sense of need, that those fully endowed with wealth and resources,
especially with virtue, which is the surest safeguard, and thus in no
need of friends, are the very persons who are the most generous and
munificent. Indeed, I hardly know whether it may not be desirable that
our friends should never have need of our services. Yet in the case of
Scipio and myself, what room would there have been for the active
exercise of my zeal in his behalf, had he never needed my counsel or
help at home or in the field? In this instance, however, the service
came after the friendship, not the friendship after the service.

15. If these things are so, men who are given up to pleasure are not to
be listened to when they express their opinions about friendship, of
which they can have no knowledge either by experience or by reflection.
For, by the faith of gods and men, who is there that would be willing to
have a superabundance of all objects of desire and to live in the utmost
fulness of wealth and what wealth can bring, on condition of neither
loving any one nor being loved by any one? This, indeed, is the life of
tyrants, in which there is no good faith, no affection, no fixed
confidence in kindly feeling, perpetual suspicion and anxiety, and no
room for friendship; for who can love either him whom he fears, or him
by whom he thinks that he is feared? Yet they receive the show of
homage, but only while the occasion for it lasts. [Footnote: Latin, _dum
taxat ad tempus_, that is, while the homage rendered is in close contact
with the occasion,--with the immunity or profit to be purchased by it.]
If they chance to fall, as they commonly have fallen, they then
ascertain how destitute of friends they have been, as Tarquin is
reported to have said that he learned what faithful and what unfaithful
friends he had, when he could no longer render back favors to those of
either class,--although I wonder whether pride and insolence like his
could have had any friends. Moreover, as his character could not have