The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose Volume II - Rome Part 2

But altho many and great advantages ensued, yet it was not from any hope of these that the causes of our attachment sprang; for as we are beneficent and liberal not to exact favor in return (for we are not usurers in kind actions), but by nature are inclined to liberality, thus I think that friendship is to be desired, not attracted by the hope of reward, but because the whole of its profit consists in love only. From such opinions, they who, after the fashion of beasts, refer everything to pleasure, widely differ, and no great wonder, since they can not look up to anything lofty, magnificent, or divine who east all their thoughts on an object so mean and contemptible.

Therefore let us exclude such persons altogether from our discourse; and let us ourselves hold this opinion, that the sentiment of loving and the attachment of kind feelings are produced by nature when the evidence of virtue has been established; and they who have eagerly sought the last-named draw nigh and attach themselves to it, that they may enjoy the friendship and character of the individual they have begun to love, and that they may be commensurate and equal in affection, and more inclined to confer a favor than to claim any return. And let this honorable struggle be maintained between them; so not only will the greatest advantages be derived from friendship, but its origin from nature rather than from a sense of weakness will be at once more impressive and more true. For if it were expediency that cemented friendships, the same when changed would dissolve them; but because nature can never change, therefore true friendships are eternal....

Listen, then, my excellent friends, to the discussion which was very frequently held by me and Scipio on the subject of friendship; altho he indeed used to say that nothing was more difficult than that friendship should continue to the end of life; for it often happened either that the same course was not expedient to both parties or that they held different views of politics; he remarked also that the characters of men often changed, in some cases by adversity, in others by old age becoming oppressive; and he derived an authority for such notions from a comparison with early life, because the strongest attachments of boys are constantly laid aside with the praetexta; even if they should maintain it to manhood, yet sometimes it is broken off by rivalry, for a dowried wife, or some other advantage which they can not both attain. And even if men should be carried on still further in their friendship, yet that feeling is often undermined should they fall into rivalry for preferments; for there is no greater enemy to friendship than covetousness of money, in most men, and even in the best, an emulous desire of high offices and glory, in consequence of which the most bitter enmities have often arisen between the dearest friends. For great dissensions, and those in most instances justifiable, arise when some request is made of friends which is improper, as, for instance, that they should become either the ministers of their l.u.s.t or their supporters in the perpetration of wrong; and they who refuse to do so, it matters not however virtuously, yet are accused of discarding the claims of friendship by those persons whom they are unwilling to oblige; but they who dare to ask anything of a friend, by their very request seem to imply that they would do anything for the sake of that friend; by the complaining of such persons, not only are long-established intimacies put an end to, but endless animosities are engendered. All these many causes, like so many fatalities, are ever threatening friendship, so that, he said, to escape them all seemed to him a proof not merely of wisdom, but even of good fortune....

Let this, therefore, be established as a primary law concerning friendship, that we expect from our friends only what is honorable, and for our friends' sake do what is honorable; that we should not wait till we are asked; that zeal be ever ready, and reluctance far from us; but that we take pleasure in freely giving our advice; that in our friendship, the influence of our friends, when they give good advice, should have great weight; and that this be employed to admonish not only candidly, but even severely, if the case shall require, and that we give heed to it when so employed; for, as to certain persons whom I understand to have been esteemed wise men in Greece, I am of opinion that some strange notions were entertained by them; but there is nothing which they do not follow up with too great subtlety; among the rest, that excessive friendships should be avoided, lest it should be necessary for one to feel anxiety for many; that every one has enough, and more than enough, of his own affairs; that to be needlessly implicated in those of other people is vexatious; that it was most convenient to hold the reins of friendship as loose as possible, so as either to tighten or slacken them when you please; for they argue that the main point toward a happy life is freedom from care, which the mind can not enjoy if one man be, as it were, in travail for others.

Nay, they tell us that some are accustomed to declare, still more unfeelingly (a topic which I have briefly touched upon just above), that friendships should be cultivated for the purpose of protection and a.s.sistance, and not for kind feeling or affection; and therefore the less a man possesses of independence and of strength, in the same degree he most earnestly desires friendships; that thence it arises that women seek the support of friendship more than men, and the poor more than the rich, and persons in distress rather than those who are considered prosperous. Admirable philosophy! for they seem to take away the sun from the world who withdraw friendship from life; for we receive nothing better from the immortal G.o.ds, nothing more delightful; for what is this freedom from care?--in appearances, indeed, flattering; but, in many eases, in reality to be disdained.

