FRIENDSHIP

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 FRIENDSHIP
A. C. GRAYLING

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

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 VICES AND VIRTUES
Series editors Richard G. Newhauser and John Jeffries Martin

Copyright © 2013 A. C. Grayling

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Grayling, A. C.
Friendship / A. C. Grayling.
   pages cm
ISBN 978-0-300-17535-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Friendship. I. Title.
BJ1533.F8G625 2013
177'.62—dc23
2013021868

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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 amare curare sentire refovere osculari oblectare tangere fortunare

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4164.indd 6 16/07/13 7:56 PM
 Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Foreword by Richard G. Newhauser and
John Jeffries Martin x

Introduction 1

PART I Ideas
1 The Lysis and Symposium 19
2 The Classic Statement: Aristotle 31
3 Cicero De amicitia 42
4 Christianity and Friendship 61
5 Renaissance Friendship 76
6 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic 95

PART II Legends
7 Excursus: Friendship Illustrated 123

PART III Experiences

8 Friendship Viewed 169

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 Contents

9 Friendship Examined 176

10 The Two Claims 185

Notes 203
Bibliography 214
Index 219

viii

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 Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Dr Hannah Dawson, who read the manuscript

and made illuminating comments, Tosca Lloyd, who researched
the references and bibliography, my other colleagues and
students at the New College of the Humanities, London, the
librarians at the University of London library, the London
Library, the British Library, and the editorial staff at Yale
University Press, for help and many acts of friendship ranging
from the practical to the inspirational.

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 Foreword
Richard G. Newhauser and
John Jeffries Martin

It is altogether fitting that the series ‘Vices and Virtues’ should

begin with Friendship. As A. C. Grayling’s inaugural volume
amply demonstrates, friendship describes the finest of human
relationships: a lasting bond that transcends whatever accidental
or utilitarian reasons might have brought two people together in
the first place. One can debate with a friend without quarrelling;
one can argue with a friend as a matter of discussion, not dissen-
sion. This is, of course, the presupposition of Socratic dialogue;
it underlies any idea of progress in politics as well. And opening
this kind of reasoned debate on matters of contemporary ethics
is one of the goals of our series. But this is not to say that the
virtue of friendship is a matter of Platonic realism: it has a
history, and that history, as Grayling observes, has led to debates
about what exactly constitutes friendship or, at times, whether
individual friendship should be given preferential treatment in the
network of relationships in a community. The history of ethical
conceptions, their varying valences in changing social and cultural

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 Foreword

situations, constitutes another important element in the goals of

the series that begins with this volume.
‘Vices and Virtues’ will come to constitute a library of ways
of thinking historically about ethics. For our age, ethical thought
is no longer comprehensible through foundational arguments;
rather, ethics is most fruitfully approached historically, with
sensitivity to the social, political and cultural contexts that
shape moral values and lead to new moral visions over time.
One of the most challenging aspects of a history of ethics is that
moral values often stand in tension with the culture in which
they emerge. A particular theory of justice, for example, may
challenge the very structures of the society in which it is first
articulated. A concept of individual friendship may be at vari-
ance with the universal aspirations of Christian agape. Thus,
not only does ethics have a history; the relation of ethics to
history is a subject rich in the possibility of intellectual discovery.
Moreover, this is a realm of enquiry that cries out for explora-
tion – especially at a time such as our own when the language of
morality is manifestly in need of precision. One has only to
listen to the word ‘friend’ in the mouth of contemporary politi-
cians referring to someone in a different party to see both how
expected, even desired, the discourse of friends seeking solu-
tions to political problems is today, and how hollowed out the
idea of this virtue has become in the arena of politics.
The key terms in the title of the series are used in an expan-
sive sense to bring to the foreground a set of topics that is of
contemporary interest. Readers of the series might expect to
find books devoted to traditional vices such as lust, lying and
envy, or traditional virtues such as faith, justice and hope, but
they can also expect to see volumes devoted to issues not

xi

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 Foreword

normally included in the traditional lists. What will give unity

to the series is its commitment to examine moral issues from
a historical perspective, with attention to how the cultural
understanding of each category has shifted over time. But what
the reader can also expect in contributions to ‘Vices and
Virtues’ are volumes in which clarity, breadth of vision, and
especially the talent to engage a broad range of readers in
reasoned discourse are essential elements. One can find no
better example of all these elements than A. C. Grayling’s
analysis of friendship and its history.

xii

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 Introduction

The highest and finest of all human relationships is, arguably,

friendship. Consider the fact that we regard it as a success if
we become friends with our parents when we grow up, our
children when they grow up, our classmates or workmates even
as they remain classmates or workmates, for in every such case
an additional bond comes to exist, which transcends the other
reasons we entered into association with those people in the
first place.
And of course our friendships with people who do not fall
into one of these categories – that is, our friendships with
people who were strangers beforehand – are special in a
different and typically less complicated way, because they are
purely elective; we meet someone and take a liking to him or
her which is reciprocated, and thereafter we enjoy each other’s
company, laugh together, share interests and views, and over
time come to feel that we are part of the fabric of each other’s
worlds, a valuable part, so that we develop a mutual sense of

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 Friendship

obligations owed and trust given, and meet each other’s needs
for boon companionship, comfort, confidences and sharing.
And we do all this to such an extent that if we lose such a friend
we feel the loss deeply, as of someone loved. Indeed we talk of
loving our friends, or some of the closer among them anyway,
and their loss can accordingly be profound.
When I think of the friends I had when young, and of the
friends made in the course of work and endeavour, of the
evenings in their company or on long journeys, of the things
learned and shared with them, of the burdens halved and the
sorrows comforted – and above all the laughter enjoyed, I realise
that it is only the supremest moments of the intimacy of
love that can compare in value to friendship – and even then we
hope that, in the ideal, the former will be a prelude to the latter
for the rest of our days.
Different people provide the friendship we need at different
times in our lives, even if certain very particular friends stay the
whole course. This is a reflection of the fact that most people
change with time and experience, and since all parties to a
friendship are changing simultaneously, it is not surprising that
they might eventually drift apart. In adult life such drift is
accelerated when people take sides with one of a divorcing pair
– and sometimes people who were friends with a couple lose
touch with both of them when they separate.
These are among the facts of contemporary friendship, but
they only scratch the surface, because the interplay of moral
psychology, emotion, the changing patterns of family and
working lives, shifting relationships between the sexes, the effect
of religion and its decline as a controlling force in many societies,
the models offered by film and television, the wider scope for

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 Introduction

friendships and relationships in adolescence, the effect on these

of electronic social media, and much besides, make the already
highly complex phenomenon of friendship even more confused
and diffuse.
Indeed the words ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ have become so
stretched and extended as to have lost a good deal of their
meaning, and this even before we begin to ask for lines of demar-
cation between friendship and other relationships, and before we
ask in what sense there can be friendships across sexes and ages,
cultures and ethnicities, divides of experience and oppositions
of attitude. Of the famous friendships recorded in history and
legend, most are between men and most of these in turn appear
not to be friendships as such but homosexual loves, which raises
the question whether much of the thinking about friendship in
classical antiquity and afterwards is about a very special and
intense version of it, focused upon erotic attraction and its fulfil-
ments. Might this not mislead us in thinking about ideals of
friendship, given our intuition that it is something significantly
different from passion and desire? These latter form the alembic
in which biological imperatives so easily supplant social and
psychological interests, which some argue are the true domain of
friendship while the sexual imperatives underlie another story
altogether. Is that right? Must lovers and spouses move on from
that bond before friendship supervenes? Another intuition rejects
this thought.
And yet: like love, friendship is a matter far more of emotion
than rational calculation. Indeed if it is wholly or even largely
the latter, we scarcely think that it merits the name. Of course
there are considerations of mutual benefit, help, advantage and
support implicit in the idea of friendship, but generally these

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 Friendship

are the sequelae of the engagement of emotion which consti-

tutes friendship, rather than the motivations for it. For when
these are indeed the motivations for one person to seek friend-
ship with another, we are instinctively suspicious; we talk
of a person so befriended as ‘being used’, of insincerity,
untrustworthiness; we talk of false friendship, in which the
seeming-relationship is a hollow matter because something
essential and fundamental is missing. To identify this essential
and fundamental thing is to understand at least what lies at the
core of the relationship, and we can be cheered by the reflection
that since we are very clear about when it is lacking, we should
be somewhat clear about what it is. It cannot be hard to find the
focus of the concept, even if what ranges away on all sides into
variety and particularity covers much territory.
Nor is it too hard. Essential and fundamental to friendship
is that it is a natural, spontaneous, freely given and entered into
relationship premised as much on subliminal cues that prompt
liking as on anything that the parties could specify as a reason
for engaging in it. Such reasons would ex post facto doubtless
abound: shared interests, attitudes, views, taste, style, appear-
ance, behaviour, similarity in sense of humour, will figure
largely. But we are reliably informed by students of human
interaction that much, perhaps most, of the basis for our judge-
ments about others is unconscious, and it might be that there
are aspects of the complex network of factors underlying our
choices of friends that we are never aware of – even so unex-
pected a thing as smell or the unrecognised similarity of
appearance, tone of voice, or gesture, of people previously
liked or admired. It is tempting to short-circuit explanations of
why people become friends with each other, especially really

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 Introduction

good, close, enduring friends, by putting the words of Montaigne

in his essay ‘On Friendship’ into their mouths: ‘If a man urge
me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed
but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself.’

