A most sacred thing, then, is friendship! and worthy not only of singular reverence, but to be celebrated with perpetual applause, as being the prudent mother of magnanimity and honour, the sister of gratitude and charity, and the enemy of hatred and avarice; always ready, without being requested, to manifest that virtuous kindness to others which she would have shown to herself; whose divine effects are rarely now to be met with, to the great reproach of the sordidness of mankind, which has driven it in a long exile to the farthest corner of the earth. What degree of love, wealthy or affinity, could have wrought so effectually upon the heart of Gisippus, to make him feel the pangs of his friend, and give him up to his beloved spouse? What laws, what threats, or fears, could have caused the youth and vigour of Gisippus to forsake his own bed, where a beautiful young lady lay expecting him, and betake himself to dark and lonesome places? What greatness, what rewards, could have made him heedless of disobliging all his own relations, as well as Sophronia’s, and indifferent to the unjust murmurs and insults of the people, to serve his friend? What, I say, but this only? On the other hand, what could have prompted Titus, without deliberation, when he might have fairly pretended not to have seen him, to contrive his own death, in order to save Gisippus? What could have made him so liberal in parting with half his substance to Gisippus, whom fortune had dispossessed of his own patrimony? What but this alone could have induced Titus, when he saw him poor and destitute, to give him his sister? To what purpose, then, do men covet numbers of relations, brethren, and children, and procure, at a vast expense, great plenty of servants, when, for the least inconvenience that they may sustain, people are so apt to forget their duty to parent, brother, or master? Whereas, in true friendship it is quite otherwise: that sacred obligation serves instead of all degrees of affinity.
[This tale is taken from the second story of Petrus Alphonsus; but Boccaccio has made considerable alterations, if we may judge of the original from the form in which it is exhibited by Le Grand (iii, 362). There it is not two young men brought up together who form this romantic attachment, but two mercantile correspondents, the one residing in Syria, and the other in Egypt; and the renunciation of his mistress by the latter takes place soon after his first interview with his partner. The change which has been made by the Italian novelist in this particular is a manifest improvement. In the next place, in the tale of ‘Alphonsus,’ it is not thought necessary to deceive the bride after the nuptials, in the manner related above; she is transferred, without further ceremony, as a piece of property, from one friend to the other, which is a convincing proof of the eastern origin of the tale. Lastly, in ‘Alphonsus,’ the friend who is reduced in his circumstances does not fancy himself neglected by his former companion; he sees the murder committed before he enters Rome, and avails himself of the incident to get free from a life in which he had no longer any enjoyment.
As thus improved by Boccaccio, the story ranks high among serious Italian novels. The internal conflict of Titus – the subsequent contest between the friends – the harangue of Titus to the two assembled families, and the beautiful eulogy on friendship, which terminates the tale form, in the opinion of critics, the most eloquent passages in the ‘Decameron,’ or perhaps in the Italian language.
The story of ‘Gisippus’ was translated into Latin by the novelist Bandello, and into English by Edward Lewicke, 1562, whose version perhaps directed to this tale the notice of Goldsmith, who has inserted it in his Miscellanies, though it is there said to be taken from a Byzantine historian, and the friends are called Septimius and Alcander. Boccaccio’s story has also evidently suggested the concluding incidents of Greene’s ‘Philomela,’ and is the subject of an old French drama by Hardy, entitled ‘Gesippe, ou les Deux Amis.’]