Nor is it reasonable to undertake any honorable matter or action lest you should be anxious, or to lay it aside when undertaken; for if we fly from care, we must fly from virtue also; for it is impossible that she can, without some degree of distress, feel contempt and detestation for qualities opposed to herself; just as kind-heartedness for malice, temperance for profligacy, and bravery for cowardice.

Accordingly, you see that upright men are most distrest by unjust actions; the brave with the cowardly; the virtuous with the profligate; and, therefore, this is the characteristic of a well-regulated mind, both to be well pleased with what is excellent and to be distrest with what is contrary. Wherefore, if trouble of mind befall a wise man (and a.s.suredly it will, unless we suppose that all humanity is extirpated from his mind), what reason is there why we should altogether remove friendship from life, lest because of it we should take upon ourselves some troubles? for what difference is there (setting the emotions of the mind aside), I do not say between a man and a beast, but between a man and a stone, or log, or anything of that kind? For they do not deserve to be listened to who would have virtue to be callous and made of iron, as it were, which indeed is, as in other matters, so in friendship also, tender and susceptible; so that friends are loosened, as it were, by happy events, and drawn together by distresses.

Wherefore the anxiety which has often to be felt for a friend is not of such force that it should remove friendship from the world, any more than that the virtues, because they bring with them certain cares and troubles, should therefore be discarded. For when it produces friendship (as I said above), should any indication of virtue shine forth, to which a congenial mind may attach and unite itself--when this happens, affection must necessarily arise. For what is so unmeaning as to take delight in many vain things, such as preferments, glory, magnificent buildings, clothing and adornment of the body, and not to take an extreme delight in a soul endued with virtue, in such a soul as can either love or (so to speak) love in return? for there is nothing more delightful than the repayment of kindness and the interchange of devotedness and good offices. Now if we add this, which may with propriety be added, that nothing so allures and draws any object to itself as congeniality does friendship, it will of course be admitted as true that the good must love the good, and unite them to them selves, just as if connected by relationship and nature; for nothing is more apt to seek and seize on its like than nature.

Wherefore this certainly is clear, Fannius and Scaevola (in my opinion), that among the good a liking for the good is, as it were, inevitable; and this indeed is appointed by Nature herself as the very fountain of friendship.

But the same kind disposition belongs also to the mult.i.tude; for virtue is not inhuman, or cruel, or haughty, since she is accustomed to protect even whole nations, and to adopt the best measures for their welfare, which a.s.suredly she would not do did she shrink from the affection of the vulgar. And to myself, indeed, those who form friendships with a view to advantage seem to do away with its most endearing bond; for it is not so much the advantage obtained through a friend as the mere love of that friend which delights; and then only what has proceeded from a friend becomes delightful if it has proceeded from zealous affection; and that friendship should be cultivated from a sense of necessity is so far from being the case that those who, being endowed with power and wealth, and especially with virtue (in which is the strongest support of friendship), have least need of another, are most liberal and generous. Yet I am not sure whether it is requisite that friends should never stand in any need; for wherein would any devotedness of mine to him have been exerted if Scipio had never stood in need of my advice or a.s.sistance at home or abroad? Wherefore friendship has not followed upon advantage, but advantage on friendship.

Persons, therefore, who are wallowing in indulgence will not need to be listened to if ever they shall descant upon friendship, which they have known neither by experience nor by theory. For who is there, by the faith of G.o.ds and men, who would desire, on the condition of his loving no one, and himself being loved by none, to roll in affluence, and live in a superfluity of all things? For this is the life of tyrants, in which undoubtedly there can be no confidence, no affection, no steady dependence on attachment; all is perpetually mistrust and disquietude--there is no room for friendship. For who can love either him whom he fears or him by whom he thinks he himself is feared? Yet are they courted, solely in hypocrisy, for a time; because, if perchance (as it frequently happens) they have been brought low, then it is perceived how dest.i.tute they were of friends.

And this, they say, Tarquin[32] exprest; that when going into exile, he found out whom he had as faithful friends, and whom unfaithful ones, since then he could no longer show grat.i.tude to either party; altho I wonder that, with such haughtiness and impatience of temper, he could find one at all. And as the character of the individual whom I have mentioned could not obtain true friends, so the riches of many men of rank exclude all faithful friendship; for not only is Fortune blind herself, but she commonly renders blind those whom she embraces....