Grant that friendship is far more a matter of emotion than

rationality, nevertheless in philosophy – ‘philosophy’ under-
stood in its broadest sense as the mature conversation that
humankind has with itself about the things that matter most to
it – there has long been discussion about friendship as among
the best and most desirable of human relationships. Even if a
good many of the examples cited in this tradition of thought
are in fact male love relationships, nonetheless these suggest an
important fact to be registered: that the ideal of friendship is
close to other ideals of human connection, foremost among
them love in its own multiplicity of guises and characters. That
closeness also invites contrasts; when Oliver Goldsmith said
that ‘friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals,
love an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves’, he said
something true about most friendships but only true of some
loves, and this reminds us that we are not to expect sharp
boundaries in the distinctions we seek to draw, but a field of
impressions, of blurred frontiers, where the presence of variety
and uniqueness has always to be admitted.
It might be helpful to cast a preliminary eye over the land-
scape of debate about friendship here; in the main body of the
chapters to come only the more central of these themes will be
explored in more detail.
No doubt there were thinkers who observed and meditated
on human relationships long before classical antiquity. But it is

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 Friendship

in this latter period that we have the first fully formed engage-
ments of intelligence with the subject of friendship and – more
completely – the other relationships, principally love, that lie in
neighbouring fields. Plato’s Lysis is the first text we can point to
that addresses philia, friendship, as distinct from eros, passionate
love; his Symposium is the classic of this latter. But the work
that stood for many centuries as the chief point of reference for
discussions of friendship was Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
In a sense it might be said that until modern times everything
thought or written about the subject not only did not but could
not start anywhere other than with Aristotle.
Aristotle’s pre-eminence in the debate arises in large part
from the fact that he saw friendship as an essential component
of the well-lived and flourishing life, a eudaimon life. He argued
that the best and highest kind of friendship is that between
people who are good, and who each love (philein) the other
because he – and it is a he in this debate – is good. The friend-
ship of the good is predicated on virtuous activity, which
requires that the parties to it be reflective and capable of the
right kind of self-esteem, which enables them to love good
others properly. That is a key point: to love another as another
self, one must be able to love oneself in the virtuous way (not a
selfish, egoistical, conceited way), and this makes one fit to love
a virtuous other as identical in interests with oneself. And it was
central to Aristotle’s conception of the good life that it should
consist in pleasant and beneficial activity directed towards
friends, which means that the truly good person needs and
desires friends so that he can live the good life.
Epicureans and Stoics, perhaps because they lived with more
practical needs in more insecure times after the high classical

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 Introduction

period, had ataraxia – tranquillity, peace of mind – as the

defining end of a life describable as good. Whereas Epicurus
largely agreed with Aristotle’s account, he did not, like him,
require that friendship can only be the best it can be if it is not
instrumental to a further end – that is, if it is an intrinsic good
– but held that it is indeed instrumental to the good, namely
ataraxia itself. Some of the Stoics took a very different view:
that the truly Stoical life is one that is indifferent (the desired
mental state is apatheia) towards what it cannot control, which
includes the fate and circumstances of others; and that therefore
the fully self-mastered individual will be sufficient to himself
and not in need of friends or friendship for the ataraxia he seeks
to achieve, nor will he mortgage the possibility of achieving
ataraxia to the fortunes of others’ lives, given that he has limited
influence over them.
This apparently cold view is not the universal Stoic view;
later Stoics were as attached to friends and to friendship as a
part of the valuable life – more: to the possibility of living
nobly – as one could wish. Their point was not that the imper-
turbability for which they aimed would exclude the possibility
of friendship altogether, but that there is a distinction to be
drawn between the normal emotional responses people have
towards things, and the ‘eupathic’ response that is controlled by
reason. Emotional reactions never flower into consequences of
action or further feeling without the Stoic’s reasoned assent.
But this allows that eupathic responses can take the form of –
be expressed as – friendship or even passionate love: what is
distinctively Stoic about them is that they are chosen. The adae-
quatio intellectus et rei – the proper fit between how we think
and how things are – is the ground of goodness in life, and

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 Friendship

‘following nature’ (which includes responding to the human

instincts for affection, community, and love both in their phys-
ical and emotional manifestations) is part of that adequacy.
The work that connected these contributions to the near-
thousand years of Christian views on friendship is Cicero’s
Laelius: De amicitia, not least because it was the immediate
spur for the thinking not only of Augustine in the fifth century
ce but of Aelred of Rievaulx in the twelfth century ce and

Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century ce. But the impor-

tance of Cicero is not confined to its influence: it is a great
treatment of the subject in its own right.
There is a feature of Cicero’s account, premised as it is on
the experience of men of affairs, that is either absent or insuf-
ficiently emphasised in the earlier debates: the element of
mutual respect, which carries a very important implication:
that one recognise that a friend is a different self, not another
self as in the Aristotelian idealisation – a point of great signifi-
cance for anyone whose endeavour to make sense of friendship
as it is and should be starts from the thought that a mutual
obliteration of identities is not, after all, what ought to be
centre-stage in the account we offer.
The idea of friendship was not straightforward for the
Christian tradition, in which the ideal of perfect love is the disin-
terested charitable love known as agape. Whereas friendship is
individual and preferential, elevating interest in one person over
others, thereby privileging the friend in such a way that relation-
ships with others are conditional and of less value, Christian
agape is intended to be indifferent, universal and unconditional.
Augustine – a man of deep friendships – offered this way out: that
individual friendship is a divine gift, and a route to the highest

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 Introduction

love, which is love of the divine. Love for another human is, he
argued, instrumental to love of God, but despite being instru-
mental is elevated and valorised by it. There are echoes of Plato
not on philia but on the eros of the Symposium here, in which,
likewise, human affection is a path to the transcendent if rightly
enacted.
Aelred did not take the same view; he wished to think with
Cicero that friendship is its own justification, though with
Augustine he wished to think that only Christians could be true
friends to each other. His solution was to say that Christian
friendship is a spiritual affair, such that friends live in the very
heart of charity with one another, enjoying and mutually fostering
its constitutive virtues – temperance, prudence, faithfulness, and
the like – making friendship an exercise of the godly life.
Aquinas argued that the love of friends – in which one loves
another simply and purely for his own sake, and vice versa – is
a model for the love of God, in loving whom we make it
possible for ourselves to become more like God. It would seem
to be implicit in this view that one’s relationship with the deity
is a superlative form of friendship, which to some suggests this
oddity: that on any view, a perfectly self-sufficient being by
definition is in need of nothing, including friends and what
they might offer to such as need friendship. How then can one
be friends with a deity, whose self-sufficiency excludes any basis
for reciprocation? For (as Plato has Socrates argue in the Lysis)
one-sided friendship is scarcely friendship.
Modern views about friendship follow the Renaissance shift
of attention from subordinating everything of value to a place
in the divine scale, to giving them a place in their own right in
the human scale. An evolving thread of difference from and

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 Friendship

continuity with ancient and medieval views runs from Boccaccio,

Montaigne and Bacon through Kant, Emerson, the Utilitarians
and Nietzsche to our own contemporary debate. The differ-
ences in view are considerable, and increasing.
Kant emphasised community of moral outlook, equality
and reciprocity of respect and affection as constitutive of
perfect friendship. But these states have to be willed, as a
rational act, not founded in emotion, which is non-rational
and involuntary because subject to natural law, and which
therefore can only at best be instrumental in the establishing of
friendship. Furthermore, said Kant, an emotional interest in the
happiness of a friend is a barely disguised desire for one’s own
happiness, given that our attachment to a friend will make us
unhappy if for some reason he is unhappy, and therefore in
being eager for his happiness we are being eager for our own.
Perfect friendship subsists between those who treat each other
as ‘ends in themselves’ irrespective of our own feelings about
their welfare.
The contrarian nature of Nietzsche’s view – that a friend is
one who opposes and thereby strengthens, who challenges, who
does not help by lifting part of a friend’s burden, but helps him
by fighting him – takes the needle to the far side of the dial;
Wilde put the matter not much differently in describing a friend
as ‘one who stabs you in the front’. But even among those still
conscious of the classical debate, there is less respect for the
ancient pieties – and still less for the pieties of a religion torn
between what it sees as differently owed to the sacred and the
profane – in the authors who desire more practical and more
secular bases for understanding the moral good of friendship.
Liberation from the need for a third party in the relationship

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 Introduction

makes room for a variety of views to emerge. What Montaigne

claimed to derive from his friendship with Etienne de La Boétie
was a view that out-Aristotles Aristotle in holding that true,
perfect, absolute friendship is a complete merging of two selves
into one, so that there is no longer even a friendship at issue but
an absolute identity beyond explanation: ‘because it was him,
because it was me’.
Such a response poses a difficulty for utilitarianism, whose
principle of maximising happiness or utility for the greatest
number shares a problem with Christianity in militating against
the preference friends have for one another over non-friends.
Can there be a consistent utilitarian view of friendship? Of
course there can, in one sense: it maximises utility if everyone
is as friendly as possible towards everyone else. Or it might be
argued that we maximise overall utility better if each of us
concentrates our energies on maximising it for one or more
chosen others. But could this be any part of an explanation of
what friendship is, why it matters, what motivates us to form
friendships and care about our friends?
Views in feminist philosophy pick up the idea of ‘caring’ –
benevolent concern and interest – as crucial, and as trumping
the potentially conflicting idea of justice with its connotation
of indifferent or equal concern for all others. The mutual rela-
tionship of care distinctive of friendship is partial, preferential
and voluntary, and its value to the parties is the driver for saying
that in a competition between universalist views as embodied in
the idea of impartial justice, and the particularism of the ‘care
perspective’, the latter wins. Obviously, though, a distinction
needs to be drawn between friendship as a theatre of caring and
other relationships where a familiar difficulty arises: not all,

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 Friendship

and perhaps not most, caring relationships are mutual. They

are often one-sided, or at least unequal; generalising, one might
say that marriage-type relationships between men and women
tend to exemplify inequalities of care, and certainly parent–
child relationships do. But these are not, or at least not in
these forms, friendships – and perhaps it is the inequality that
prevents them from being so. If this is right, then it would
appear that mutuality in caring and respect for justice are not
merely compatible after all, but actually a further constituent
in what it is for a relationship to be a form of friendship.
It is almost exclusively in recent discussion that women’s
perspectives on friendship have been added to the debate. This
is a function of the suppression of women’s voices in most
of history, so that as one looks back across the landscape of
interest in this, as with so many other matters, the tone is
almost wholly and relentlessly masculine.
In Testament of Friendship, her biography of her friend
Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain wrote,

From the days of Homer the friendships of men have enjoyed

glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in
spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely
unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted. I hope
that Winifred’s story may do something to destroy these
tarnished reputations and show its readers that loyalty and
affection between women is a noble relationship which far
from impoverishing, actually enhances the love of a girl
for her lover, of a wife for her husband, of a mother for her
children.1

