and zeal to repay to those who bore them and brought them up the favours long ago lent to them when they were young. [*] Nor is there, again, a greater exhibition of an impious nature than neglect of parents or offences against them. Therefore, while we are forbidden to do wrong to all others, yet to our mother and father, if we do not always afford, both in deed and in word, matter for their pleasure, even if offence be not present, men consider it unholy and unlawful. Hence what deed or favour or disposition, which children may show toward their parents, can give more pleasure than steadfast goodwill and friendship toward a brother?