Two of my sons-in-law came to the house today, and they came with a question they were too polite to ask directly.1
They asked it sideways. They said: people are calling you wise, and they want to know how a wise man carries a loss like this. You missed the meeting of the augurs. In forty years you have never missed it. Are you well?
What They Are Really Asking
Let me answer it plainly, and then let me give you something more useful than my grief.
If I told you I was not affected, I would be lying, and I would have to go find a philosopher to justify me. Of course I am affected. I have lost a friend the like of which I do not believe will exist again. But I do not need medicine and I do not need consoling, because I am spared the mistake that usually does the damage at a graveside.
Nothing bad has happened to Scipio.
He was elected consul twice without once standing for it, the first time before he was legally old enough. He ended two wars by ending two cities. He was good to his mother, generous to his sisters, straight with everyone. On his last day alive the Senate rose and the whole city walked him to his own front door. What exactly would a few more years have added?
So the disaster, if there is one, is mine. And I want you to hold on to that distinction, because everything else I have to say depends on it. To be badly broken by your own misfortune does not prove that you loved your friend. It proves that you loved yourself.
Only Between Good People — and I Do Not Mean Saints
Here is my definition, and I will not soften it. Friendship is complete agreement about everything that matters, human and divine, joined to goodwill and affection.
Complete agreement about what matters. Not shared amusements. Not enjoying each other's company, pleasant as that is. Agreement about what is worth doing and what is not.
Which forces me to say the unfashionable thing first: friendship is only possible between good people.
Now, I know what happens when you say that. The professional philosophers descend and explain that only the perfectly wise man can be called good, and that no such man has ever lived, and therefore nothing I have just said applies to anybody.
Let them keep the word. Everyone is irritated by it and nobody understands what it means.
I am talking about people whose conduct leaves no real question about their honesty, their fairness and their generosity. People who are not ruled by greed or appetite or violence, and who have the nerve to act on what they believe. I could name you six such men in this city. You know several yourself. They are good enough for ordinary life, and ordinary life is what we have. I am not interested in ideal characters.
Nobody has ever met one.
The demand is high. The standard is not exotic.
It Does Not Begin in Need
There is a theory going about that friendship is a trade. You are weak here, I am weak there, so we come to an arrangement. Friendship as insurance.
Look at what is actually in front of you. If that were the mechanism, then the neediest people would have the most friends and the strongest would have none. And you know perfectly well that it runs the other way. It is the people who want for nothing — secure in themselves, fortified by their own character — who reach hardest for friendship and hold it longest.
Did Scipio need anything from me? Not the smallest thing. Nor I from him. I admired what he was. He seems to have thought something similar of me. The advantages came afterward, in enormous quantity, and they were never the reason.
Our word for friendship is amicitia. Our word for love is amor. The love comes first. The rest arrives behind it, unasked for, like fruit on a tree you did not plant for fruit.
And if you want the proof by contrary case, consider a tyrant. He has everything. He can buy any man in the city and command the rest. And he has no friends at all — not one — because who can love a man he fears, or love a man who he knows fears him? Tarquin said in exile that he never found out which of his friends were real until he had lost the power to reward or punish either kind.
So it is not friendship that follows advantage. It is advantage that follows friendship.
Even If He Had Wished It
Now the hard question, and I will not dodge it, because I have had to answer it in a courtroom.
How far does loyalty go? If your friend turns against the city, do you go with him?
There was a man called Blossius, from Cumae. He had been the closest adviser and intimate friend of Tiberius Gracchus, who tried to make himself something very like a king and was beaten to death in the street for it. Afterward Blossius was brought before a commission to explain himself. I was sitting on it.
He offered a defense that sounded almost noble. He said his regard for Tiberius had been so high that he had treated the man's wishes as law.
So I asked him: even if he had wished you to set fire to the Capitol?
He said: he would never have wished that.
I said: but if he had wished it?
He said: I would have obeyed.
I have no comment to make on that sentence. It does not need one.
Here is the first law of friendship, and it has two halves, because one half alone is useless. Do not ask of a friend, and do not agree to do for a friend, anything that is wrong. Both halves. You are as answerable for what you request as for what you grant — because a man who feels free to ask you for anything has just told you exactly what he is willing to do for you.
And I will not accept "for friendship's sake" as a defense. Not for a moment. Not from anyone.
