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save as they get some advantage from each other.
[3]
Also friendship between good men alone is proof against calumny; for a man is slow to
believe anybody's word about a friend whom he has himself tried and tested for many years,
and with them there is the mutual confidence, the incapacity ever to do each other wrong,
and all the other characteristics that are required in true friendship. Whereas the other
forms of friendship are liable to be dissolved by calumny and suspicion.
[4]
But since people do apply the term ‘friends’ to persons whose regard
for each other is based on utility, just as states can be ‘friends’
(since expediency is generally recognized as the motive of international
alliances), or on pleasure, as children make friends, perhaps we too must call
such relationships friendships; but then we must say that there are several sorts of
friendship, that between good men, as good, being friendship in the primary and proper
meaning of the term, while the other kinds are friendships in an analogical sense,1 since such friends are friends in virtue
of a sort of goodness and of likeness2 in them: insomuch as pleasure is good in the eyes
of pleasure-lovers.
[5]
But these two secondary forms of
friendship are not very likely to coincide: men do not make friends with each other both
for utility and for pleasure at the same time, since accidental qualities are rarely found
in combination.