Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

Goldsmith contrasts two kinds of human attachment by framing them in the language of power and exchange. “Friendship” is imagined as reciprocal and principled—an interaction between social and moral equals in which neither party seeks advantage (“disinterested commerce”). By contrast, “love” (in this aphoristic, satirical sense) is depicted as a relationship that easily slips into domination and submission, where desire produces dependency, jealousy, and coercion (“tyrants and slaves”). The sting of the line lies in its deliberate exaggeration: it is less a universal definition than a moral warning about how passion can corrupt mutuality, while friendship at its best preserves dignity and balance.