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[p. 245]

ON BROTHERLY LOVE (DE FRATERNO AMORE)
INTRODUCTION

In this essay Plutarch has arranged his material somewhat more methodically than is his usual practice. In chaps. 1-7 he shows that Brotherly Love is in accordance with nature ; in 9-19 he tells us how we should conduct ourselves toward a brother : (a) while our parents are alive, (b) when they are dead, (c) when the brother is our inferior, (d) when our superior ; and also the reasons for quarrels and the treatment thereof. He closes with some pleasant tales of affection for brothers' children.

That Plutarch wrote this work after De Adulatore et Amico, De Amicorum Multitudine,1 and the Life of Cato Minor was demonstrated by C. Brokate (De aliquot Plui. libellis, diss. Göttingen, 1913, pp. 17-24, 58; and see the excellent tables on pp. 47, 61). Plutarch appears to have retained a certain amount of more or less irrelevant material on friendship from his recent work on these treatises, and also to have drawn upon some portions of Theophrastus's treatise On Friendship.2

The essay is No. 98 in the Lamprias catalogue.

1 This point was subsequently shown, but with much less care and detail, by G. Hein (Quaestiones Plut., diss. Berlin, 1916, p. 37), who seems to have been ignorant of Brokate's far superior work.

2 Cf. Brokate, op. cit., pp. 7 ff.

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