Plutarch, De fraterno amore
W. C. Helmbold, Ed.

Therefore it is fitting to cleanse away completely hatred of brothers, which is both an evil sustainer of parents in their old age¹ and a worse nurturer of children in their youth. And it is also a cause of slander and accusations against such brothers ; for their fellow-citizens think that, after having been so closely bound together by their common education, their common life together, and their kinship, brothers could not have become deadly enemies unless each were aware of many wicked deeds committed by the other. There must be, they infer, great reasons for the breaking-up of a great goodwill and affection. For this reason it is not easy to effect a reconciliation of brothers; for just as things which have been joined together, even if the glue becomes loose, may be fastened together again and become united, yet if a body which has grown together is broken or split, it is difficult to find means of welding or joining it; so friendships knitted together through long familiarity, even though the friends part company, can be easily resumed again, but when brothers have once broken the bonds of Nature,² they cannot readily come together, and even if they do, their reconciliation bears with it a filthy hidden sore of suspicion. Or rather, every enmity between man and man which steals into the heart in company with the most painful emotions - contentiousness, anger, envy, remembrance of wrongs - causes pain and perturbation of mind; but when the enmity is toward a brother, with whom it is necessary to share sacrifices and the family's sacred rites, to occupy the same sepulchre, and in life, perhaps, the same or a neighbouring habitation - such an enmity keeps the painful situation ever before our [p. 267] eyes, and reminds us every day of the madness and folly which has made the sweetest countenance of the nearest kinsman become most frowning and angry to look upon, and that voice which has been beloved and familiar from boyhood most dreadful to hear. And though they see many other examples of brothers using the same house and table and undistributed estates and slaves, yet they alone maintain different sets of friends and guests, considering as hostile everything dear to their brothers - and that too though all the world may readily reflect that while friends and boon-companions may be ‘taken as booty,’ and relatives by marriage and familiars may be ‘obtained’ ³ when the old ones, like arms or implements, have been lost, yet the acquisition of another brother is impossible,⁴ as is that of a new hand when one has been removed or that of a new eye when one has been knocked out; rightly, then, did the Persian⁵ woman declare, when she chose to save her brother in place of her children, that she could get other children, but not another brother, since her parents were dead.