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 Introduction

What is surprising now about these remarks is their apologetic

character; even here ‘loyalty and affection between women’ is
not allowed to stand in its own right but requires justification
in terms of the lover, husband or children who have prior claim
on that loyalty and affection.
The obvious reason is that until very recently it has been nigh
impossible for women to be defined otherwise than in connec-
tion with the roles that women play – as girlfriends, wives and
mothers, nurses, teachers of the young. Brittain quotes May
Sinclair’s introduction to an edition of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of
Charlotte Brontë:

By suppressing Haworth churchyard and Charlotte Brontë’s

relations, it would be possible to write a ‘Life’ of her which
would be all gaiety and sunshine. The lives of great men admit
of these suppressions. Their relations on the whole do not
affect them except as temporary obstacles (more or less offen-
sive) to their career . . .
It is otherwise with great women. They cannot thus get
rid of their relations. Their lives are inseparable from them,
their work in many cases inexplicable without them . . . A
woman cannot get away from her family even in its absence.
She may abandon it; it may abandon her; but she is bound
to it by infrangible indestructible bonds. It, and all it has
done to her or for her, has an enduring life in her memory.
However much abandoned or ignored, its persistence there
endows it with immortality. Imagine then what its influence
must have been on Charlotte, who never abandoned or
ignored it.2

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 Friendship

And yet – to generalise – the attestation of anecdote and

experience is that friendships between women can be and often
are closer, more enduring, more confidential and supportive,
more intimate, more powerful and complete, than is customary
among men, whose companionships are often predicated on
doing things together rather than saying things to each other,
masking taciturnities about private and intimate matters with
attachments instead to external matters – to careers, sports,
news, practical interests, and the like.

Some of the foregoing paragraphs offer a sketch of the concep-

tual terrain and, as noted, only some of the more central themes
and features mentioned will be explored in the following pages.
But it is important to note that it is not in philosophy as such –
the discursive enterprise of conceptual analysis – but in literature
that one finds a more minute inspection of friendship as lived
rather than as a concept, an abstraction, an idealisation, and a
subject for theorising. It cannot for example be merely coinci-
dence that Plato and Aristotle discussed friendship against the
background of a public conversation in which Sophocles and
Aeschylus were dominant voices, and where philoi – those in the
bond of philia – were family and kin too, not just chosen others.
If the natural ties of kinship were taken to apply in the chosen
ties of friendship, and if these could be extended to foreigners
too – xenoi – then we have an interest in knowing what commo-
nalities link them.
At some point it is necessary to look at the examples of
friendship given to us by literary and legendary tradition to see
what the models were in the minds of those who theorised; I do
so in a chapter which divides the historical survey of ideas

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 Introduction

about friendship from the discussion I give of how in our

contemporary setting we might view its variety and complexity,
and its centrality to the good and flourishing life.

Note that this is not a history of friendship, not a sociological

or a psychological treatise on friendship, not a self-help or New
Age manual about friendship; rather, it is a discussion of the
idea of friendship, a philosophical (in the broadest sense)
exploration of views about it.
In Part I, I survey discussions of friendship mainly in the
history of philosophy, beginning with the classic sources that
have shaped so much of subsequent thinking on the topic. Part
II is an excursus into the examples in legend and literature of
great friendships, so often cited by those who examine the
subject, and which we must therefore know about too. Part III
addresses contemporary debates about friendship, and offers
my own views and experiences in response to the foregoing. For
this last, the justification is that in the end the personal and the
subjective are the ultimate measures of what we find plausible
in this field – making it one of the few fields where this is
legitimately so, and all the more significant for being so.
I range widely through philosophical, historical and literary
sources for my materials, not methodically and systematically,
but as occasion and need suggest. As when sinking one’s instru-
ments into ocean currents at various places, one eventually gets
a sense of their drift: that has been part of the technique here.

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 PA R T I

Ideas

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 CHAPTER 1

The Lysis and Symposium

Friendships existed long before anyone thought to analyse

them, and even longer again before anyone thought to write
philosophical treatises about them. But when the first serious
discussions of friendship appeared – and it is no surprise that
they did so in that fountainhead of Western civilisation, the
classical period of antiquity in Greece – they laid the ground
for almost all the debate that followed.
As the first philosophical text directly to address the concept
of friendship, Plato’s dialogue Lysis has to stand at the head of
the discussion. It must be introduced with a caveat, however;
which is that it is a somewhat unsatisfying treatment, and not
only for the reason common to much of Plato’s earlier work,
which is that it is inconclusive and leaves its subject in as much
unclarity as it began, but also because it exemplifies too fully a
characteristic of those dialogues: the sophistries which allow
Socrates his too-easy victories over his interlocutors, who ought
not to let him get away with them.

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 Ideas

These reservations apart, there are two useful features of the

Lysis discussion. One consists in the throwaway comments on
friendship that Socrates and his interlocutors accept as truisms,
illustrating what Greeks of their time thought about the matter.
The other is the contrast between these truisms – along with the
other points about friendship made in the Lysis – and the
concepts of love discussed in Plato’s more famous dialogue,
the Symposium.
The commonplaces about friendship which Plato assumes in
the Lysis were not accepted in their entirety by Aristotle, whose
own much fuller and more detailed discussion of friendship in
the Nicomachean Ethics is in part a reaction to the Lysis view,
most especially in rejecting its casual commitment to friendship
having a utilitarian aspect as part of its very essence – that is,
as turning on the usefulness of friends to each other, or (which
in Aristotle’s view is worse) of one of them to the other.
The contrast between friendship in Plato’s Lysis and love in
his Symposium is intriguing, not least because the Lysis discus-
sion proceeds as if the concept of one kind of love – that of an
older male for a younger – at least largely overlaps with the
concept of friendship, even though, as the dialogue acknowl-
edges in passing, the latter is more extensive. The Symposium
is a later and philosophically far more achieved work whose
aim is very different: it serves the purpose of establishing that
love of the Form of Beauty is an integral part of what consti-
tutes the good life, an overarching ethical claim absent from
the Lysis despite its (again passing) allusions to virtues and
other non-virtue desiderata. In the Symposium the concept of
friendship – philia, the subject of the Lysis – is subordinate to
the eros discussed in the Symposium, and whose eventual

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refinement into ‘Platonic love’ is described to Socrates by (so he

tells his companions) a priestess of Mantinea called Diotima.
The Lysis is ostensibly narrated by Socrates himself. He
recounts being stopped one day by a group of boys as he
walked back into Athens from the Academy, and being invited
by them to join their talk. He asks one of them, a youth called
Hippothales, if he has a ‘favourite’ – meaning, someone he is
in love with – and is told that Hippothales’ favourite is a boy
named Lysis, son of a wealthy and patrician citizen called
Democrates. We are to imagine that Hippothales is in his mid-
teens, Lysis about twelve, which makes the pair much younger
than is normally the case for relationships of the connoted
kind. This is doubtless deliberate, because the dialogue is more
concerned with the relationship between Lysis and a boy of his
own age, Menexenus, which is straightforwardly a friendship
and has no erotic overtones, thus contrasting it with the passion
felt by Hippothales for Lysis, which we are given to understand
is not requited.
It is accordingly a bit of byplay in which Socrates tells
Hippothales that he is wooing Lysis in entirely the wrong way,
by praising him and his family, writing poetry and songs in
Lysis’ honour, and singing them to him. Instead, says Socrates,
Hippothales should remind Lysis that he is still an ignorant
child, thus putting him down rather than buttering him up:
‘That is the way, Hippothales, in which you should talk to your
beloved, humbling and lowering him, and not as you do,
puffing him up and spoiling him.’1
The meat of the discussion of friendship occurs not in this
demonstration itself but in its framing. Socrates asks Lysis’
friend Menexenus which of the two of them is older.

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‘That is a matter of dispute between us,’ he said.

‘And which is the nobler? Is that also a matter of dispute?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘And do you also dispute which is the more beautiful?’
The two boys laughed.
‘I shall not ask which is the richer of the two,’ I said; ‘for
you are friends, are you not?’
‘Certainly,’ they replied.
‘And friends have all things in common, so that one of
you can be no richer than the other, if you say truly that you
are friends.’
They assented. I was about to ask which was the juster and
which the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus
was called away . . .2

Justice, wisdom and nobility are virtues, beauty – physical

beauty – and wealth are not; in quizzing the boys Socrates is
exploring the question that, on the evidence of the Charmides,
he always liked to have answered: whether this or that notable
youth has the characteristic which is greater than physical
beauty, namely, nobility of soul.3 Of interest to us is the throw-
away remark, ‘ “I shall not ask which is the richer of the two,”
I said; “for you are friends, are you not? . . . And friends have
all things in common, so that one of you can be no richer than
the other, if you say truly that you are friends”.’
The next assumption appears near the end of Socrates’
‘lowering and humbling’ attack on Lysis, where he asks him,
‘ “. . . shall we be friends to others, and will any others love us,
in matters where we are useless to them? . . . And therefore my

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 The Lysis and Symposium

boy, if you become wise, all men will be your friends and
kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not
wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else,
will be your friends.” ’4
We thus learn that friends are those who hold all things in
common, and are useful to each other. This is the picture we
have in mind when we read Socrates’ passionate asseveration
that the one thing he has always, with all his heart, longed for
more than anything else, is friends: ‘ “I must tell you that I am
one who from my childhood upward have set my heart upon a
certain possession . . . I have a passion for friends . . . Yea, by
the dog of Egypt, I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the
gold of Darius . . .”’5 He tells Menexenus how he envies the
perfect friendship that he and Lysis seem so easily to have estab-
lished, and wishes to quiz him on how they managed it. But
then the dialogue collapses into a sophistical exercise of tying
Menexenus in knots over whether a pair can be mutual friends
if only one loves the other, and how one can determine in that
case which is the friend, for if the friend is he who loves another
then it might turn out that people can be loved by their enemies,
who are therefore their friends . . . and so on into paradox.6
This part of the discussion might have been short-circuited
by Menexenus if he had refused to accept that there can be true
friendship which is not mutual, and that although one person
can unrequitedly love (the dialogue still speaks of philia not
eros) another and therefore be a friend to him, the relationship
itself would need to be qualified accordingly; for whatever it is,
it does not deserve the name of friendship as such.
More to the point is the discussion in which Socrates and
Lysis agree that there is something to the idea that like attracts

