"Birds Of A Feather Flock Together"
Context: Aristotle composed his treatise on Rhetoric to help truth and justice prevail over falsity, to show how persuasion and reason can be used to convince an audience and to refute unfair argument. The first two books tell where to find and construct enthymeme, a sort of syllogism, but with one premise suppressed. Chapter XI analyzes Pleasure. Aristotle declares that we like what we are accustomed to, or as Robert Burton (1577-1640) agreed in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 2: "Birds of feather will gather together." (Cervantes also uses this proverb in Don Quixote, Part II, Book III, chapter 5, published in 1615.) Aristotle points out that remembering the past is pleasant, anger and revenge are pleasant, and, he adds:
Since that which is according to nature is pleasant, and kindred things are natural to each other, all things akin to one and like one are pleasant to one, as a rule;–as man to man, horse to horse, youth to youth; whence the proverbs, "mate delights mate," "like to like," "a beast knows his fellow," "birds of a feather flock together," and so forth.
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