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.
36
Wherefore, let us first consider, if you please, how far love ought to go in friendship. Supposing Coriolanus to have had friends, were those friends in duty bound to bear arms with him against their country? Or ought the friends of Vecellinus, or of Maelius, to have supported them in their attempts to gain regal power?