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like, but that since evil men are like each other but might well
not be good friends to each other because of their evilness,
friendship should only be seen as the mutuality of good people
who are alike. But Socrates slides from this to the generalisa-
tion that ‘the good are friends’ (permitted by the idea that those
who are alike in being good are otherwise alike: a fallacy) and
then declares that he is not satisfied with it7 – as indeed he
should not be, for those who are alike in some respects might
be very different in other respects, and their being alike in good-
ness might be the only respect in which they are alike. His
reason is that if two people are alike, they can only get from
one another what they can get from themselves: ‘And if neither
can be of any use to the other, how can they feel affection for
one another?’ Since Lysis feebly agrees both to this sophistical
reasoning and to the instrumental view of friendship it supports,
Socrates is able to conclude that ‘the like is not the friend of the
like in so far as he is like’,8 thus apparently denying what we
instinctively know to be true, namely, that shared interests and
outlook, a similar sense of humour and a shared past make
potent cement in relationships, and is surely what we mean in
talking of people being ‘like’ one another.
Socrates then finds a way of refuting the thought that
‘the good may be the friend of the good in so far as he is
good’ by arguing that because good people, in virtue of being
so, are self-sufficient and have no need of anyone else, and
because ‘he who wants nothing will feel affection for nothing
. . . and he who loves not is not a lover or a friend’, it follows
that the good will not be the friend of the good.9 This is
a classic example of early Platonic sophistry (‘the good are
self-sufficient, therefore they lack nothing, therefore they will

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 The Lysis and Symposium

feel no affection for anything’; these transitions are obviously

spurious).
And so the argument proceeds, with Socrates considering
whether opposites are most likely to establish friendships, and
the degree to which friendship is a matter of need (‘medicine
is a friend to health’ because sickness needs medicine), and
whether it is congeniality that makes for friendship – though he
acknowledges that the distinction between congeniality and
likeness is unclear. ‘If neither the beloved, nor the lover, nor the
like, nor the unlike, nor the good, nor the congenial, nor any
other of whom we spoke – for there were such a number of
them that I cannot remember all – if none of these are friends,
I know not what remains to be said.’10 And at that point the
bodyguards of the boys arrive to take them home, leaving the
discussion in an unfinished state. That it is left in such a state
is no surprise; it was not moving towards a conclusion anyway.
Nevertheless, Plato appears to be sure about two things in
the Lysis. One is that mutual utility is a founding principle of
friendship, and the other is that in the catechising of Menexenus
early in the dialogue he has Socrates make it clear that the
usefulness of an individual to another, and to his family and
community, is a condition of his being regarded as a friend both
to him and to them. The unremarked slippage from the personal
to the social – it equivocates to treat ‘friend’ in ‘friend to his
community’ and ‘friend to Lysis’ – does not however affect the
point that, for Plato, mutual utility underlies friendship and is
constitutive of its very nature. This is the point with which
Aristotle so trenchantly disagreed.
An oddity in the account is how much Plato under-appreciates
the persuasiveness of the ‘congeniality’ point, which we in our

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modern understanding of friendship take for granted as essential.

He is right to be troubled about whether there is much difference
between congeniality and likeness, though he should be more
troubled by the spurious argument that if two people are alike
they can find no use in each other. On the contrary, mutual
re­inforcement of attitudes and the easiness which arises from
sharing beliefs, practices and tastes is taken to be a profound
reason for friendship, and would undoubtedly have been as
obvious a source of bonding between Lysis and Menexenus as
any other.
Indeed the assumption that friends will, if true friends,
share their wealth in common says that sharing things other
than wealth – confidences, opportunities, interests, tastes – is
likewise a principle of friendship.
And there is the datum that whatever complex of reasons can
be adduced for people liking one another, the simple truth is that
people can and do take a liking to each other: and that this can
be enough to start a friendship, even if it is in the end not enough
to sustain it. So when Socrates says what he does at the end,
he should have taken a hint from it: ‘O Menexenus and Lysis,
how ridiculous that you two boys, and I, as an old man, who
venture to range myself with you, should imagine ourselves to
be friends – this is what the bystanders will go away and say –
and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend!’11

Obviously enough, Lysis, Menexenus and Socrates would not

be described by bystanders as lovers of one another. The senti-
ment they share is philia, not eros. The Lysis’s exploration of
philia stands at a considerable remove from the terminus of the
Symposium’s discussion of love. At one point in the Lysis there

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 The Lysis and Symposium

is a possible hint of things to come, where Socrates gets his

young interlocutors to agree that friendship is caused by desire,
and desire is for something lacked by the desirer, and that what
is lacked and is therefore dear to the desirer is what is congenial
to him.12 This result is a declension from where the argument
seems to be going at first, namely, that the sentiments constitu-
tive of friendship are in fact intimations of a desire for, and
a lack of, congress in body or mind with something that
the immediate object of those sentiments merely represents –
something metaphysically higher. In the Symposium we meet
this thought in full. There we learn that love in the more exigent
sense of eros is desire for what lies beyond and above all the
instances or instantiations of what is desired, which in the
sublunary sense is the beauty of the beloved: and this far
further thing is the Form of Beauty itself.
The Symposium is a great piece of art, and its serious meta-
physical aspect is only part of a work whose geniality and good
humour are a window into the Athens we know as the cradle of
our thought. We see Socrates at a drinking party hosted by the
dramatist Agathon, along with a number of other distinguished
guests, and it ends after the late drunken arrival of Alcibiades,
the celebrated but controversial statesman and soldier who
loved Socrates and claimed to have made several unsuccessful
attempts on his virtue. When he gatecrashes Agathon’s party
near the end of the Symposium he gives an amusing account of
crawling into Socrates’ bed only to be rebuffed.
The opening speeches by Phaedrus and Agathon are admi-
rable for their literary qualities, but do not contribute much to
the question of the nature of love. After Phaedrus’ literary allu-
sions to that noble aspect of eros which makes the lover lay down

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his life for his beloved – he cites Achilles and Patroclus – we have
Pausanias describing the situation in contemporary Athens in
which it is accepted that men will love boys, but that boys must
be guarded from the attentions of men, a double standard that
Pausanias decries on the grounds that if the man’s attitude is
honourable and his aim is to educate his beloved in prudence and
wisdom, the relationship ought to be encouraged. This is a
higher form of love than the ‘vulgar’ love which has its focus on
physical satisfaction. It is implicit in the tale that two of those
present at the party, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, had begun their
long-standing relationship in just that way.
In contrasting ways Eryximachus and Aristophanes reprise
the familiar ideas that love arises between opposites or between
incomplete halves. In replying to Agathon’s poetic invocation of
love as a juvenile deity, Socrates rejects the idea that love can be
divine, for it involves desire, and desire is for what one lacks, and
therefore the love is not felt by one who is rich or wise, but by one
who seeks wealth and wisdom. A person who is aware of being
ignorant strives for wisdom, unlike either the god who is already
wise or the foolish person who is unaware of being ignorant.
And then Socrates claims to be rehearsing what he learned
from the priestess Diotima: that the beauty represented in an
individual – for example in the body of a beautiful youth – is an
instance of what is present in the beauty of bodies in general,
and which makes them beautiful. Realisation of this leads on to
thoughts of the beauty of minds, and thence of moral nobility
and knowledge, and by these gradations finally to Beauty itself,
the imperishable, perfect and eternal Form of Beauty.
In this account love – eros – is desire for everything good, if
the greatest goods, among them beauty, happiness and truth,

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 The Lysis and Symposium

are truly separable. The familiar physical passions of eros are

merely the first intimation of desire, and because desire is
innate and has the potential to be elevated in its aim to higher
and eventually the highest form – that is, the metaphysical Form
– of its objects, this shows that we are by nature predisposed to
seek the good. The obverse of this coin is that desire is aware-
ness of deficit, of what we lack; that is the thrust of Socrates’
reply to Agathon. But the positive implication of this is that the
quest of the ultimate good is founded on self-knowledge, which
involves a recognition of deficiency, and a determination to
remedy it. In Diotima’s lecture to Socrates the point is made
that just as sexual desire has procreation as its aim, so desire for
the ultimate good has a higher procreation as an aim: the gener-
ating, nurturing and passing on of wisdom.
Neither in the account of more prosaic love in the Symposium,
nor in the metaphysical version of its highest expression, is
there any consideration of friendship. From the point of view
of eros conceived in such a way as to make it the gradient to the
highest of moral and intellectual aspirations, philia seems
prosaic and minor. It is certainly different, even if it were
neither of these more reductive things.13
There is a loftiness of thought in the Symposium’s final
idealised view of love that makes it appear great; but it is an
unrealistic view nonetheless. It asks us to think that the
encounter with everything attractive and lovable will, if we are
reflective, make us move beyond the physical to a purely intel-
lectual contemplation of abstractions. ‘Platonic love’ is ethe-
real, unphysical, denatured love. The common and healthy
desire felt by people who love each other to hug, kiss, touch,
make love, and thereby gain the satisfactions and completions

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of physical and through it psychological intimacy, recoils from

the idea of a fastidiously abstract state which, in being exclu-
sively intellectual is unexpressible in any way other than by the
largest and finest-sounding words. This does not connect with
the reality either of love or friendship, and does not begin to
touch the connections between them. And this is because it is
about relationships not between people, but between minds and
the abstract ideas they contemplate.
When people think of the first truly classic statement of a
view about friendship, therefore, it is not to Plato they turn, but
to his great pupil and successor, Aristotle.