He who, therefore, shall have shown himself in both cases, as regards friendship, worthy, consistent, and stedfast; such a one we ought to esteem of a cla.s.s of persons extremely rare--nay, almost G.o.dlike. Now, the foundation of that stedfastness and constancy, which we seek in friendship, is sincerity. For nothing is stedfast which is insincere.

Besides, it is right that one should be chosen who is frank and good-natured, and congenial in his sentiments; one, in fact, who is influenced by the same motives, all of which qualities have a tendency to create sincerity. For it is impossible for a wily and tortuous disposition to be sincere. Nor in truth can the man who has no sympathy from nature, and who is not moved by the same considerations, be either attached or steady. To the same requisites must be added that he shall neither take delight in bringing forward charges nor believe them when they arise, all of which causes belong to that consistent principle of which now for some time I have been treating.

Thus the remark is true which I made at first that friendship can exist only among the good; for it is the part of a good man (whom at the same time we may call a wise man) to observe these two rules in friendship: first, that there shall be nothing pretended or simulated (for even to hate openly better becomes the ingenuous man than by his looks to conceal his sentiments); in the next place, that not only does he repel charges when brought (against his friends) by any one, but is not himself suspicious, ever fancying that some infidelity has been committed by his friend. To all this there should be added a certain suavity of conversation and manners, affording, as it does, no inconsiderable zest to friendship. Now solemnity and gravity on all occasions, certainly, carry with them dignity; but friendship ought to be easier and more free and more pleasant, and tending more to every kind of politeness and good nature....

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: From the "Cato Major, an Essay on Old Age." Translated by Cyrus R. Edmonds. This work is composed in the form of a dialog, in which, in the person of Cato the Censor as speaker, the benefits of old age are pointed out.]

[Footnote 5: A famous athlete who was many times crowned at the Pythian and Olympian games.]

[Footnote 6: Cneius Scipio was Consul in 222, and with Marcellus completed the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul. He served with his brother Publius Cicero against the Carthaginians in Spain, where, after several victories, both were slain in 212 B.C.]

[Footnote 7: Lucius Metellus, a Roman general who defeated the Carthaginians at Panormus, now Palermo, Sicily, in 250 B.C.]

[Footnote 8: Masinissa, king of a small territory in northern Africa, was at first an ally of Carthage against Rome, but afterward became an ally of Rome against Carthage.]

[Footnote 9: The translator explains that the speeches here referred to, as collected and published by Cato, numbered about 150. Cato was known to his contemporaries as "the Roman Demosthenes." Later writers often referred to him as "Cato the orator."]

[Footnote 10: Archytas was a Greek philosopher, eminent also as statesman, mathematician, and general. He lived about 400 B.C., and is credited with having saved the life of Plato through his influence with Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. He was seven times general of the army of Tarentum and successful in all his campaigns; eminent also for domestic virtues. He is p.r.o.nounced by a writer in Smith's "Dictionary" to have been "among the very greatest men of antiquity."

He was drowned while making a voyage in the Adriatic.]

[Footnote 11: Caudium was a Samnite town near which the Romans were defeated by Pontius Herennius.]

[Footnote 12: Not the Appius Claudius from whom the Appian Way and one of the great aqueducts were named. The older Appius Claudius, here referred to, lived in the century that followed Plato.]

[Footnote 13: t.i.tus Flaminius, general and statesman, was Consul in 198 B.C. It was not t.i.tus, but Caius Flaminius, who built the famous circus and road bearing his name. Caius lived at an earlier period.]

[Footnote 14: Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, the eminent military genius, who several times defeated the Romans before he was finally overthrown by them at Beneventum in 275 B.C.]

[Footnote 15: Livius Andronicus, who lived in Rome about 240 B.C.]

[Footnote 16: A small island (now a peninsula), lying off the coast of Spain. It is to-day called Cadiz, but anciently was known as Erythia, Tartessus, and Gades. It was founded about 1100 B.C., by the Phenicians, of whose western commerce it was the center.]

[Footnote 17: The tyrant of Athens who reigned thirty-three years and died about 527 B.C.]

[Footnote 18: Melmoth has commented on this pa.s.sage that, altho suicide too generally prevailed among the Greeks and Romans, the wisest philosophers condemned it. "Nothing," he says, "can be more clear and explicit" than the prohibition imposed by Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato.]

[Footnote 19: Better known as the famous Regulus, whose alleged speech to the "Conscript Fathers" has been declaimed by generations of schoolboys.]

