Laelius on Friendship (73-76)

Now, in the first place, you must render to each friend as much aid as you can, and, in the second place, as much as he whom you love and assist has the capacity to bear. For however eminent you may be, you cannot lead all your friends through the various grades to the highest official rank, as Scipio was able to do when he made Publius Rutilius consul, though he could not accomplish this result in the case of his brother, Lucius Rutilius. But even if you could bestow upon another any honour you chose, yet you must consider what he is able to bear.

As a rule decisions about friendships should be formed after strength and stability have been reached in mind and age; nor should men who in boyhood were devoted to hunting and games of ball, keep as their intimates those whom they loved at that period simply because they were fond of the same pursuits. For on that principle nurses and the slaves who attended us to and from school, will, by right of priority of acquaintance, claim the largest share of our goodwill. I admit that they are not to be neglected, but they are to be regarded in an entirely different way; under no other conditions can friendship remain secure.[*]For difference of character is attended by difference of taste and it is this diversity of taste that severs friendships; nor is there any other cause why good men cannot be friends to wicked men, or wicked men to good men, except that there is the greatest possible distance between them in character and in taste.

This rule also may properly be prescribed in friendship: Let not a sort of ungoverned goodwill (as very frequently happens) hinder your friends’ advantage in important matters. For indeed, if I may go back to legends, Neoptolemus could not have taken Troy if he had been willing to listen to Lycomedes, by whom he had been reared and who endeavoured with many tears to hinder him from setting out. Often, too, important duties arise which require the temporary separation of friends; and he who would hinder the discharge of those duties because he cannot easily bear his grief at the absence of his friends, is not only weak and effeminate, but, on that very account, is far from reasonable in his friendship.

In brief, it is your duty on every occasion to consider carefully both what you will demand from a friend and what you will permit him to obtain when he makes a demand on you.

Furthermore, there is a sort of disaster in connexion with breaking off friendships—for now our discussion descends from the intimacies of the wise to friendships of the ordinary kind[*] —which is sometimes unavoidable. There are often in friends outbursts of vice which affect sometimes their actual friends, sometimes strangers, yet so that the infamy of the evil flows over on to the friends. Therefore the ties of such friendships should be sundered by a gradual relaxation of intimacy, and, as I have heard that Cato used to say, They should be unravelled rather than rent apart, unless there has been some outbreak of utterly unbearable wrongdoing, so that the only course consistent with rectitude and honour, and indeed the only one possible, is to effect an immediate withdrawal of affection and association.