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[76]
In brief, it is your
duty on every occasion to consider carefully both
what you will demand from a friend and what you
will permit him to obtain when he makes a demand
on you.
21. Furthermore, there is a sort of disaster in
connexion with breaking off friendships—for now
our discussion descends from the intimacies of the
wise to friendships of the ordinary kind1 —which is
sometimes unavoidable. There are often in friends
outbursts of vice which affect sometimes their actual
friends, sometimes strangers, yet so that the infamy
of the evil flows over on to the friends. Therefore
the ties of such friendships should be sundered by a
gradual relaxation of intimacy, and, as I have heard
that Cato used to say, “They should be unravelled
rather than rent apart,” unless there has been
some outbreak of utterly unbearable wrongdoing,
so that the only course consistent with rectitude
and honour, and indeed the only one possible, is to
effect an immediate withdrawal of affection and
association.
1 Cf. § 32 verae amicitiae sempiternae sunt.
Cicero: De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione. With An English Translation. William Armistead Falconer. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1923.
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