The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

270 LELIUS; OR,
but continues the same it was in its origin, notwithstanding
every degree of cordiality between the parties should be
utterly extinguished
; whereas the kind affections enter
so essentially into the latter, that where love does not
exist friendship can have no being. But what still farther
evinces the strength and efficacy of friendship above all
the numberless other social tendencies of the human heart
is that, instead of wasting its force upon a multiplicity
of divided objects, its whole energy
is exerted for the
benefit of only two or three persons at the utmost.
Friendship may be shortly defined, a perfect con
formity of opinions upon all religious and civil subjects,
united with the highest degree of mutual esteem and
affection ;
and yet from these simple circumstances
results the most desirable blessing (virtue alone excepted)
that the gods have bestowed on mankind. I am sensible
that in this opinion I shall not be universally supported
health and riches, honours and power, have each of them
their distinct admirers, and are respectively pursued as
the supreme felicity of human life ; whilst some there are
(and the number is by no means inconsiderable) who
contend that it is to be found only in the sensual grati
fications. But the latter place their principal happiness
on the same low enjoyments which constitute the chief
good of brutes, and the former on those very precarious
possessions that depend much less on our own merit than
on the caprice of fortune. They, indeed, who maintain
that the ultimate good of man consists in the knowledge
and practice of virtue, fix it, undoubtedly, upon its truest
and most glorious foundation ;
but let it be remembered,
at the same time, that virtue is at once both the parent
and the support of friendship.
I have already declared that by virtue I do not mean,
with the philosophers before alluded to,
that ideal strain
of perfection which is nowhere to be found but in the
pompous language of enthusiastic declamation ; I mean