Of Brotherly Love (11)

But when the father is dead, it is fitting brothers should close the nearer in affection; immediately in their sadness and sorrow communicating their mutual love, and, in the next place, rejecting the suspicious stories and suggestions of servants, discountenancing their sly methods and subtle applications, and amongst other stories, adverting to the fable of Jupiter’s sons, Castor and Pollux, whose love to one another was such that Pollux, when one was whispering to him somewhat against his brother, killed him with a blow of his fist. And when they come to dividing their parents’ goods, let them take

heed that they come not with prejudice and contentious resolutions, giving defiance and shouting the warcry, as so many do. But let them observe with caution that day above all others, as it may be to them the beginning either of mortal enmity or of friendship and concord. And then, either amongst themselves, or, if need be, in the presence of some common and indifferent friend, let them deal fairly and openly, allowing Justice (as Plato says) to draw the lot, giving and receiving what may consist with love and friendship. Thus they will appear to be sharers only in the care and disposal of these things, whilst the propriety and enjoyment is free and common to them all. But they that take an advantage in the controversy, and seize from one another nurses and children who have been fostered and brought up with them, prevailing by their eagerness, may perhaps go away with the gain of a single slave, but they have forfeited in the stead of it the best legacy their parents could have left them, the love and confidence of their brothers. I have known some brothers, without the instigation of lucre, and merely out of a savage disposition, fly upon the goods of their deceased parents with as much ravine and fierceness as they would upon the spoil of an enemy. Such were the actions of Charicles and Antiochus the Opuntians, who divided a silver cup and a garment in two pieces, as though by some tragical imprecation they had been set on

To share the patrimony with a sword.[*]

Others I have known proclaiming the success of their subtle methods of fierce and eager and sometimes sly and fallacious reasonings, by which means they have compassed larger proportion from their deluded brethren. Whereas their just actions and their kind and humble carriage had less reproached their pride, but raised the esteem of their persons. Wherefore that action of Athenodorus is very

memorable, and indeed generally remembered by our countrymen. His elder brother Xeno in the time of his guardianship had wasted a great part of his substance, and at last was condemned for a rape, and all that was left was confiscated. Athenodorus was then but a youth; but when his share of the estate was given to him, he had that regard to his brother, that he brought all his own proportion and freely exposed it to a new division with him. And though in the dividing it he suffered great abuse from him, he resented it not so much as to repent of what he had done, but endured with most remarkable meekness and unconcerned ease his brother’s outrage, that was become notorious throughout all Greece.