But this cannot be so always, for then by this very law of contraries the good would love the bad, and the just the unjust. No—there must be a stage of indifference, between these two; when one whose character is hardly formed—who is neither good nor bad—courts the society of the good, from some vague desire of improvement.
But Socrates is not satisfied yet. He thinks there must be some final principle or first cause of friendship which they have not discovered: "and here," he says,
"I was going to invite the opinion of some older person, when suddenly we were interrupted by the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus, who came upon us like an evil apparition with their brothers, and bade them go home, as it was getting late. At first we and the bystanders drove them off, but afterwards, as they would not mind, and only went on shouting in their barbarous dialect, and got angry, and kept calling the boys (they appeared to us to have been drinking rather too much at the Hermæa, which made them difficult to manage), we fairly gave way, and broke up the company. I said, however, a few words to the boys at parting. O Menexenus and Lysis, will not the bystanders go away and say, 'Here is a jest: you two boys, and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, imagine ourselves to be friends, and we have not as yet been able to discover what is a friend!'"—J.
Aristotle devotes two books of his "Ethics" to this much-debated question of Friendship—always romantic and interesting from a Greek point of view. He looks upon it in a political light, as filling up the void left by Justice in the state; and he traces its appear-
