Book 7
3
it is also a law of nature—activity is a more desirable thing, and there is the same relation between effect and activity as between the parties here: the person benefited is as it were the product of the benefactor. This is why even animals have the philoprogenitive instinct, which urges them to produce offspring and also to protect the offspring produced.
4
And in fact fathers love their children more than they are loved by them (mothers more so than fathers)This clause is probably an interpolation in the Greek. and these in their turn love their children more than their parents, because activity is the greatest good. And mothers love their children more than fathers, because they think that the children are more their work;
5
for people estimate work by its difficulty, and in the production of a child the mother has more pain.
5
Such may be our decision on the subject of friendship for oneself and of friendship among more than one.
1
It is thought that what is just is something that is equal, and also that friendship is based on equality, if there is truth in the saying Amity is equality. And all constitutions are some species of justice; for they are partnerships, and every partnership is founded on justice, so that there are as many species of justice and of partnership as there are of friendship, and all these species border on each other and have their differentia closely related.
2
But since the relations of soul and body, craftsman and tool, and master and slave are similar,i.e. to one another. Perhaps the Greek should be amended to give not similar (to those just mentioned). between the two terms of each of these pairs there is no partnership;for they are not two, but the former is one and the latter a part of that one, not one itself; nor is the good divisible between them, but that of both belongs to the one for whose sake they exist. For the body is the soul’s tool born with it, a slave is as it were a member or tool of his master, a tool is a sort of inanimate slave.
