Toxaris vel amicitia

But I will tell you of many a murder and war and death for the sake of a friend, to show that it is childish to compare your case with ours in Scythia. Still, your feeling is reasonable enough, and it is natural that you should eulogize these small matters, for you have no great occasions for displaying friendship, sunk in peace as you are, just as calm weather furnishes no opportunity to learn a pilot's quality. You need a storm for that. But with us one war follows on the heels of another, and we are either riding against some one else, or retiring before invaders, or falling to and fighting about pasturage or booty. In these emergencies, above all others, a man needs stanch friends. Accordingly, we cement friendships in the most enduring way, deeming them our only invincible weapons.

In the first place, I should like to describe to you our manner of acquiring friends. We do not do it over our cups as you do, or because a certain man happens to be a playfellow or a neighbor; but when we see a good man of great ability, we all strive for him, and we think it proper to win a friend as you do a wife, courting him a long time and taking all similar measures not to meet with a disappointment in friendship or figure as rejected aspirants. And when at length one has been chosen as his friend, the next step is a contract and a mighty oath that they will live together and, if need be, die for one another. This is the manner of the oath: we cut our fingers and let the blood trickle into a cup and then we dip our sword-points in it and, desisting from this at the same moment, we drink. When once we have done this, nothing can thereafter put us asunder. Three at most are permitted to enter into such a contract, since a man with many friends seems as bad to us as a woman with many lovers or husbands, and we think his friendship will no longer be so sure when it is parcelled among many tendernesses.