The Nicomachean Ethics — trans. F. H. Peters (1881)
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The translator’s English as printed (F. H. Peters). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
Of these other kinds, that which more nearly resembles true friendship is that whose motive is pleasure, when each renders the same service to the her, and both take pleasure in one another, or in .■le same things, such as young men's friendships are wont to be; for a generous spirit is commoner in them than in others. But the friendship whose motive is utility is the friendship of sordid souls. Those who are happy do not need useful, but pleasant friends ; it is people to live with that they want, and * hough they may for a short time put up with what painful, yet no one could endure anji-hing continually, not even the good itself, if it were painful to hiin ; so they require that their friends shall be pleasant. But they ought, we may say, to require that they shall be good as weU as pleasant, and good for them ; then all the characteristics of a friend wiU be combined.
• Reading toXAovj.
p. 264
People in exalted positions seem to make distinct classes of friends. They have some who are useful, and others who are pleasant, but seldom any that unite both these qualities; for they do not seek for people who are at once agreeable and virtuous, or people who can be useful to them in noble actions, but they seek for witty persons to satisfy their craving for pleasure, while for other purposes they choose men who are clever at carrying out their instructions : but these two qualities are seldom united in one person.
The good man, indeed, as we have already said, ( is both pleasant and useful ; but such a man does not make friends with a man in a superior station, unless he allows himself inferior in virtue :* only thus does he meet the good man on equal terms, being inferior in one respect in the same ratio as he is superior in another. But great men are by no means wont to behave in this manner.
In the friendships hitherto spoken of the persons are equal, for they do the same and wish the same for each other, or else exchange equal quantities of different things, as pleasure for profit. (We have already explained that the latter less deserve the name of friendship, and are less lasting than the former kind. We may even say that, being at once
* The words tiv fiij koI t^ aper^ uTrepe'xTjTot literally meau " unless he also be surpassed in virtue." Who is "he"? Not the former, for 6 eirovSttios, the ideally good man, cannot be surpassed in virtue ; therefore the latter — the great man, the tyrant, king or prince. The whole passage displays a decided animus against princes (perhaps, as Stahr suggests, a reminiscence of experiences in the Macedonian court).
-7, 2.] FRIENDSHIP OR LOVE. 265
til like it and unlike it, they seem both to be and not to be friendships. On the ground of their resemblance to the friendship that is based on virtue, they seem to be friendships ; for one involves pleasure, the other profit, both of which belong to true friendship ; but, again, inasmuch as it is beyond calumny and is lasting, while they are liable to rapid change and different in many other respects, they seem not to be friendships because of their unlikeness to it.)
7. But, besides these, there is another kind oioffriaiAship bttwttM fiiendship, in which the persons are unequal, as that unequal of a father for a son, and generally of an elder for ausruieqf
' o ^ proportion.
younger person, or of a man for a woman, or of a f**^JT^'*- ruler of any kind for a subject S^aL