[Footnote 20: Lucius Paulus died at the battle of Cannae, which was precipitated by his colleague Terentius Varro in 260 B.C., 40,000 Romans being killed by the Carthaginians.]

[Footnote 21: Marcellus, a Roman consul, who fought against Hannibal and was killed in an ambuscade.]

[Footnote 22: Cicero's daughter was born about 79 B.C., and thrice married, the last time to Dolabella, who has been described as "one of the most profligate men of a profligate age." She was divorced from Dolabella in 44 B.C., gave birth to a son soon afterward, and died in the same year. Cicero's letter was written in reply to one which he had received from Servius Sulpicius, a celebrated Roman jurist. Cicero intended to erect a temple as a memorial to Tullia, but the death of Caesar and the unsettled state of public affairs that ensued, and in which Cicero was concerned, prevented him from doing so.]

[Footnote 23: From Book I of the "Offices." Translated by Cyrus R.

Edmonds.]

[Footnote 24: Pausanias, a Spartan general, was the son of Cloembrotus, the king of Sparta, killed at the battle of Leuctra.

Pausanias commanded at Plataea; but having conducted a treasonable correspondence with Xerxes, was starved to death as a punishment.]

[Footnote 25: The general who contended against Sulla in the Civil war.]

[Footnote 26: Catulus was consul with Marius in 102 B.C. He acted with Sulla during the Civil war.]

[Footnote 27: Nasica, "a fierce and stiff-necked aristocrat," was of the family of Scipios. When the consuls refused to resort to violence against Tiberius Gracchus, it was he who led the senators forth from their meeting-place against the popular a.s.sembly outside, with whom ensued a fight, in which Gracchus was killed by a blow from a club.

Nasica left Rome soon after, seeking safety. After spending some time as a wandering exile, he died at Pergamus.]

[Footnote 28: From the Dialogue on "Friendship." Translated by Cyrus E. Edmonds. Laelius, a Roman who was contemporary with the younger Scipio, is made the speaker in the pa.s.sage here quoted. Laelius, was a son of Caius Laelius, the friend and companion of the elder Scipio, whose actions are so interwoven with those of Scipio that a writer in Smith's "Dictionary" says, "It is difficult to relate them separately." The younger Laelius was intimate with the younger Scipio in a degree almost as remarkable as his father had been with the elder. The younger, immortalized by Cicero's treatise on Friendship, was born about 186 B.C., and was a man of fine culture noted as an orator. His personal worth was so generally esteemed that it survived to Seneca's day. One of Seneca's injunctions to a friend was that he should "live like Laelius."]

[Footnote 29: Scipio Africa.n.u.s minor by whom Carthage was destroyed in 146 B.C., and Numantia, a town of Spain, was destroyed in 133 B.C.

From the letter he obtained the surname of Numantinus.]

[Footnote 30: Magna Graecia was a name given by the ancients to that part of southern Italy which, before the rise of the Roman state, was colonized by Greeks. Its time of greatest splendor was the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; that is, intermediate between the Homeric age and the Periclean. Among its leading cities were c.u.mae, Sybaris, Locri, Regium, Tarentum, Heraclea, and Paestum. At the last-named place imposing ruins still survive.]

[Footnote 31: Empedocles, philosopher, poet, and historian, who lived et Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490-430 B.C., and wrote a poem on the doctrines of Pythagoras. A legend has survived that he jumped into the crater of Etna, in order that people might conclude, from his complete disappearance, that he was a G.o.d. Matthew Arnold's poem on this incident is among his better-known works.]

[Footnote 32: Tarquinius Superbus, seventh and last King of Rome, occupied the throne for twenty-five years, and as a consequence of the rape of Lucretia by his son s.e.xtus was banished about 509 B.C.]

JULIUS CaeSAR

Born in 100 B.C.; a.s.sa.s.sinated in 44; famous as general, statesman, orator, and writer; served in Mitylene in 80; captured by pirates in 76; questor in 68; pontifex maximus in 63; propretor in Spain in 61; member of the First Triumvirate in 60; Consul in 59; defeated the Helvetii in 58; invaded Britain in 55 and 54; crossed the Rhine in 55; crossed the Rubicon and began the Civil war in 49; dictator from 49 to 45; defeated Pompey in 48; reformed the calendar in 46; refused the diadem in 44; a.s.sa.s.sinated in the senate house in 44.[33]

I

THE BUILDING OF THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE RHINE[34]