Introduction

Summary

FRIENDSHIP AS AN HISTORICAL VARIABLE

The subject of this book is the history of the relationship we call friendship in the classical world, beginning with the Homeric epics and concluding in the Christian empire of the fourth and fifth centuries AD. While the idea of friendship is not uniform over various cultures or even within a single culture at any given moment, the core of the relationship with which we shall be concerned may be characterized as a mutually intimate, loyal, and loving bond between two or a few persons that is understood not to derive primarily from membership in a group normally marked by native solidarity, such as family, tribe, or other such ties. Friendship is thus what anthropologists call an achieved rather than an ascribed relationship, the latter being based on status whereas the former is in principle independent of a prior formal connection such as kinship or ethnicity.

An achieved relationship does not necessarily mean one that depends essentially on free or personal choice. One may meet friends by accident and be drawn to them for mysterious reasons having little to do with decision, as is often the case with erotic attraction, for example. Arranged marriages and those based on individual sentiment or infatuation may from a certain point of view seem like two kinds of constraint; the fifth-century BC rhetorician Gorgias thus held that rōs or erotic passion was involuntary (Helen 19), and in canon law infatuation may be grounds for annulment because marriage was not entered into freely. In addition, friendship is “socially patterned” by numerous factors such as class or age.