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 CHAPTER 2

The Classic Statement: Aristotle

The word philia is made to do express duty for the sentiment

of friendship in Plato’s Lysis, but it also – as noted in passing
in the Introduction – meant much more, embracing family ties
and even socio-­political ones. Plato’s usage seems to have
secured it to friendship for the philosophical debate, however,
for in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics it
is philia – and along with it an identification of the qualities
that attract people into friendship with each other, ‘lovables’ or
phileta – which is used to denote the sentiment of friendship.
But in passing Aristotle applies it in the conventional way not
just to family members but to travellers from foreign parts, and
says that it exists even among the birds and beasts.1 Convergence
in attitudes and aims of the kind that keeps cities together
‘seems to be similar, in a way, to friendship’, he says, which is
why political action is aimed at achieving it.2
This was no idle remark. The Nicomachean Ethics precedes
the Politics for good reason. ‘Society depends on friendship,’

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 Ideas

Aristotle says there; ‘after all, people will not even take a
journey in common with their enemies.’3 He says ‘philia is the
motive of society’,4 and that it is even more important than
justice because it is what promotes concord in the city.5
Aristotle describes friendship as an ‘excellence’, and essential
to the living of a good and worthwhile life. Even those – indeed,
perhaps especially those – who have wealth or power need friends,
he says, for how otherwise would they be able to show benefi-
cence, or protect their wealth and position, which are more at risk
the greater they are? Moreover, ‘in poverty and all other kinds of
misfortune people think of their friends as their only refuge’.6 And
friends help each other; they help the young to learn, they care for
the old, and encourage those in their prime to behave finely.
So far these remarks imply that friendship is useful and,
correlatively, an acknowledgement of deficiencies in need of
being supplied. But although these commonplaces are true,
they do not get to the nub of the matter. What is the nature of
the friendship that serves these purposes, and are these purposes
all that there is to friendship? And what is or could be the
highest, best or most distinctive aspect of it? Aristotle mentions
the ‘disputes’ that arise in efforts to answer these questions,
with some saying that friendship is a matter of like attracting
like, while others argue that it arises in the mutual attraction of
opposites – both of them familiar and conventional views in
competition with each other, and which Aristotle’s own succinct
definition – ‘a man becomes a friend when he is loved and
returns that love and this is recognised by both men in question’
– by itself leaves open.7 To clarify matters, Aristotle says, we
should instead begin by asking ‘what is it that is loved?’ What
are the phileta or ‘lovables’?

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 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

There are three phileta, he says, and they are what is useful,
what is pleasing, and what is excellent. These correlate to three
kinds of friends: those who are friends with each other because
of the advantages gained by being so, those who are friends
with each other because of the pleasure it brings them to be
so, and those who are friends with each other because they
‘resemble each other in excellence’ and love each other because
of ‘what the other is’.8 This last, he says, is the truest and
highest kind of friendship.
The friendships of utility and pleasure are incidental affairs,
easily ended when the utility or pleasure evaporates, as in their
nature they are all too prone to do.9 This is clear in the case
of the pleasure-­based friendships of the young, who live by
emotion and seek immediate gratification in what lies close to
hand; and they are erotically inclined, says Aristotle, which
adds to the propensity for quick beginnings and endings, espe-
cially in those youthful friendships.10
Friendship between virtuous people – people who are good
without qualification; good in themselves – is lasting and
complete. Utility and pleasure are comprehended in this friend-
ship, but they are not constitutive of it; its constitutive aspects lie
in the fact that it is the friendship of people who are alike in
virtue, and who wish good things for each other both because
these things are good in themselves and because each is recog-
nised by the other as good in himself. The friendship between
them ‘lasts so long as they are good, and excellence is something
lasting’.11 Desiring the good for the other is eunoia, ‘goodwill’
(the English term ‘benevolence’ derives from the Latin cognate).
A problem implicit in the nature of friendship thus conceived,
from Aristotle’s own point of view, is that it is not going to be

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achieved by many, for there are too few people with a sufficient
degree of virtue and eunoia to make it general.12 At one point,
indeed, Aristotle seems to think that his account offers such an
idealised and demanding portrait of friendship that it could
never be realised in practice: ‘Friends! there is no friend!’ he
despairingly says. If it were thought that goodwill is sufficient
for friendship, not merely necessary, the problem would be
resolved; but goodwill is not itself friendship, since people can
have good will towards those who are not friends; rather, it is
the starting point of friendship and, as with like-­mindedness, a
concomitant of it.13
Aristotle famously then says that ‘[a person] is to his friend
as he is to himself, for his friend is another self’.14 We can there-
fore read off the attributes of friendship from the concern that
an individual has for himself. The self-­respecting person

wishes for what is good for himself, and what appears good,
and he does it (for it is a mark of a good person to work hard
at what is good), and for his own sake (he does it for the sake
of the thinking element of himself, which is what each of us
is thought to be). He also wishes himself to live and be kept
safe, and most of all that with which he understands, since to
the good person existing is something good, and each of us
wishes good things for himself.15

The typical features of friendship derived from these ways

that people relate to themselves include, he says, the following:
we wish good to ourselves, to be safe, to spend time with
ourselves, to have pleasant memories, to have good hopes for

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 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

the future, to have materials for thoughtful reflection, and to

‘share his grief and his pleasures with himself’.16 Because a
friend is another self, we wish all these things for him too.
Much is made of the ‘another self’ claim in subsequent
treatments of friendship, and indeed most of the discussions,
all the way to Montaigne, appear to concentrate on this remark
above all the other things Aristotle says in a long and complex
discussion of the varieties of friendship and why the friendship
of virtuous equals is best. Yet the remark is almost parenthet-
ical, and the context of discussion has as much to do with the
appropriateness of proper self-­love as it does with defining the
meaning of ‘friend’. In my view the overemphasis on Aristotle’s
‘another self’ phrase in all the subsequent history of discussion
about friendship has been the single most distorting aspect in
our understanding of it, for the very good reason that it has to
be part of the voluntary obligations attached to being a good
friend to accept the differences between oneself and one’s
friend – which involves giving one’s friend space to have some
interests and tastes different from one’s own, and to agree to
disagree about some things.
The point about self-­love is a significant one, for it is
obvious that if the highest form of friendship is mutuality
between people of excellent character, then the self-­cultivation
and self-­mastery required for excellence of character require,
just as they lead to, self-­respect. When both parties to a friend-
ship have this attitude to themselves, and regard the other as
entitled to the same consideration as they give themselves, then
the relationship is, as it should be, complete.
The point is therefore no different, except in expression,
from saying that a real friend is one who feels what she does for

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her friend for her friend’s own sake. She does not like or love
her because of what she can get from the relationship or
because it happens for the time being to be enjoyable; these are
the incomplete or imperfect friendships which are not destined
to last. Reciprocity is another feature: true friends think and
feel the same way about each other, something made possible
by the fact that their relationships are based on virtue – each
party to the relationship is a virtuous person, and each recog-
nises and loves this fact about the other. And this is further to
say that the best kind of friendship is based on character, and
moreover the best kind of character, which is the reason – in
Aristotle’s view – for its relative rarity.
As mentioned, Aristotle does not restrict the use of ‘friend-
ship’ to denote only those relationships where mutual benevo-
lence felt for the other’s intrinsic sake is its basis, because he is
practical enough to recognise that relationships based on utility
and pleasure are types of friendship too, just as are kin rela-
tions and amicable transactions with foreigners. But they are
not ‘complete’ – that is the point; and in not being so, they are
far less likely to endure, and are of lower intrinsic value.
Recall that Aristotle thinks that friendship is an essential
constituent of the good life and the happiness that characterises
it – eudaimonia.The question therefore arises whether only the
highest kind of friendship is such a constituent, or can the incom-
plete kinds also serve? It is clear from Aristotle’s opening discus-
sion about how we need friends in order to exercise our beneficence
and secure help in times of need that friendship as such, not
necessarily or only the highest form of it, is a desideratum.
The characteristic streak of pragmatism in Aristotle is at
work here. Earlier in the Nicomachean Ethics he remarks that

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 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

making a contribution to society is of as much importance to

being virtuous as anything we do or achieve in the private realm:
at one point he says it is finer to benefit the city at large than to
make one other person happy.17 This thought does not quite
contradict, but nevertheless sits at an angle to, the idea that
friendship is ‘necessary to life’ for the reasons given at the outset
of his discussion of the subject. But because the quest of the
good is an overriding one, it would surely seem that anything
that conduces to eudaimonia has equal value to anything else
thus conducive. The resounding claim at the outset of Aristotle’s
writing on ethics is that the good is that at which all things aim,
the thing which is intrinsically desirable and to which all other
positive things aim.18 If friendship is integral to the good life,
and the good is the ultimate aim, then friendship – an individual
and private thing – has at least as great a significance as civic
contribution; and that really does seem to resist the claim that it
is ‘finer and more godlike’ to advance the interests of one’s city
than to make another person happy.
The point can be differently made. By eudaimonia Aristotle
meant an activity, not a state or quality. In the first book of the
Nicomachean Ethics he defines it as ‘the activity of the mind
deriving from virtue,’ remembering that ‘virtue’ means ‘excel-
lence’.19 The activity in question is what expresses and fulfils
the highest and most distinctive attribute of human beings,
which is their capacity to be rational. Rationality enables them
to work out what the courageous, temperate, generous, modest
or (generally) right thing is to do in a given circumstance, by
identifying the middle course between extremes constituting
the vices opposite to those virtues: for example, rashness or
cowardice on either side of courage, meanness or profligacy on

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either side of generosity. The development and application of

practical wisdom – phronesis – enable one to steer that middle
path, thus to be virtuous, and thus to live a life of eudaimonia.
But for all that Aristotle’s pragmatism and common sense
are here fully on display, this view does not represent the
terminus of his case. In the first pages of the Nicomachean
Ethics he identifies three kinds of life: the life of pleasure, the
life of virtuous activity on behalf of one’s community (the
political life), and the contemplative philosophical life, devoted
to grasping the ultimate nature of things.20 From what he says
of the highest and most distinctive thing about human beings,
namely their possession of rationality, one can readily infer
which of these lives is in his view best, and which therefore is
most fully eudaimonic. And although such a life might be
enhanced by having friends with whom to exchange ideas
about supreme and final questions, the clear implication is that
philosophical contemplation is a solitary and detached activity.

