r countenance, while you are keeping the truth hidden within? Consider,
I intreat you, whether this is proper. My opinion is that those are
genuine sentiments which are honourable, which are praiseworthy, which are
creditable; which a man is not ashamed to avow in the senate, before the
people, in every company and every assembly, so that he will be ashamed to
think what he is ashamed to say.

But what room can there be for friendship, or who can be a friend to any
one whom he does not love for his own sake? And what is loving, from which
verb (_amo_) the very name of friendship (_amicitia_) is derived, but
wishing a certain person to enjoy the greatest possible good fortune, even
if none of it accrues to oneself? Still, you say, it is a good thing for
me to be of such a disposition. Perhaps it may be so; but you cannot be so
if it is not really your disposition; and how can you be so unless love
itself has seized hold of you? which is not usually generated by any
accurate computation of advantage, but is self-produced, and born
spontaneously from itself. But, you will say, I am guided by prospects of
advantage. Friendship, then, will remain just as long as any advantage
ensues from it; and if it be a principle of advantage which is the
foundation of friendship, the same will be its destruction. But what will
you do, if, as is often the case, advantage takes the opposite side to
friendship? Will you abandon it? what sort of friendship is that? Will you
preserve it? how will that be expedient for you? For you see what the
rules are which you lay down respecting friendship which is desirable only
for the sake of one's own advantage:--I must take care that I do not incur
odium if I cease to uphold my friend. Now, in the first place, why should
such conduct incur odium, except because it is disgraceful? But, if you
will not desert your friend lest you should incur any disadvantage from so
doing, still you will wish that he was dead, to release you from being
bound to a man from whom you get no advantage. But suppose he not only
brings you no advantage, but you even incur loss of property for his sake,
and have to undertake labours, and to encounter danger of your life; will
you not, even then, show some regard for yourself, and recollect that
every one is born for himself and for his own pleasures? Will you go bail
to a tyrant for your friend in a case which may affect your life, as that
Pythagorean(38) did when he became sur