To begin therefore with the domestic hearth,5 as the saying is, with the traditions of life that time has handed down to us about constant friends, let us take the witness and counsel of antiquity, according to which friendships go in pairs, as in the cases of Theseus and Pirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Phintias and Damon, Epaminondas and Pelopidas. For friendship is a creature that goes in pairs, and is not gregarious, or crow-like,6 and to think a friend a second self, and to call him companion as it were second one,7 shows that friendship is a dual relation. For we can get neither many slaves nor many friends at small expense. What then is the purchase-money of friendship? Benevolence and complaisance conjoined with virtue, and yet nature has nothing more rare than these. And so to love or be loved very much cannot find place with many persons; for as rivers that have many channels and cuttings have a weak and thin stream, so excessive love in the soul if divided out among many is weakened. Thus love for their young is most strongly implanted in those that bear only one, as Homer calls a beloved son "the only one, the child of old age,"8 that is, when the parents neither have nor are likely to have another child.
§ iii. Not that we insist on only one friend, but among the rest there should be one eminently so, like a child of old age, who according to that well-known proverb has eaten a bushel of salt with one,9 not as nowadays many so-called friends contract friendship from drinking together once, or playing at ball together, or playing together with dice, or passing the night together at some inn, or meeting at the wrestling-school or in the market. And in the houses of rich and leading men people congratulate them on their many friends, when they see the large and bustling crowd of visitors and handshakers and retainers: and yet they see more flies in