indeed pleasing in aspect, but on many occasions it is to be renounced;
for it is not fitting, in order to avoid solicitude, either to refuse to
undertake any right cause or act, or to drop it after it is undertaken.
If we flee from care, we must flee from virtue, which of necessity with
no little care spurns and abhors its opposites, as goodness spurns and
abhors wickedness; temperance, excess; courage, cowardice. Thus you may
see that honest men are excessively grieved by the dishonest, the brave
by the pusillanimous, those who lead sober lives by the dissolute. It is
indeed characteristic of a well-ordered mind to rejoice in what is good
and to be grieved by the opposite. If then, pain of mind fall to the lot
of a wise man as it must of necessity unless we imagine his mind
divested of its humanity, why should we take friendship wholly out of
life, lest we experience some little trouble on account of it? Yet more,
if emotion be eliminated, what difference is there, I say not between a
man and a brute, but between a man and a rock, or the trunk of a tree,
or any inanimate object? Nor are those to be listened to, who regard
virtue as something hard and iron-like. [Footnote: Here, undoubtedly,
Cicero refers to the sterner type of Stoicism, which in his time was
already obsolescent, and was yielding place to the milder, while no less
rigid, ethics of which the _De Officiis_ may be regarded as the manual.]
As in many other matters, so in friendship, it is tender and flexible so
that it expands, as it were, with a friend's well being, and shrinks
when his peace is disturbed. Therefore the pain which must often be
incurred on a friend's account is not of sufficient moment to banish
friendship from human life, any more than the occasional care and
trouble which the virtues bring should be a reason for renouncing them.

14. Since virtue attracts friendship, as I have said, if there shines
forth any manifestation of virtue with which a mind similarly disposed
can come into contact and union from such intercourse love must of