Socrates was many things, but above all he was a troublemaker. One day while chatting on the street, he looked at Antisthenes and said, “Do friends have the same price as slaves?”
I imagine Antisthenes would be a bit shocked. But, well, he already knew how the old man spent his time and well, he didn’t give him much time either. Socrates goes on to say and explain that when a slave can be worth two minas; The other half and the next, five or ten. Nicias, who must have been someone very well known, even paid a talent for a foreman for his silver mine.
Was the same thing happening with friends? This seems like a simple, almost absurd question. But we’ve been trying to solve it for 2,400 years.
we talk (money) friends Antisthenes, who would later become one of the founders of the Cynic school, responded that, indeed, he loved some more than two mines and others he would not value half as much. For others, he will pay for what he doesn’t have.
At that time, according to the Erechtheion’s construction records, the daily wage was one drachma a day. A mina was, we believe, one hundred drachmas. This gives us an idea of how much Antisthenes valued his friends. But Socrates was not taking inventory.
And what was he doing? A friend of Socrates was suffering. very badly Financial problems harassed him and he was in a survival situation. But Socrates had many friends and one in particular was a friend of both of them. He was a friend of both of them, he knew the poor guy was having a hard time and in short, he looked the other way.
So the old philosopher mixed up this whole circus and finally said that it would be a good idea for each person to examine themselves to know how much they are worth to their friends and try to be as valuable as possible. Xenophon says all this and in the next chapter he actually explains that when Socrates is asked how to recognize a good friend, he answers the same way one recognizes a good sculptor: not by what he says, but by the statues he has already made.
2,400 years of asking ourselves the wrong questions. In 2018, Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney sat down strangers to chat for five minutes and then asked them how much they liked each other and how much they thought they liked each other.
It seems like a silly question, but the conclusions were very intriguing: systematically, people liked it more than they liked it. This is what we know as Choice of gaps (something like a “preference gap”) and it’s not related to the first time. Apparently, in a study of college roommates, this gap lasted for several months.
And, indeed, it affects us in the most unexpected ways possible.
What about this? If we were to repeat Antisthenes’ practice with ourselves today, we would almost certainly price ourselves lower than others would price us.
And that flaw, which shouldn’t be bad, hinders our personal relationships. Because we believe that we are not worth much to others: we don’t write, we don’t call, we don’t offer coffee. We isolate ourselves from others because we think we are not as important to them as we really are.
Cicero, who read Xenophon by heart, understood the underlying problem amicitia: A friend can only be tested in friendship, so friendship always comes before judgement. You have to invest first and it’s interesting that, in the times when we are so obsessed with investing, we forget to invest in something so important.
Picture | Wikipedia – Own creation
In Xataka | These are the contents of the philosophy which will no longer be binding (and thus we can relieve it).