I understand how strange that sounds inside a discourse in praise of affection. But follow it. If friendship rests on two people recognizing the same good, then a friendship that survives the abandonment of that good has already stopped being one. What is left is a habit with two men inside it.
The Flatterer Is Only Watering What You Planted
My friend Terence has a line: compliance gets us friends; plain speaking gets us hate.
He is right, and it does not matter. Plain speaking causes trouble when it breeds resentment, and resentment is poison. But going along with a man causes far worse trouble, because it lets him walk off a cliff with company. The one truly hopeless case is the man whose ears are so shut that he cannot stand to hear the truth from someone who loves him. Give him up.
Cato put it more harshly than I would dare: there are men who owe more to their bitter enemies than to their agreeable friends, because the enemies occasionally tell them the truth and the friends never do.
Which brings me to the thing that actually destroys friendships. It is not betrayal. It is not distance. It is flattery, and I want to be precise about where it gets its grip.
The man who opens his ears widest to flatterers is the man who was already flattering himself. The flatterer plants nothing. He waters.
And do not imagine you will spot him by his gushing. Any fool can see through an open flatterer. The dangerous one disagrees with you. He argues, he gives ground, he lets you win, and he leaves you feeling like the clear-sighted one in the room.
Count Your Friends the Way You Count Your Sheep
Scipio used to complain that any man in Rome could tell you exactly how many goats and sheep he owned, and not one could tell you how many friends he had. Enormous care over the livestock. None whatsoever here.
So: test first. Judge, and then love — not love, and then judge. We do the reverse constantly, bind ourselves in by long habit and mutual obligation, and then discover the man at the worst possible moment and break with him at full gallop.
Look for firmness, steadiness, constancy. Look for a man who neither enjoys bringing you accusations nor believes them when others do. Look for a character that is not intricate; you cannot trust what is tortuous. And allow it time, because as the saying goes, you must eat a great deal of salt with a man before you are truly friends with him.
I will give you two more rules, and then I am nearly done.
If you have risen higher than your friends, come down. Scipio was the first man of his generation and he never once pulled rank — he deferred to a brother who was his equal in nothing but age. And if you are the one who has not risen, do not sulk about it, and above all do not keep accounts. People who are forever reciting their own services are unbearable. The man who received the favor should remember it. The man who did it should never mention it again.
And when a friendship has to end, and some do: unstitch it, do not tear it in two. Let it fade by seeing less of each other. Do not convert it into a war.
Caution
There is nothing more shameful than open enmity with a man who used to know everything about you.
A Man Alone in Heaven
I want to give you one saying, and I want to be honest that it comes to me third-hand. Men older than I am told me that men older than they were had it from Archytas of Tarentum. Which is, I suppose, its own small demonstration of how things get passed along.
Suppose a man could rise up into the sky and see the whole order of the universe laid open in front of him — the structure of everything, the beauty of the stars.
He would take almost no pleasure in it. Though nothing more delightful could possibly be given to a man. Not if there were nobody he could tell.
That is not an argument. It is just what is the case. Nature cannot bear to be alone, and leans on something, and the pleasantest thing it can lean on is the person closest to you.
What Is Left
They tell me Scipio is gone. I say he is not.
It was the man's virtue that I loved, and that has not died. I do not mean this as consolation. I mean it as a description. What I loved is still exactly where it was, and it will be visible to people who are not yet born.
And when I count up what the friendship actually consisted of, it is strikingly unglamorous, which is how I know it was real. Agreement in public. Counsel in private. One house, one table, one manner of living. Campaigns abroad, and quiet stretches in the country. Hours and hours spent learning things, out of anybody's sight, for no reason at all.
Never once did I say a thing to him I wished back. Never once did he say a thing to me I wished unsaid. Of everything fortune or nature has given me, I know nothing to set beside it.
So here is what I would have you take away, and then I will stop.
Virtue comes first. Without it there is no friendship at all, only arrangement. But next to virtue — and next to nothing else in this world — the greatest of all things is friendship.
Be careful, then, whom you love, because you will be answerable for it. Tell them the true thing even when it costs you. Never ask them for anything that would make them smaller than they are.
And keep looking, all your life, for someone to love and be loved by. Because if you let affection and warmth out of your life, you have thrown away the only part of it that had any charm.