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And so the saying of Theophrastus,Frag. 75 ed. Wimmer; cf. Moralia, 65 a. - its relevance is suggested by our very subject - is excellent: If the possessions of friends are common, Cf. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, viii. 9. 1 (1159 b 31); Kock, Com. Att. Frag., iii. p. 6, Menander, Frag. 9, from the Adelphoe. then by all means the friends of friends should be common; and one should urge this advice upon brothers with special emphasis. For associations and intimacies which are maintained separately and apart lead brothers away from each other and turn them toward others, since an immediate consequence of affection for others is to take pleasure in others, to emulate others, and to follow the lead of others. For friendships shape character and there is no more important indication of a difference in character than the selection of different friends. For this reason neither eating and drinking together nor playing and spending the day together can so firmly cement concord between brothers as the sharing of friendships and enmities, taking pleasure in the company of the same persons, and loathing and avoiding the same. For friendships held in common do not tolerate either slanders or conflicts, but if any occasion for wrath or blame arises, it is dissipated by the mediation of friends, who take it upon themselves and disperse it, if they are but intimate with both parties and incline in their goodwill to both alike. For as tin joins together broken bronze and solders it by being applied to both ends, since it is of a material sympathetic to both, so should the friend, well-suited as he is to both and being theirs in common, join still closer their mutual goodwill; but those who are uneven and will not blend, like false notes of a scale in music, create discord, not harmony.More exactly, the disjunction, not conjunction of tetrachords. One may, then, be in doubt as to whether Hesiod Works and Days, 707; cf. the Commentarii in Hesiodum, 65 (Bernardakis, vol. vii. pp. 83 f.). was right or not in saying, Nor should one make a friend a brother’s peer. For that man who is a considerate and a common friend to both brothers, as we have described him, compounded as he is of the natures of both, will the more readily be a bond of brotherly love between them. But Hesiod, it is likely, was afraid of the common run of friends who are evil because of their jealous and selfish natures.
