1LAELIUS. 1Listen, then, my excellent friends, to the things that were very often discussed between Scipio and me about friendship. 1And yet he used to say that nothing was more difficult than for a friendship to last right up to the last day of life: for it often happened either that the same thing was not advantageous to both, or that they did not hold the same views about the state; 1he said too that men's characters often changed, sometimes through adversity, sometimes as age grew heavier. 1And he took an illustration of these things from the analogy of early life, in that the warmest loves of boys were often laid aside together with the bordered toga; 34but if they had carried them through to youth, they were nevertheless sometimes broken off by rivalry, either over a marriage or over some advantage which both could not obtain at once.
34And if any had advanced further in friendship, still it was often shaken if they fell into competition for office; 34for there was no greater bane to friendships than, in most men, the desire for money, and in all the best men the contest for office and glory, from which the bitterest enmities had often arisen between the closest friends. 35Great breaches too, and for the most part justified ones, arose when something that was not right was asked of friends, that they should be either the servants of lust or accomplices in wrongdoing; and those who refused, however honourably they did so, were nevertheless accused of abandoning the law of friendship by those whom they would not oblige; 35while those who dared to ask anything whatever of a friend declared by the very request that they would do anything whatever for a friend's sake.
35By their long-standing complaints, he said, not only were intimacies usually extinguished, but everlasting hatreds were even engendered. 35So many dangers of this kind, like fates, hung over friendships, that to escape them all seemed to him, he said, to require not only wisdom but also good fortune.