Pythagoric Discipline and Symbols

Pythagoras also exhorted to remove contention and strife from true friendship, and especially from all friendship, if possible.

But if this is not possible, at least expel it from:

• paternal friendship, and
• universally from the friendship with elders and benefactors.

Contending with your friends because of anger or some other similar passion destroys the existing friendship.

But the smallest lacerations and ulcerations should happen in friendships. This will happen if both friends know how to yield and subdue their anger, and especially the younger of the two belonging to some one of the above-mentioned orders.

The Pythagoreans likewise thought it necessary that:

• the corrections and admonitions which they called pædartases, and which the elder employed towards the younger, should be made with much suavity of manners and great caution
• much solicitude and appropriation should be exhibited in admonitions. In this way, the admonition will become decorous and beneficial.

They likewise say that faith should never be separated from friendship, neither seriously nor in jest.

For it is no longer easy for the existing friendship to remain in a sane condition, when falsehood once insinuates itself into the manners of those who assert themselves to be friends. And again they say, that friendship is not to be rejected on account of misfortune, or any other imbecility which happens to human life; but that the only laudable rejection of a friend and of friendship, is that which takes place through great and incurable vice.

Such therefore was the form of correction with the Pythagoreans through sentences, and which extended to all the virtues, and to the whole of life.