The observation that the best is the enemy of the good might
seem to apply rather squarely to Aristotle’s account. He is
surely right to say that a life without friends would, at very
least, be an impoverished one, and for the reasons that he
begins by noting: that without friends we have no field for the
exercise of beneficence, no helpers and supporters in times of
need, no bond that keeps communities together, no teachers of
the young or carers of the old, no encouragers to virtue for
those in the prime of life. Yet there is more to the matter: if
friendly sentiments can be felt towards strangers as well as kin,
and if even animals can be friends to their own kind, then
friendship has a strong claim to being essential simpliciter, not

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 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

‘essential for’ something else – intrinsic as a value, not instru-

mental. This is expressly what Aristotle’s best kind of friend-
ship is intended to be.
However, although this view is consistent with the idea that
there are ‘lower’ forms of friendship predicated on mutual
pleasure or usefulness, a question arises whether the fact that
a friend is a ‘good in itself’ for the other friend (this being
mutual) is consistent with the ‘good for oneself’ of loving that
friend. Since the latter is instrumental in conducing to one’s
own good, it is inconsistent with the austere conception of
treating the other as a good in himself without any instru-
mental benefit to oneself. Is this a problem? It would be the
most strained kind of purism to argue that the best kind of
friendship must be such that its defining features are irrelevant
to the welfare of the parties to it considered individually, not
least because this would require us to regard a friendship as an
independently existing abstraction. But as an important compo-
nent of the good life it is, obviously, good for the friend that he
is a friend, not merely in being the object of the disinterested
love of his friend, but in himself loving his friend disinterest-
edly likewise. If the relationship is mutual, each party is both
an agent and a patient of the process; so there can be no incon-
sistency between treating the other as a good in himself and
one’s loving him as a good for oneself as well as him.
There is room in Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia for
regarding the activity of being a friend not merely as a
conductor to the highest good but as part of what is constitu-
tive of the highest good. That is surely what ‘being essential’ is.
But if so there is a different tension in Aristotle’s view, one that
serves as a ground for rejecting the idea that contemplation is

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exclusively the highest good. If eudaimonia is an activity, and if

the highest quality of such activity consists in solitary contem-
plation of ultimate things, friendship would not be essential to
it; but friendship is essential to the good life. Aristotle cannot
have it both ways. The ‘solitary contemplation of the highest
good’ is reminiscent of the impractical ideality of Plato’s views,
with which Aristotle’s more pragmatic temper is so often at
odds. Here therefore we see a residue of Plato’s influence on his
former pupil, creating an inconsistency.
But the active sense of friendship as an essential feature of
eudaimonia seems to me to trump Aristotle’s add-­on view of
the highest good as the solitary contemplation of abstractions.
Moreover if we were to accept his own view that promoting
concord in the city is a ‘finer and more godlike thing’ than
personal friendship, then given that this is an even more prac-
tical and social activity, yet further removed from the anchoritic
distance of contemplation, we see that the tension between
these two aspects of his view is unsustainable.
Aristotle’s immediate successors in the debate were unsur-
prisingly more taken by the significance of the personal bond
than any suggestion of its subordination to a putatively higher
ethereal end, for after all the realities and practicalities of life
make friendship a down-­to-­earth business, with laughter and
food and wine, and activities like helping each other move
furniture when necessary, as ordinary accompaniments. It was
the Christian thinkers who reverted to a more ethereal aspect of
the view, for like Aristotle in his metaphysical mood they had
transcendental fish to fry.
In fastening on Aristotle’s ‘another self’ remark as his
defining view of what is meant by ‘friend’, almost all later

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 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

contributors to the discussion found themselves in considerable

agreement about the nature of friendship. As already noted,
this in my view is a mistake. But Aristotle himself was not as
wedded to the ‘another self’ notion as his successors made him
seem. The idea of seeing friendship as a relationship in impor-
tant part predicated on wishing the good, and promoting the
good, for one’s friend, and of this itself contributing to the
good of one’s own life, is surely part of what we have to mean
by friendship, and although it seems, once it is explicitly stated,
an obvious enough insight, it is too central to be treated as
merely implicit.

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 CHAPTER 3

Cicero De amicitia

There is a good reason why Erasmus and Hume, among many

others, valued Cicero – and for more reasons than the famous
beauty of his prose. It is that certain of his treatises are as
valuable in content as in style. It is true that much of his philo-
sophical writing is, as his critics say, derivative and superficial;
but the essays ‘On Old Age’ (Cato Maior De senectute) and
‘Laelius: On Friendship’ (Laelius: De amicitia), and especially
this last, belong in the first rank of discussions of their subject
matter.
The chapters on friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics are careful explorations of the kind especially approved
by philosophers in the analytic tradition today, for whom the
painstaking business of conceptual clarification and the
drawing of fine distinctions are the essence of their craft.
Although most of his strictures are directed at Stoics, Epicureans
and others whose views he disagreed with, Cicero might have
had Aristotle in mind when he wrote of his own approach,

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 Cicero De amicitia

which was that he does not go into the subject of friendship in

the same manner as those who discuss it ‘with more than usual
accuracy, and it may be correctly, but with too little view to
practical results’.1 ‘Practical results’ – the actuality, reality and
pragmatics of friendship – are what interested him, and his
account of them in the De amicitia is in consequence richly
human. Even though it draws on Aristotle and other sources, in
its breadth of view it is arguably the best classical discussion
extant. It carries the weight of Cicero’s experience as a public
man, and the plausibility of real historical examples which his
contemporary readers knew and could judge.
Cicero sided with Pompey against Caesar in the civil wars
that effectively ended the Roman Republic, so after Pompey’s
defeat, and Caesar’s pardon of him in acknowledgement of his
former great services to Rome, Cicero withdrew from public
life. In the quiet of his country retreat he devoted himself to
writing, and in less than three years, 46 to 44 bce, produced an
extraordinary list of works, among them his best. It was not
only despair at the demise of the Republic that drove him to
seek solace in work, but the even profounder grief caused by
the death of his only daughter, whom he greatly loved.
In brief intervals in the three decades of public life preceding
this, Cicero had continued the avid study of philosophy that he
began in his youth. Its fruits appear in these works. He was not
an original thinker, but a skilful organiser of ideas, which he
expressed with marvellous clarity and elegance. It would, by the
way, be wrong to infer a demotion of him because of that phrase
‘not an original thinker’, for after all very few people are so. In
the judgement of more recent intellectual history hardly anyone
comes close to Plato and Aristotle in this league. Yet it takes

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great powers to do what Cicero did, which was to understand,

arrange and articulate important ideas well, and when one
considers the fact that his works are in print two thousand years
after their composition, and that he has always been admired by
excellent judges for the best of what he did, it would be a mistake
to devalue his achievement because of that comparison, which is
yet another instance of the harm that the best does to the good.
Although the influence of Aristotle’s thought is obvious in
De amicitia, it is not the only and perhaps not the chief source
of its ideas. Cicero makes direct use of material from Xenophon’s
Memorabilia also, words there attributed to Socrates being
here given to Scipio; and both Diogenes Laertius and Aulus
Gellius state that Cicero’s principal source was a now-­lost
three-­volume work on friendship by Theophrastus. Students of
Cicero’s work take the view that although the influences are
identifiable, and indeed Cicero references them at times, it is
clear that, as his Loeb translator William Falconer says, the
‘arrangement, plan, style and illustrations are his own. Certainly
no other author of ancient or modern times has discussed the
subject of friendship with so much completeness and charm as
Cicero.’2
As a youth Cicero studied law with the augur Quintus
Mucius Scaevola, a learned man and son-­in-­law of the Gaius
Laelius who is the main speaker in De amicitia. Laelius is repre-
sented as being asked by Scaevola and another son-­in-­law,
Gaius Fannius, to talk about friendship because of his famous
lifelong bond with Scipio Amaelianus. Cicero set the dialogue
shortly after Scipio’s death in 129 bce, when Laelius was
freshly grieving for his lost friend. It is surmised that Cicero
had himself heard of Laelius’ account from Scaevola when

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 Cicero De amicitia

he became his student in 90 bce. Nearly eighty years separate

the date of writing from the dramatic date, and nearly fifty
years from the time Cicero first heard Scaevola speak of what
Laelius had to say on the subject of his friendship with Scipio.
Obviously, Cicero is using whatever he heard from Scaevola
merely as a hook, but there is no doubt that an attitude and
some details deriving from that almost legendary friendship lie
near the centre of Cicero’s account.
Laelius and Scipio fought together in the Iberian campaigns
of 210–206 bce, during which Laelius’ victories in charge of the
Roman fleet in the attack on New Carthage, and at the head of
the cavalry at the battle of Zama, made significant contribu-
tions to Scipio’s overall victory. According to the historian
Polybius, to whom Laelius in old age gave much information
about Scipio and his campaigns, the two men were friends from
childhood, though Laelius was of lower social status from a less
rich family. After their military adventures they held office
together in the Roman state, helping each other in different
ways, but with Laelius always the junior – a fact that made no
difference to the friendship between them.
Just how close and enduring a friendship it was is clear from
Laelius’ remarks on the grief he felt in losing Scipio.

Without affection and goodwill life can hold no joys. Scipio

was suddenly snatched away . . . We shared the same house,
ate the same meals side by side; we were soldiers together,
together we travelled, together we went on our holidays in the
countryside. We devoted every minute of our spare time
together to study and learning, hidden from the world but
enjoying each other’s company.3

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 Ideas

Laelius’ disquisition on friendship is offered as the practical

reflections of a mature and experienced mind, not as those of
an abstruse philosopher. He begins by saying that there is
nothing greater in the world than friendship, for it fits human
nature, and is exactly what people both need and desire in all
experiences of life. But he makes a conventional stipulation:
‘I must at the very beginning lay down this principle: that true
friendship can only exist between good people’4 – meaning by
‘good people’ those whom we recognise as such, using our
practical common sense rather than the refinements of ‘pedantic
accuracy’. A good person, on a practical understanding of the
term, is one who is honourable, just, generous, courageous and
loyal, and free from greed, intemperance and violence.5
Laelius’ account then proceeds as follows. There is a natural
propensity to prefer kin to fellow citizens, and these to stran-
gers; that is just a fact. But what is obvious is that the difference
between friendship and mere acquaintanceship is the goodwill
(benevolentia; perhaps ‘affection’ captures the sense better)
distinctive of the former. Eliminate goodwill from acquaint-
anceship and it still exists in name; eliminate it from a friend-
ship, and that friendship no longer exists as friendship. It is the
key to a bond that one shares deeply with, at best, very few
others.6
‘And now we can try to define friendship, as: enjoyment of
the other’s company, accord on many things, and mutual good-
will and liking. With the exception of wisdom I am inclined to
think nothing better than this can be found in human experi-
ence.’7 Some people would prefer to have riches, some to have
health, some power, others honours, others again sensual
pleasure – this last being what brutes most desire. And there are

