Since then Friendship stands rather in the entertaining,
than in being the object of, the sentiment, and they
are praised who are fond of their friends, it seems
that entertaining—[Sidenote: II59b]the
sentiment is the Excellence of friends; and so, in
whomsoever this exists in due proportion these are
stable friends and their Friendship is permanent.
And in this way may they who are unequal best be friends,
because they may thus be made equal.
Equality, then, and similarity are a tie to Friendship,
and specially the similarity of goodness, because
good men, being stable in themselves, are also stable
as regards others, and neither ask degrading services
nor render them, but, so to say, rather prevent them:
for it is the part of the good neither to do wrong
themselves nor to allow their friends in so doing.
The bad, on the contrary, have no principle of stability:
in fact, they do not even continue like themselves:
only they come to be friends for a short time from
taking delight in one another’s wickedness.
Those connected by motives of profit, or pleasure,
hold together somewhat longer: so long, that
is to say, as they can give pleasure or profit mutually.
The Friendship based on motives of profit is thought
to be most of all formed out of contrary elements:
the poor man, for instance, is thus a friend of the
rich, and the ignorant of the man of information; that
is to say, a man desiring that of which he is, as it
happens, in want, gives something else in exchange
for it. To this same class we may refer the lover
and beloved, the beautiful and the ill-favoured.
For this reason lovers sometimes show in a ridiculous
light by claiming to be the objects of as intense
a feeling as they themselves entertain: of course
if they are equally fit objects of Friendship they
are perhaps entitled to claim this, but if they have
nothing of the kind it is ridiculous.
Perhaps, moreover, the contrary does not aim at its
contrary for its own sake but incidentally: the
mean is really what is grasped at; it being good for
the dry, for instance, not to become wet but to attain
the mean, and so of the hot, etc. However,
let us drop these questions, because they are in fact
somewhat foreign to our purpose.
It seems too, as was stated at the commencement, that
Friendship and Justice have the same object-matter,
and subsist between the same persons: I mean
that in every Communion there is thought to be some
principle of Justice and also some Friendship:
men address as friends, for instance, those who are
their comrades by sea, or in war, and in like manner
also those who are brought into Communion with them
in other ways: and the Friendship, because also
the Justice, is co-extensive with the Communion, This
justifies the common proverb, “the goods of friends
are common,” since Friendship rests upon Communion.
