The Complete Essays (40 page)

[A] And that alternative licence of the Greeks is rightly abhorrent to our manners; [C] moreover since as they practised it it required a great disparity of age and divergence of favours between the lovers, it did not correspond either to that perfect union and congruity which we are seeking here. ‘
Quis est enim iste amor amicitiae? Cur neque deformem adolescentem quisquam amat, neque formosum senem?
’ [What is this ‘friendship-love’? Why does nobody ever fall in love with a youth who is ugly or with a beautiful
old
man?]
¹⁵
For even the portrayal of it by the Academy will not I think belie me when I say this about it: that the original frenzy inspired by Venus’ son
¹⁶
in the heart of the Lover towards the bloom of a tender youth (in which they allow all the excessive and passionate assaults which an immoderate ardour can produce) was simply based on physical beauty, a false image of generation in the body (for it could not have been based on the mind, which had yet to show itself, which was even then being born, too young to sprout); that if so mad a passion took hold of a base mind the means of pursuing it were riches, presents, favouritism in advancement to high office and such other base traffickings which the Academy condemned; if it lighted on a more noble mind its inducements were likewise more noble: instruction in philosophy; lessons teaching reverence for religion, obedience to the law and dying for the good of one’s country; examples of valour, wisdom, justice, with the Lover striving to make himself worthy of acceptance by the graciousness and beauty of his soul (that of his body having long since faded) and hoping by this mental alliance to strike a
more firm and durable match. When this suit produced its results – in due season (for while they did not require the Lover to devote time and discretion to this undertaking they strictly required it of the Beloved, since he had to reach a judgement about a kind of beauty which is internal, difficult to recognize and concealed from discovery) – there was then born in that Beloved the desire mentally to conceive through the medium of the beauty of the mind. For him this beauty was pre-eminent: that of the body, secondary and contingent – quite the opposite from the Lover. For this reason they held the Beloved in higher esteem and proved that the gods do so too; they severely rebuked the poet Aeschylus for having given, in the love of Achilles and Patroclus, the role of the Lover to Achilles, who was the fairest of all the Greeks, in the first verdure of unbearded youth.
¹⁷

Once this general communion had been established, with the more worthy aspect of it fulfilling its duties and predominating, they said that it produced fruits useful for private and public life; that it was the strength of those countries where it was the accepted custom and the main defence of right conduct and freedom – witness the loves of Hermodius and Aristogiton. That is why they call it sacred and divine. By their reckoning only the violence of tyrants and the baseness of the people are opposed to it.
¹⁸
Yet when all is said and done the only point we can concede to the Academy is that it was a love-affair which ended in friendship – which conforms well enough to the Stoic definition of love:
‘Amorem conatum esse amicitiae faciendae ex pulchritudinis specie.’
[Love is the striving to establish friendship on the external signs of beauty.]
¹⁹

I now return to a kind of love more equable and more equitable:
‘Omnino amicitiae, corroboratis jam confirmatisque ingeniis et aetatibus, judicandae sunt.’
[Such only are to be considered friendships in which characters have been confirmed and strengthened with age.]
²⁰

[A] Moreover what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in
so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed [C] except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ [A] Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say [C] specifically [A] about it, some [C] inexplicable [A] force of destiny.
²¹

[C] We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other – both because of the reports we each had heard (which made a more violent assault on our emotions than was reasonable from what they had said, and, I believe, because of some decree of Heaven: we embraced each other by repute, and, at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other. He wrote an excellent Latin
Satire
, which has been published,
²²
by which he defends and explains the suddenness of our relationship which so quickly reached perfection. Having so short a period to last, having begun so late (for we were both grown men – he more than a few years older than I) – it had no time to waste on following the pattern of those slacker ordinary friendships which require so much prudent foresight in long preliminary acquaintance. This friendship has had no ideal to follow other than itself; no comparison but with itself. [A] There is no one particular consideration – nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them – but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together which, having captured my will, brought it to plunge into his and lose itself [C] and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation. [A] I say ‘lose itself’ in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine.

In the presence of the Roman Consuls (who, after the condemnation of Tiberius Gracchus were prosecuting those who had been in his confidence) Laelius eventually asked Caius Blosius, the closest friend of Gracchus, how much he would have done for him. He replied: ‘Anything.’ – ‘What, anything?’ Laelius continued: ‘And what if he had ordered you to set fire to our temples?’ – ‘He would never have asked me to,’ retorted Blosius. ‘But supposing he had,’ Laelius added. ‘Then I would have obeyed,’ he replied.
²³
Now if he really were so perfect a friend of Gracchus as history
asserts, he had no business provoking the Consuls with that last rash assertion and ought never to have abandoned the certainty he had of the wishes of Gracchus.
²⁴
But those who condemn his reply as seditious do not fully understand the mystery of friendship and fail to accept the premiss that he had Gracchus’ intentions in the pocket of his sleeve, both by his influence and by his knowledge. [C] They were more friends than citizens; friends, more than friends or foes of their country or friends of ambition and civil strife. Having completely committed themselves to each other, they each completely held the reins of each other’s desires; grant that this pair were guided by virtue and led by reason (without which it is impossible to harness them together) Blosius’ reply is what it should have been. If their actions broke the traces, then they were, by my measure, neither friends of each other nor friends of themselves. Moreover [A] that reply sounds no different than mine would be, if I were interrogated thus: ‘If your will commanded you to kill your daughter would you kill her?’ and I said that I would. For that is no witness that I would consent to do so, because I do not doubt what my will is, any more than I doubt the will of such a friend. All the arguments in the world have no power to dislodge me from the certainty which I have of the intentions and decisions of my friend. Not one of his actions could be set before me – no matter what it looked like – without my immediately discovering its motive. Our souls were yoked together in such unity, and contemplated each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails, that not only did I know his his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.