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 Cicero De amicitia

those who place the highest value on virtue – which is a noble

view; but the examples of ideally perfect individuals given by,
for example, the Stoics, are unrealistic models, and surpass the
‘ordinary standard of life’.8 But no life can be worth living
without the mutual goodwill of a friend in it. There is ‘nothing
sweeter’ than to have someone with whom one can talk as
frankly and openly as if to oneself. The value of having
someone to share both prosperity and adversity, enhancing the
enjoyment of the former and lightening the burden of the
latter, proves friendship’s importance by itself.9 Prosperity loses
half its value if unshared, troubles are doubled without someone
to comfort one. All those other desiderata – riches, health,
status, pleasure – are single goods, but friendship encompasses
everything: ‘friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where
you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never
untimely and never in the way.’10
The sovereign blessing of friendship is that it brightens hope
for the future, and supports the friends themselves in their
weakness and despair if these occur:

In the face of a true friend we see a second self, so that where

a man’s friend is, he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; if
he is weak, his friend’s strength is his; and in his friend’s life
he enjoys a second life after his own is finished . . . If you
should take the bond of friendship out of the world, no
house or city could stand, nor would the soil even be tilled.11

A good way to see the value of friendship is to consider the

contrasting case of families or states afflicted by animosities
and divided by faction. They cannot avoid destruction. But all

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 Ideas

examples of loyalty in confronting danger are warmly

applauded; only consider how rousingly the audience in the
theatre greets the portrayal of true friendship. It is easy to see
what a natural feeling friendship is given that it is so universally
approved when displayed.12
Having anatomised friendship and pointed out how natural
and deep-­rooted its sources are, Laelius turns to consider the
questions that press. Is the longing for friendship a function of
weakness or want of means? Is it chiefly motivated by the desire
to be able to get help when needed? Even if it is not quite that,
is it nonetheless prompted by the utilitarian consideration that
‘if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’? Or is there a more
noble prior cause of friendship, which springs more directly
from human nature?
At this point Laelius reminds his listeners that the word for
friendship, amicitia, shares the same origin as the word for love,
amor, ‘for it is love that leads to the establishing of goodwill’.13
It is true that advantages are sought and often obtained under
the pretence of friendship, but in true friendship there is
nothing false or pretended; it is genuine and spontaneous,
springing not from need but from nature, ‘from an inclination
of the soul joined with a feeling of love’.14
This is not to deny that friendship is ‘strengthened by the
receipt of benefits and the desire to render service’, but when
these are prompted by prior amity and warmth of feeling
they are very different from what is involved in base motiva-
tions towards gain.15 If the latter were truly the origin of friend-
ship, people would be inclined to friendship in proportion to
the size of their wants and deficiencies. But the truth is the
opposite: when a person is confident, fortified by virtue, and

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 Cicero De amicitia

fully self-­dependent, then is he ‘most conspicuous for seeking

out and maintaining friendship’.16
Perhaps conscious that the account being attributed to
Laelius has begun to verge on the ideal, Cicero considers some
realities. Not all friendships last: people change because of
adversity or the burdens of age, their friendship might cease to
be mutually beneficial, political differences might arise, rivalry
in courtship or for office or for some other honour or advan-
tage might drive them apart. One of the major causes of divi-
sion occurs when one asks the other to do something wrong,
‘as for example becoming an agent of vice or an abettor in
violence’; in such cases friendship can turn to serious enmity.17
The question therefore arises, how far should one take
loyalty to a friend? Cicero has Laelius rhetorically ask whether
the friends of traitors to Rome should have stayed true to their
friendship or to Rome, assuming an answer different from the
one E. M. Forster said he hoped he would give: ‘If I had to
choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,
I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Forster goes
on to cite Dante, who consigned Cassius and Brutus to the
Inferno’s lowest circle because they betrayed their friend Caesar
rather than Rome.18 But this is to underestimate the ferocity of
patriotism as a Republican virtue in the eyes of Romans of
Cicero’s stamp; he has Laelius say that for ‘crimes against the
Republic’ there will always be a ‘heavy and righteous penalty’.19
From this Laelius concludes that it does not justify a sin that
it was committed on behalf of a friend, and that therefore the
following rule of friendship should be established: ‘Neither ask
dishonourable things, nor do them, if asked. And dishonour-
able it certainly is, and not to be allowed, for anyone to plead

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in defence of sins in general and especially of those against the

State, that he committed them for the sake of a friend.’20
Alternatively and positively phrased, this rule states:

Ask of friends only what is honourable; do for friends only

what is honourable and without waiting to be asked; let zeal
be ever present, but hesitation absent; dare to give true advice
with all frankness; in friendship let the influence of friends
who are wise counsellors be paramount, and let the influence
be employed in advising, not only with frankness but, if the
occasion demands, even with sternness.21

Up to this point Cicero has alluded to the views of others only

in passing. But because there was an existing tradition of
thought about the matter which would have been familiar to his
readers (or hearers, given that these texts were often read to
audiences), he next addresses some of the commoner ones
directly. One view he deprecated was that people should not
become too friendly with anyone, and not have too many
friends, ‘lest one man be full of anxiety for many’. Moreover,
each has his own affairs to attend to, and it is an annoyance to
be too involved in others’ affairs; so it is ‘best to hold the reins
of friendship as loosely as possible, so that we may either draw
them up or slacken them at will’. And all this advice is predi-
cated on the idea that the best kind of life is one that is least full
of care – and friendship brings cares.22
Laelius will have none of this. ‘O noble philosophy! Why,
they seem to take the sun out of the universe when they deprive
life of friendship,’ he says, and rejects the idea of ‘freedom from

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 Cicero De amicitia

care’ as a failure to grasp that to flee from care is to flee

from virtue, because kindness rejects ill will, bravery rejects
cowardice, justice rejects injustice, and continence rejects
excess. To care about being kind, brave and just is to accept the
cares that come with contending against their opposites:
accepting that care might come with what is worthwhile is
appropriate. If we deprive the soul of the emotions associated
with friendship we make ourselves no different from a stone.23
In rejecting the views of those who place ataraxia – peace of
mind, an easy untroubled life – above friendship, or the posses-
sion of such goods as power or pleasure, Cicero has Laelius
offer a contrast: who would wish to have unlimited wealth or
pleasure on condition that he never felt for or received love from
another person? ‘Such indeed is the life of tyrants – a life, I
mean, in which there can be no faith, no affection, no trust in
the continuance of goodwill; where every act arouses suspicion
and anxiety and where friendship has no place.’24
But if we are to accept that there are limits to friendship,
boundaries beyond which one cannot go for a friend, what and
where are they? Laelius begins by rejecting three suggestions on
this head: that our feeling for our friends should be the same as
our feeling for ourselves, that the degree of our goodwill
towards them should match the degree of theirs to us; and that
we should put the same value on our friends as we place on
ourselves.25 His reasons are that in the nature of friendship one
friend will do for another things that he would not do for
himself, that circumstances of life differ for different people so
what is appropriate for one person is not for another, that to try
placing an exact measure of equivalence on the mutualities of
friendship involves a ‘very close and petty accounting . . . I

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 Ideas

think true friendship is richer and more abundant than that and
does not narrowly scan the reckoning lest it pay out more than
it has received.’26
The last most exercises Laelius, who is emphatic that a
friend should not value others and himself equally, as demon-
strated by the case where one’s friend is downcast or despairing:
is one to have the same estimate of oneself, or should one not
‘strive to rouse him up and lead him into a better train of
thought and livelier hopes’?27
So where is the boundary? Well, pace what Laelius had to
say earlier about the unacceptability of abetting a friend in
committing treason or doing something dishonourable, he now
says that loyalty requires that we should indeed help a friend
even if it means ‘turning aside from the straight path’, just so
long as doing so does not involve us in ‘utter disgrace’, and if it
is a matter that involves the friend’s life or reputation. Note
that he says ‘we should turn aside from the straight path’. But
the possibility of disgrace offers at least an outer boundary, the
‘limit to the indulgence which can be allowed to friendship’:
this is the one thing neither Laelius nor Cicero was prepared to
contemplate even for a friend. Death, yes; disgrace, no.28
Evidently this is an aspect of the matter that gave Cicero
difficulty. A few pages after this he talks about ‘loyalty’ and
‘unswerving constancy’ as the ‘support and stay’ of friendship,29
which does not sit well either with the stricter or the laxer limits
to friendship he has so far described. So he prefaces his talk of
loyalty with a diversion into the need to choose one’s friends
carefully, testing them first: ‘hence it is the part of wisdom to
check the headlong rush of goodwill as we would that of a
chariot, and thereby so manage friendship that we may in some

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 Cicero De amicitia

degree put the dispositions of friends, as we do those of horses,

to a preliminary test’.30 One such test is to see how a person
fares in matters of money transactions, or in ambition for
advancement in office; ‘where can you find a man so high-­
minded that he prefers his friend’s advancement to his own?’31
This leads naturally to the question of what qualities a
potential friend should have, if he is to be one to whom
‘unswerving constancy’ can safely be pledged. The answer is
frankness, sociability, and sympathy, this last in the sense that
he is likely to resonate with the same interests and concerns as
oneself. The ‘two rules of friendship’ Laelius now lays down
can be adduced from this. First, there is to be ‘no feigning or
hypocrisy’, and second, be sure that the candidate for your
friendship is very constant, and reluctant to accept anything
said against you by others.32
A third rule is that there is to be equality in friendship,
whether the friendship be new or old – that is: a new friend is
to be treated equally with an old friend – and there is to be
equality between friends who are of unequal rank to each other
or to oneself, whether in office or the social hierarchy.
To guard against the ills that beset friendship – such as being
put into an awkward position over something dishonourable or
that might bring disgrace, or where the friendship is ending
because of political or other differences – it is, Laelius repeats,
best to enter friendships carefully: and in fact one should not
enter into friendships intended to be lasting and firm until one
has a degree of maturity. This, given the experience it brings,
allows one to give careful thought to the qualities of possible
friends, for one must aim to respect and revere as well as love
them, and they must therefore be worthy of both.33

