|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: no violent desire of any of these things; but I have a passion for friends;
and I would rather have a good friend than the best cock or quail in the
world: I would even go further, and say the best horse or dog. Yea, by
the dog of Egypt, I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of
Darius, or even to Darius himself: I am such a lover of friends as that.
And when I see you and Lysis, at your early age, so easily possessed of
this treasure, and so soon, he of you, and you of him, I am amazed and
delighted, seeing that I myself, although I am now advanced in years, am so
far from having made a similar acquisition, that I do not even know in what
way a friend is acquired. But I want to ask you a question about this, for
you have experience: tell me then, when one loves another, is the lover or
Lysis |