Let nobody place those other common friendships in the same rank as this. I know about them – the most perfect of their kind – as well as anyone else, [B] but I would advise you not to confound their rules: you would deceive yourself. In those other friendships you must proceed with wisdom and caution, keeping the reins in your hand: the bond is not so well tied that there is no reason to doubt it. ‘Love a friend,’ said Chilo, ‘as though some day you must hate him: hate him, as though you must love him.’
²⁵
That precept which is so detestable in that sovereign master-friendship is salutary in the practice [C] of friendships which are
common and customary,
²⁶
in relation to which you must employ that saying which Aristotle often repeated: ‘O my friends, there is no friend!’
²⁷

[A] In this noble relationship, the services and good turns which foster those other friendships do not even merit being taken into account: that is because of the total interfusion of our wills. For just as the friendly love I feel for myself is not increased – no matter what the Stoics may say – by any help I give myself in my need, and just as I feel no gratitude for any good turn I do to myself: so too the union of such friends, being truly perfect, leads them to lose any awareness of such services, to hate and to drive out from between them all terms of division and difference, such as good turn, duty, gratitude, request, thanks and the like. Everything is genuinely common to them both: their wills, goods, wives, children, honour and lives; [C] their correspondence is that of one soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s,
²⁸
[A] so they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. That is why those who make laws forbid gifts between husband and wife, so as to honour marriage with some imagined resemblance to that holy bond, wishing to infer by it that everything must belong to them both, so that there is nothing to divide or to split up between them. In the kind of friendship I am talking about, if it were possible for one to give to the other it is the one who received the benefaction who would lay an obligation on his companion. For each of them, more than anything else, is seeking the good of the other, so that the one who furnishes the means and the occasion is in fact the more generous, since he gives his friend the joy of performing for him what he most desires. [C] When Diogenes the philosopher was short of money he did not say that he would ask his friends to give him some but to give him some back!
²⁹
[A] And to show how this happens in practice I will cite an example – a unique one – from Antiquity.

Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends: Charixenus, a Sicyonian, and Aretheus, also a Corinthian. As he happened to die in poverty, his two friends being rich, he made the following testament: ‘To Aretheus I bequeath that he look after my mother and maintain her in her old age; to Charixenus, that he see that my daughter be married, providing her with the largest dowry he can; and if one of them should chance to die I appoint the survivor to substitute for him.’ Those who first saw his will laughed at
it; but, when those heirs learned of it, they accepted it with a unique joy. One of them, Charixenus, did die five days later; the possibility of substitution was thus opened in favour of Aretheus, and he looked after the mother with much care; then, of five hundred weight of silver in his possession, he gave two and a half for the marriage of his only daughter and two and a half for the daughter of Eudamidas, celebrating their weddings on the same day.
³⁰

This example is a most full one, save for one circumstance: there was more than one friend. For the perfect friendship which I am talking about is indivisible: each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another: on the contrary, he grieves that he is not two-fold, three-fold or four-fold and that he does not have several souls, several wills, so that he could give them all to the one he loves.

Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated. [C] If two friends asked you to help them at the same time, which of them would you dash to? If they asked for conflicting favours, who would have the priority? If one entrusted to your silence something which it was useful for the other to know, how would you get out of that? The unique, highest friendship loosens all other bonds. That secret which I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can reveal without perjury to him who is not another: he
is
me. It is a great enough miracle for oneself to be redoubled: they do not realize how high a one it is when they talk of its being tripled. The uttermost cannot be matched. If anyone suggests that I can love each of two friends as much as the other, and that they can love each other and love me as much as I love them, he is turning into a plural, into a confraternity, that which is the most ‘one’, the most bound into one. One single example of it is moreover the rarest thing to find in the world.

[A] The rest of that story conforms well what I was saying: for Eudamidas bestows a grace and favour on his friends when he makes use of them in his necessity. He left them heirs to his own generosity, which consists in putting into their hands the means of doing him good. And there is no doubt that the force of loving-friendship is more richly displayed in what he did than in what Aretheus did. To sum up, these are deeds which surpass the imagination of anyone who has not tasted
them; [C] they make me wondrously honour the reply of that young soldier when Cyrus inquired of him how much he would take for a horse which had enabled him to win the prize in the races: ‘Would he sell it for a kingdom?’ – ‘No, indeed, Sire; but I would willingly give it away to gain a friend, if I could find a man worthy of such an alliance.’
³¹
Not badly put, that, ‘If I could find’; for you can easily find men fit for a superficial acquaintanceship. But for our kind, in which we are dealing with the innermost recesses of our minds with no reservations, it is certain that all of our motives must be pure and sure to perfection.