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all these instruments it is true are benefited by the persons who use them, but there can be no friendship, nor justice, towards inanimate things; indeed not even towards a horse or an ox, nor yet towards a slave as slave. For master and slave have nothing in common: a slave is a living tool, just as a tool is an inanimate slave. [7] Therefore there can be no friendship with a slave as slave, though there can be as human being: for there seems to be some room for justice in the relations of every human being with every other that is capable of participating in law and contract, and hence friendship also is possible with everyone so far as he is a human being. [8] Hence even in tyrannies there is but little scope for friendship and justice between ruler and subjects; but there is most room for them in democracies, where the citizens being equal have many things in common. 12.

All friendship, as we have said,1 involves community; but the friendship between relatives and between members of a comradeship may be set apart as being less in the nature of partnerships than are the friendships between fellow-citizens, fellow-tribesmen, shipmates, and the like; since these seem to be founded as it were on a definite compact. With the latter friendships may be classed family ties of hospitality between foreigners. [2]

Friendship between relatives itself seems to include a variety of species, but all appear to derive from the affection of parent for child. For parents love their children as part of themselves, whereas children love their parents as the source of their being. Also parents know their offspring with more certainty than children know their parentage; and progenitor is more attached to progeny than progeny to progenitor, since that which springs from a thing belongs to the thing from which it springs—for instance, a tooth or hair or what not to its owner—whereas the thing it springs from does not belong to it at all, or only in a less degree. The affection of the parent exceeds that of the child in duration also; parents love their children as soon as they are born, children their parents only when time has elapsed and they have acquired understanding,2 or at least perception. [3] These considerations3 also explain why parental affection is stronger in the mother. Parents then love their children as themselves (one's offspring being as it were another self—other because separate4); children love their parents as the source of their being; brothers love each other as being from the same source, since the identity of their relations to that source identifies them with one another, which is why we speak of ‘being of the same blood’ or ‘of the same stock’ or the like; brothers are therefore in a manner the same being, though embodied in separate persons. [4] But friendship between brothers is also greatly fostered by their common upbringing and similarity of age; ‘two of an age agree,’5 and ‘familiarity breeds fellowship,’ which is why the friendship between brothers resembles that between members of a comradeship.

1 chap. 9.1.

2 Cf. 6.11.2 and note.

3 That is, greater certainty of parentage, closer affinity and earlier commencement of affection.

4 Or ‘a second self produced by separation from oneself.’

5 ἧλιξ ἥλικα sc. τέρπει, Aristot. Rh. 1371b 15. ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.’ In its fuller form the proverb continues, ‘the old get on with the old,’ ἧλιξ ἥλικα τέρπε, γέρων δέ τε τέρπε γέροντα schol. ad Plat. Plat. Phaedrus 240c. The next phrase appears to be a proverb as well.

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