“
[35]
"Then, too, disagreements of a very serious
nature, and usually justifiable, arise from a demand
upon friends to do something that is wrong, as,
for example, to become agents of vice or abettors
in violence, and when the demand is refused, however honourable the refusal, it is nevertheless
charged by those to whom the compliance was
denied that the laws of friendship have been disregarded; besides, those who dare demand anything
and everything of a friend, by that very demand
profess a willingness to do anything whatever for
the sake of a friend. By their ceaseless recriminations not only are social intimacies usually destroyed,
but also everlasting enmities are produced. So
many dangers of this kind,” he would say, “hover
like evil fates over friendships, that it seems to me
to require both wisdom and good luck to escape
them all.”
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.