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It is true that the Arcadian prophetHegisistratus of Elis in Herodotus, ix. 37. The first sentence of this chapter is paraphrased by Stobaeus, vol. iv. p. 675 ed. Hense. of necessity manufactured for himself, according to Herodotus, a wooden foot, deprived as he was of his own; but the man who quarrels with his brother, and takes as his comrade a stranger from the market-place or the wrestling-floor, appears to be doing nothing but cutting off voluntarily a limb of his own flesh and blood, and taking to himself and joining to his body an extraneous member. Indeed it is our very need, which welcomes and seeks friendship and comradeship, that teaches us to honour and cherish and keep our kin, since we are unable and unfitted by Nature to live friendless, unsocial, hermits’ lives. Wherefore MenanderKock, Com. Att. Frag., iii. p. 169, Frag. 554 (p. 493 ed. Allinson, L.C.L.); v. 4 is quoted in Moralia, 93 c. rightly says, Not from drink or from daily revelling Do we seek one to whom we may entrust Our life, father. Do we not think we’ve found Great good in but the shadow of a friend? For most friendships are in reality shadows and imitations and images of that first friendship which Nature implanted in children toward parents and in brothers toward brothers; and as for the man who does not reverence or honour this friendship, can he give any pledge of goodwill to strangers? Or what sort of man is he who addresses his comrade as brother in salutations and letters, but does not care even to walk with his own brother when they are going the same way? For as it is the act of a madman to adorn the effigy of a brother and at the same time to beat and mutilate the brother’s body, even so to reverence and honour the name brother in others, but to hate and shun the person himself, is the act of one who is not sane and has never yet got it into his head that Nature is the most holy and great of sacred things.For the hyperbole contrast 491 d, infra.
