1LAELIUS. 1This is indeed using force; 1for what does it matter by what means you compel me? 1Compel me you certainly do. 1For to resist the wishes of one's sons-in-law, especially in a good cause, is not only difficult but not even fair. 1Well then, as I very often reflect on friendship, the question that usually seems to me most worth considering is this: whether friendship has been sought because of weakness and want, so that by giving and receiving favours each might obtain from another, and repay in turn, what he was less able to do by himself, or whether, though this is indeed a feature of friendship, there is another cause, older, more beautiful and springing more from nature herself.
1For love, from which friendship takes its name, is the prime mover in uniting men in goodwill. 1For advantages are often gained even from those who are courted and attended with a pretence of friendship for the sake of the occasion; 1but in friendship there is nothing feigned, nothing pretended, and whatever there is, is genuine and freely given. 27Therefore friendship seems to me to have sprung from nature rather than from need, from an inclination of the mind together with a certain feeling of love rather than from a calculation of how much profit the thing would bring. 27What this is like can be observed even in certain animals, which so love their offspring for a certain time, and are so loved by them, that their feeling is plainly apparent.
27This is far more evident in man, first from that affection which exists between children and parents, which cannot be broken except by an accursed crime, and next when a similar feeling of love has arisen, if we have found someone with whose character and nature we are in harmony, because we seem to see in him a kind of light, as it were, of uprightness and virtue. 28For nothing is more lovable than virtue, nothing that draws us more to affection, since for their virtue and uprightness we feel affection in some way even for those we have never seen. 28Who is there who does not recall the memory of Gaius Fabricius and Manius Curius with a certain kindly affection, though he never saw them?
28And who is there who does not hate Tarquinius Superbus, Spurius Cassius and Spurius Maelius? 28Against two generals there was a fight to the finish for empire in Italy, Pyrrhus and Hannibal; 28towards the one, because of his uprightness, we do not feel too unfriendly; 28the other, because of his cruelty, this state will always hate.