Page:On Friendship (Howe, 1915).pdf/31

 hinderance they may sometimes cause one another; and by nature one depends on the ruin of the other. Philosophers have been found who despised this natural tie: witness Aristippus, who, when importuned about the affection he owed his children as being issued from him, fell to spitting, saying that that was just as much issued from him; that we bred many lice and worms; and witness that other whom Plutarch tried to induce to make friends with his brother; “I don’t set any more by him,” said he, “ for having come out of the same hole.” It is, in truth, a beautiful name and delectable, that name of brother, and for that reason he and I made our alliance by it: but this mixture of property, these divisions, and the fact that the richness of one should be the poverty of the other, all that wonderfully weakens and relaxes the fraternal tie; since brothers must conduct the progress of their advancement in the same path and at the same rate, perforce they often interfere and collide. Moreover, why should the congeniality and relation that begets those real and perfect friendships, be found here? Father and son may be of entirely foreign dispositions, and brothers also: