06 Feb On Having Many Friends (Plutarch) | Part Β’
But if all our friends want the same things at the same time, it is hard to satisfy all, in either their counsels, their public life, their ambitions, or their dispensing of hospitality.
And if at one and the same time they chance to be occupied in diverse activities and experiences, and call upon us at the same instant, one to join him on a voyage to foreign parts, another to help him in defending a suit, another to sit with him as judge, another to help him in managing his buying and selling, another to help him celebrate his wedding, another to mourn with him at a funeral,
full too of joyous hymns and doleful groans
is the possession of a host of friends. It is impossible to be with them all, and unnatural to be with none, and yet to do a service to one alone, and thus to offend many, is a source of vexation,
for fond affection does not brook neglect
But most people, apparently, look at the possession of a host of friends merely from the point of view of what such friendships are able to bestow, and overlook what these demand in return, forgetting that he who accepts the services of many for his needs must in turn render like service to many in their need.
There is truth in the remark of the wise Chilon, who, in answer to the man who boasted of having no enemy, said, “The chances are that you have no friend either.” For enmities follow close upon friendships, and are interwoven with them, inasmuch as it is impossible for a friend not to share his friend’s wrongs or disrepute or disfavour; for a man’s enemies at once look with suspicion and hatred upon his friend, and oftentimes his other friends are envious and jealous, and try to get him away.
As the oracle given to Timesias about his colony prophesied:
Soon shall your swarms of honey-bees turn out to be hornets,
so, in like manner, men who seek for a swarm of friends unwittingly run afoul of hornet’s nests of enemies.
For these reasons it is not a fit thing to be thus unsparing of our virtue, uniting and intertwining it now with one and now with another, but rather only with those who are qualified to keep up the same participation, that is to say, those who are able, in a like manner, to love and participate.
For herein plainly is the greatest obstacle of all to having a multitude of friends, in that friendship comes into being through likeness.
Indeed, if even the brute beasts are made to mate with others unlike themselves only by forcible compulsion, and crouch aside, and show resentment as they try to escape from each other, while with animals of their own race and kind they consort with mutual satisfaction, and welcome the participation with a ready goodwill, how then is it possible for friendship to be engendered in differing characters, unlike feelings, and lives which hold to other principles?
In our friendship’s consonance and harmony there must be no element unlike, uneven, or unequal, but all must be alike to engender agreement in words, counsels, opinions, and feelings, and it must be as if one soul were apportioned among two or more bodies.
What man is there, then, so indefatigable, so changeable, so universally adaptable that he can assimilate and accommodate himself to many persons?
Whereas friendships seek to effect a thorough-going likeness in characters, feelings, language, pursuits, and dispositions.
Such varied adaptation were the task of a Proteus, not fortunate and not at all scrupulous, who by magic can change himself often on the very instant from one character to another, reading books with the scholarly, rolling in the dust with wrestlers, following the hunt with sportsmen, getting drunk with topers, and taking part in the canvass of politicians, possessing no firmly founded character of his own. And as the natural philosophers say of the formless and colourless substance Band material which is the underlying basis of everything and of itself turns into everything, that it is now in a state of combustion, now liquefied, at another time aeriform, and then again solid, so the possession of a multitude of friends will necessarily have, as its underlying basis, a soul that is very impressionable, versatile, pliant, and readily changeable.
But friendship seeks for a fixed and steadfast character which does not shift about, but continues in one place and in one intimacy.
For this reason a steadfast friend is something rare and hard to find.
Part A’: http://www.lecturesbureau.gr/1/on-having-many-friends-plutarch-part-a/?lang=en
Plutarch’s Morals
Plutarch
