Golden Verses 3 — Choose the Best for a Friend; Forgive Small Faults (lines 5–8)

Of everyone else, make your friend the one who is best in virtue. Yield to gentle words and to deeds that do good. And do not come to hate your friend over a small fault — for as long as you can bear it, do so; what you are able to do lives next door to what you must.

Having ordered our duties to the gods and to kin — relations we do not choose — the poem turns to the one great bond we do choose: friendship. And the criterion is immediate and demanding. Choose as friend not the most useful, the most charming, or the most powerful, but hóstis áristos — "whoever is best," best specifically in aretḗ, in virtue. The Pythagoreans held friendship in the highest regard; the very phrase "a friend is another self" descends from this milieu. If a friend is a second self, then the quality of one's friends is the quality of one's becoming.

The second line domesticates this lofty standard into daily texture: yield to gentle words and helpful deeds. A good friend offers correction softly, and the wise person does not stiffen against it. To be teachable by those who wish you well — to let their kind exhortation actually move you — is itself a form of strength, not weakness.

Then comes the most humane line in the whole opening section, and one of its most quietly profound: do not hate a friend over a small fault — óphra dúnēi, "as far as you are able." Forgiveness is treated not as a feeling but as a capacity to be exercised and extended. The closing aphorism, dúnamis gàr anánkēs engýthi naíei ("power dwells near to necessity"), is famously compressed; the most natural ethical reading is that what you are capable of bearing borders closely on what you must bear — that your ability to endure a friend's small failing is greater than you think, and that you should draw on it before you spend a friendship. Hierocles read the verse exactly this way: we have far more strength to preserve a friendship than we imagine, and a bond should be broken only if the friend sinks into genuine corruption, and even then only after every effort to recall them to the good.

The principle that one should choose friends by character finds its closest classical sibling in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which ranks friendship-of-virtue — friendship grounded in the good rather than in pleasure or utility — as the only kind that endures, because only the good are stable enough to be reliably loved. The Pythagorean criterion precedes and likely informs that analysis.

The Buddhist tradition gives this an almost identical weight: the Maṅgala Sutta opens its list of life's highest blessings with "not to associate with fools, but to associate with the wise." And in a celebrated exchange the Buddha corrects Ānanda, who suggested that good friendship (kalyāṇa-mitta) is half of the holy life — telling him it is not half but the whole of it. Choosing companions by their goodness is, in both traditions, not a minor social preference but a determinant of one's entire trajectory.

The teaching on bearing a friend's small faults resonates with the wide cross-cultural wisdom on forgiveness — the Stoic counsel to remember our own faults before condemning another's, and the broad consensus across the wisdom traditions that relationships are preserved not by finding faultless people but by extending patience to the flawed ones we love. The Golden Verses are distinctive in framing this patience as a measurable power we underuse.

Two universal truths converge here. First: you become like those you keep close. Character is contagious, and the slow pressure of habitual company shapes the self more reliably than any resolution. To choose friends by their goodness is to choose, in advance, the person you will gradually turn into.

Second: forgiveness is a capacity, not merely a feeling — and most people have more of it than they spend. Relationships rarely fail because of a single large betrayal; far more often they erode through the refusal to absorb small faults. The line "what you can do lives next to what you must" is a permanent reminder that your endurance is larger than your irritation, if you choose to draw on it.

Audit your closest circle the way the poem suggests: not by who is most entertaining or most advantageous, but by who, over time, makes you more honest, more steady, more kind. We tend to drift into friendships by proximity and convenience. The Pythagorean counsel is to choose them, deliberately, by the direction in which they pull you.

On the receiving end, practice the second line: when someone who loves you offers gentle correction, resist the reflex to defend, and ask instead whether they are right. And on the third: before you let a small grievance harden into distance — the unanswered text, the careless remark, the forgotten favor — remember that your capacity to let it go is greater than your impulse to nurse it. Save the rupture for the rare fault that truly warrants it, and even then, try first to call the person back rather than write them off.