Laelius on Friendship (33-36)

SCAEVOLA. Well said, Fannius. Therefore, let us hear.

LAELIUS. Then listen, most worthy gentlemen, to the points very frequently mentioned between Scipio and me in our discussions of friendship. Now he, indeed, used to say that nothing was harder than for a friendship to continue to the very end of life; for it often happened either that the friendship ceased to be mutually advantageous, or the parties to it did not entertain the same political views; and that frequently, too, the dispositions of men were changed, sometimes by adversity and sometimes by the increasing burdens of age. And then he would draw an illustration of this principle from the analogy of early life.

For, said he, the most ardent attachments of boyhood are often laid aside with the boyish dress; but if continued to the time of manhood, they are broken off, sometimes by rivalry in courtship or sometimes by a contest for some advantage, in which both of the parties to the friendship cannot be successful at the same time. But should the friendship continue for a longer time, yet it is often overthrown when a struggle for office happens to arise; for while, with the generality of men, the greatest bane of friendship is the lust for money, with the most worthy men it is the strife for preferment and glory, and from this source frequently have sprung the deadliest enmities between the dearest friends.

Then, too, disagreements of a very serious nature, and usually justifiable, arise from a demand upon friends to do something that is wrong, as, for example, to become agents of vice or abettors in violence, and when the demand is refused, however honourable the refusal, it is nevertheless charged by those to whom the compliance was denied that the laws of friendship have been disregarded; besides, those who dare demand anything and everything of a friend, by that very demand profess a willingness to do anything whatever for the sake of a friend. By their ceaseless recriminations not only are social intimacies usually destroyed, but also everlasting enmities are produced. So many dangers of this kind, he would say, hover like evil fates over friendships, that it seems to me to require both wisdom and good luck to escape them all.

Wherefore, let us first consider, if you please, how far love ought to go in friendship. Supposing Coriolanus to have had friends, were those friends in duty bound to bear arms with him against their country? Or ought the friends of Vecellinus, or of Maelius, to have supported them in their attempts to gain regal power?