Book 7
7
And a household is a sort of friendship—or rather the relationships of master and slave is that of craft and tools, and of spirit and body, and such relationships are not friendships or forms of justice but something analogous, just as healthPerhaps the text is corrupt. is not justice but analogous to it.
8
But the friendship of man and wife is one of utility, a partnership; that of father and son is the same as that between god and man and between benefactor and beneficiary, and generally between natural ruler and natural subject.
9
That between brothers is principally the friendship of comrades, as being on a footing of equality— For never did he make me out a bastard, But the same Zeus, my lord, was called the sire Of both— Soph. Fr. 755 (Jebb and Pearson; 684 Nauck). The third line is completed in a quotation by Philo, θνητῶν δ’ οὐδείς. (For τῷδε dative of agent see Kuhner-Gerth, i. 422). for these are the words of men seeking equality. Hence in the household are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of political organization and of justice.
10
And since there are three sorts of friendship, based on goodness, on utility and on pleasure, and two varieties of each sort (for each of them is either on a basis of superiority or of equality), and what is just in relation to them is clear from our discussions, in the variety based on superiority the proportionate claims are not on the same lines, but the superior party claims by inverse proportion—the contribution of the inferior to stand in the same ratio to his own as he himself stands in to the inferior, his attitude being that of ruler to subject;
