as soon as he hears your challenge, he will embrace
the contest; pricked on by emulous pride, he will insist upon getting
the better of you in kindness of word and deed.

At present you two are in the condition of two hands formed by God to
help each other, but which have let go their business and have turned to
hindering one another all they can. You are a pair of feet fashioned on
the Divine plan to work together, but which have neglected this in order
to trammel each other's gait. Now is it not insensate stupidity (8) to
use for injury what was meant for advantage? And yet in fashioning
two brothers God intends them, methinks, to be of more benefit to one
another than either two hands, or two feet, or two eyes, or any other
of those pairs which belong to man from his birth. (9) Consider how
powerless these hands of ours if called upon to combine their action at
two points more than a single fathom's length apart; (10) and these feet
could not stretch asunder (11) even a bare fathom; and these eyes, for
all the wide-reaching range we claim for them, are incapable of seeing
simultaneously the back and front of an object at even closer quarters.
But a pair of brothers, linked in bonds of amity, can work each for the
other's good, though seas divide them. (12)

(8) "Boorishness verging upon monomania."

(9) "With which man is endowed at birth."

(10) "More than an 'arms'-stretch' asunder."

(11) Lit. "reach at one stretch two objects, even over that small
distance."

(12) "Though leagues separate them."

IV

I have at another time heard him discourse on the kindred theme of
friendship in language well calculated, as it seemed to me, to help a
man to choose and also to use his friends aright.

He (Socrates) had often heard the remark made that of all possessions
there is none equal to that of a good and sincere friend; but, in spite
of this assertion, the mass of people, as far as he could see, concerned
themselves about nothing so little as the acquisition of friends.
Houses, and fields, and slaves, and cattle, and furniture of all sorts
(he said) they were at pains to acquire, and they strove hard to keep
what they had got; but to procure for themselves this greatest of all
blessings, as they admitted a friend to be, or to keep the friends whom
they already possessed, not one man in a hundred ever gave himself a
thought. It was noticeable, in the case of a sickness befalling a man's
friend and one