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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXVIII
251

ful of the Greeks. From this complete participation, its most commanding and worthiest part exercising its functions and predominating, they declare that there flowed results of great utility, private and public; that it was the strength of those countries which admitted the practice of it, and the chief bulwark of equity and of liberty; witness the salutary loves of Harmodius and Aristogeiton.[1] Therefore they call it sacred and divine, and to their thinking only the violence of tyrants and the weakness of peoples are opposed to it. In fine, all that we can concede in favour of the Academy is to say that this was a love that ended in friendship; Which agrees not ill with the Stoic definition of love: Amorem conatum esse amicitiæ faciendæ ex pulchritudinis specie.[2] I return to my description of a kind[3] more equitable and equable. Omnino amicitiæ, corroboratis jam confirmatisque ingeniis et ætatibus, judicandæ sunt.[4]

(a) To continue — what we commonly call friends and friendships are only acquaintances and familiar relations formed by some chance or convenience, by means whereof our minds meet kindly. In the friendship of which I speak they are blended and melted one into another in a commingling so entire that they lose sight of that which first united them and can not again find it.[5] If I am urged to say why I loved him, I feel that it can not be expressed (c) save by replying: “Because it was he, because it was I.” (a) There is, beyond all my reasoning and beyond all that I can say in detail about it, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable force that brought about this union. (c) We sought each other before we had met, by reason of what we had heard of each other, which had more effect on our emotions than comports with hearsay reports, I believe, by some decree of Heaven. We embraced by our names. And at our first meeting, which was accidental, at a great festival and gathering in the city, we found ourselves so fast held, so well known, so bound to

  1. ↑ See Plato, Symposium.
  2. ↑ Love is the desire to win friendship from a beautiful being. — Cicero, Tusc. Disp., IV, 34.
  3. ↑ Of friendship.
  4. ↑ In general, friendships are not to be judged of until both the mind and the body have strength and maturity. — Idem, De Amicitia, XX.
  5. ↑ Qu'elles effacent et ne retrouvent plus la couture qui les a jointes.
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