Delphic Maxim 15: Help your friends

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

15. Help your friends

Today I am writing and my mind is drifting back to how I spent my lunchtime yesterday. A very good friend of mine is having chemotherapy, and yesterday I had the privilege of hanging around with him in the treatment centre for an hour or so, discussing — among other things — these Delphic Maxims.

You might be thinking that the point I’m going to make is that I was helping him, but actually it’s the complete reverse: he was helping me to think about life, and these maxims, and the strange things we people do, and most importantly about the unbelievable value of friendship. How good is it that so much time can fly by in conversation, so rich and nourishing for our souls, and we enjoy it so much that I don’t even notice how much of that time has passed? What a great way to spend our lives in the universe — enjoying it with friends!

The ancients were obsessed with friendship. It’s one of my favourite reasons to read them. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aurelius, the lot of them spent time ruminating on the subject of friendship. All of them recognised the supreme value and joy that comes with friendship. Cicero put it most perfectly in Laelius: On Friendship when he said:

“Friendship, then, both adds a brighter glow to prosperity and relieves adversity by dividing and sharing the burden.”

This is why I think it’s important to help your friends! It’s not a quid pro quo or an obligatory thing, but actually to ‘brighten the glow’ of our prosperity. Helping our friends is fun! Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. Even the most annoying, boring tasks are more joyful and worthwhile when we undertake them with friends. We support friends when they are sad and need us because sharing the emotional burdens of life is easier than being made to cope with them alone.

The interesting thing about this maxim is that it translates so perfectly from the time of the Pythia to our world today. If one thing has stood the test of time, it’s the idea that friendship is a worthwhile, vital quality in living a good life. For that reason it’s not hard to understand why we should help our friends — they do it for us each day, in subtle and remarkable ways. Friendship is a diffuse glow that constantly surrounds us, brightening our days as the sun does even when it is hidden behind a storm cloud. I quite like the metaphor of brightness and light, because it captures the levity that friendship lends us. So while I really ought to spend these posts translating things into my own language, I want to end with another quote from Cicero:

“It is unique because of the bright rays of hope it projects into the future: it never allows the spirit to falter or fall. When a man thinks of a true friend, he is looking at himself in the mirror. Even when a friend is absent, he is present all the same. However poor he is, he is rich: however weak, he is strong.”

We are all made stronger by our friendships, so help your friends however you can.