INTRODUCTION
In this essay Plutarch has arranged his material somewhat more methodically than is his usual practice. In chaps. 1-7 he shows that Brotherly Love is in accordance with nature; in 9-19 he tells us how we should conduct ourselves toward a brother: (a) while our parents are alive, (b) when they are dead, (c) when the brother is our inferior, (d) when our superior; and also the reasons for quarrels and the treatment thereof. He closes with some pleasant tales of affection for brothers’ children.
That Plutarch wrote this work after
De Adulatore et Amico,
De Amicorum Multitudine,
1
and the
Life of Cato Minor was demonstrated by C. Brokate (
De aliquot Plui. libellis, diss. Güttingen, 1913, pp. 17-24, 58; and see the excellent tables on pp. 47, 61). Plutarch appears to have retained a certain amount of more or less irrelevant material on friendship from his recent work on these treatises, and also to have drawn upon some portions of Theophrastus’s treatise
On Friendship.
2
The essay is No. 98 in the Lamprias catalogue.
De fraterno amore. Plutarch. William Clark Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1939.
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