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 Ideas

Late in the dialogue Laelius has an apparent turn to the

Aristotelian in saying, ‘Everyone loves himself, not with a view
of acquiring some profit for himself from his self-­love, but
because he is dear to himself on his own account; and unless
the same feeling were transferred to friendship, the real friend
would never be found; for he is, as it were, another self.’34 It
might be thought that the point being made here is cognate to
the Christian one of ‘loving one’s neighbour as oneself’ under-
stood as implying that one must love oneself in order to be able
to love one’s neighbour well. And indeed there is something
important in this thought. According to phrasing, this adjura-
tion does not necessarily amount to saying that one’s friend is
literally another self, in the sense of being exactly like oneself,
but rather (and much more plausibly) that one’s friend is to be
treated with the same concern and interest as one treats oneself.
There is as usual something reflex about invocation of the
‘another self’ trope, yet the whole tenor of Cicero’s account is
premised on what is surely an appropriate recognition of the
difference and otherness of a friend, whom one nevertheless
values, respects, and even indeed needs, for the mixture of
reasons Cicero has astutely assembled: the natural impetus
we feel towards friendship based on shared interests and
congeniality, and the fact that friends do not invariably have a
parity of feelings towards each other, or equal goodwill, or hold
one another to be of exactly commensurate value. In fact these
were three requirements imposed by other philosophical views
that Cicero rejects, as noted above; and in the rejection of them
lies the implied recognition that friends are separate and
different, and that their friendship is a function of how those
differences mesh and provide mutual satisfactions, not for

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instrumental reasons but out of the goodwill that the parties

bear each other.
There is a fallacy in informal logic known as the ‘no true
Scotsman’ fallacy, derived from the claim some Scottish patriot
might make on hearing of a fellow Scot’s turpitude: ‘no true
Scotsman would do such a thing.’ The fallacy resides in so
defining a ‘true X’ that if some putative X fails to fit the desired
definition, it can be excluded from the class of Xs by moving the
goal posts so that they only compass ‘true’ Xs. This fallacy is
committed by Laelius early on when he says ‘true friendship can
only exist between good people’, which allows him to say of evil
people who are fast friends that theirs is not ‘true’ friendship.
The point is an important one for those who make it, because
the classical trope that ‘true’ friendship requires mutually recog-
nised virtue allows theoreticians of friendship to escape certain
problems, for example the one about loyalty being an essential
feature of friendship, which conflicts with the requirement that
friendship should not lead people into dishonourable acts. The
problem can be avoided by the stipulation that ‘true’ friendship
is predicated on virtue, and that therefore it would never lead
the parties into dishonour – not only because a ‘true’ friend
would not ask you to commit a dishonourable deed, nor because
a ‘true’ friend would abet you in dishonourable activities but,
rather, would remonstrate with you and lead you into better
ways; but because you would not become friends with a dishon-
ourable person in the first place, given that ‘true’ friendship is
not possible with one such. Since this is obviously not the case,
talk of ‘true’ friendship is destined to mislead.
Laelius’ definition of a ‘good person’ as one who is honour-
able, just, generous, courageous, loyal, and free from greed,

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intemperance and violence, is prefaced by his saying that he is

not going to become enmeshed in ‘pedantic accuracy’ in
defining what we mean by ‘a good person’. But the standard he
sets here is extremely high, and is conventional rather than – as
Cicero claims he wishes to be – pragmatic. One thing that we
would hope a friend to be (a ‘true’ friend!) is somewhat
forgiving and tolerant of our faults, our failings and failures,
our imperfections, and even at times our downright sins. Of
course it is too much to expect that a friendship might survive
genuine nastiness directed by one party at another or others,
unless there are extenuating circumstances; but as with the path
of ‘true’ love, it is utopian to expect that a friendship will
always be trouble-­free.
Laelius’ definition of ‘friendship’ itself – enjoyment of the
other’s company, accord on many things, and mutual goodwill
and liking – fares much better than his definitions of ‘true
friendship’ and ‘good person’, and has exactly the sensible ring
that one expects from Cicero. The notion of benevolentia,
‘goodwill’, includes within it that of a commitment to sharing
adversity as well as prosperity, to supporting one’s friend in
‘weakness and despair’ as well as in the pleasures of life; if the
phrase ‘true friendship’ has work to do, it does it here.
Like Aristotle, but even more explicitly – and no doubt
because of the influence of the Stoic philosophers with their
famous exhortation to ‘follow nature’ which, although he was
not a Stoic, he was evidently impressed by – Cicero sees the
impulse to friendship as natural, a necessitating feature of
human nature just as it is of animal nature in general. But the
social factors are as powerful if not more so: once the feeling of
goodwill and the sentiment of affection are engaged, they can

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be strengthened by mutual benefits, or weakened by the occur-

rence of divisions or change of character or personality over
time. All this makes sense. It is a recognition that the classical
conception’s impossible ideal of friendship between impossibly
ideal individuals needs tempering by a healthy dose of pragma-
tism to make it anywhere near plausible.

It is not possible to leave antiquity – still less, its lessons for our
own time – without mention of Plutarch and the question he
raises about having too many friends.35 This is a point of rele-
vance to us today because of the huge numbers of ‘friends’ that
people acquire on such social media as Facebook. If one has
ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand ‘friends’ on Facebook, are they
all friends? If they are, are they all equally friends? Does the
distinction between friends and acquaintances take on a partic-
ular significance in the Facebook age? As with at least some
other matters of significance, the ancient world is not without
insights.
Plutarch is better known for his Parallel Lives than his Moral
Essays, but some of these latter have great charm and interest
– not least on this matter of how many friends can really be
friends.
In Plutarch’s view, one major obstacle to acquiring a really
good friend is the desire for many friends, which is the product
of our love of novelty and our fickleness and inconstancy, so
that we are forever pursuing new friendships even though they
come to nothing.36 He points out that literature teaches us that
exemplary friendships all consist in the relationship between a
pair, and cites the examples of Theseus and Pirithous, Achilles
and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Phintias and Damon,

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Epaminondas and Pelopidas. And he observes that the

Aristotelian ‘another self’ idea itself implies duality.37
The only coin that can purchase a good friend, Plutarch
says, is ‘benevolence and complaisance conjoined with virtue’.
But these are rare qualities, so if one has a superfluity of friends
they are unlikely to be well endowed with them. Just as a river
divided into many courses runs with a feeble stream in each, so
if one’s affection is divided among too many recipients it will
be weak and ineffective.38
Plutarch says he is not insisting that we should each have just
one friend, but that we should aim to have one pre-­eminent
friend. A friend should be chosen with judgement, so that one
can ‘rejoice in his company, and make use of him in need’,
which is not possible if one has too many so-­called friends. For
a friend should be virtuous, pleasant company, and useful, and
to judge whether he will be all three we need to be as thoughtful
in our choice as we are when picking a tutor for our children or
a new member of a choir, whom we need to hear sing so that
we can be sure he will harmonise with the others. It is far more
difficult than either of these two last tasks ‘to meet with many
friends who will take off their coats to aid you in every fortune,
each of whom “offers his services to you in prosperity, and does
not object to share your adversity”’.39
Like Polonius in his advice to Hamlet – ‘Do not dull thy
palm with entertainment of each new-­hatch’d, unfledg’d
comrade’ – Plutarch advises strongly against too-­ready inti-
macy with chance comers or flatterers; ‘what is easily got is not
always desirable’; the beginning of a friendship is key to the
quality of its continuance.40 A bad friend is not easily got rid
of, troublesome if kept, harmful if turned into an enemy in the

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process of being shaken off; ‘as in the case of food which is

injurious or harmful, we cannot retain it on the stomach
without damage and hurt, nor can we expel it as it was taken
into the mouth, but only in a putrid, mixed and changed form
. . . if he be got rid of forcibly it is with hostility and hatred,
and like the voiding of bile.’41
In short: one must choose one’s friends very carefully, and
must take one’s time in doing it. ‘As therefore Zeuxis, when
some people accused him of painting slowly, said, I admit that
I do, but then I paint to last.’42
Plutarch seems unabashedly to run contrary to Aristotle and
Cicero in thinking that a good friend is one who affords
pleasure and usefulness. But like them he means that the bond
between friends, ‘strengthened by intercourse and kindness’, is
what produces both; it is these that prompt what friendship
brings, not the other way round. ‘As Menelaus said about
Odysseus, “Nor did anything ever divide or separate us, who
loved and delighted in one another, till death’s black cloud over-
shadowed us”.’43 Such depth of feeling between friends is not
the outcome of calculation.
Steadiness and constancy are the desiderata of friendship,
given that once the bond is established the parties will share in
each other’s difficulties as well as in their good times. That is
yet another reason for choosing with care, given the rarity of
those qualities. ‘The soul suitable for many friendships must be
impressionable, and versatile, pliant, and changeable. But
friendship requires a steady, constant and unchangeable char-
acter, a person that is uniform in his intimacy. And so a constant
friend is a thing rare and hard to find.’44 It can be turned round
too, pointing out that as we do well to choose one or a very few

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friends with care, so our own capacity for friendship towards

them demands it likewise – for consider the implication of the
old English proverb, ‘A friend to all is a friend to none.’
This is sensible plain advice, obvious enough, but entertain-
ingly put. If anything it is slightly less precious than the ideal-
ised conceptions of the major classic sources; and that is a step
in the right direction.

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 CHAPTER 4

Christianity and Friendship

One of the most influential works Cicero wrote in his years of

maximum philosophical productivity was a dialogue called
Hortensius, named for his friend Quintus Hortensius Hortalus.
It was an introductory survey of philosophy, intended to lay
before the Roman Republic the wealth of the Greek philosoph-
ical tradition. It is taken to be an adaptation and expansion of
Aristotle’s own introduction to philosophy, known in Latin as
the Protrepticus philosophiae, a work famous in antiquity as an
invitation to philosophical life and thought.
Both works, alas, are lost; only fragments of them remain.
Some efforts have been made to reconstruct the Protrepticus
from quotations of it in ancient texts. But it is Cicero’s
Hortensius which had the greater known impact, and in no less
a case than that of Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine tells us in his Confessions that it was reading
Cicero’s Hortensius at the age of nineteen that filled him with
a ‘burning ardour’ for philosophy.1 It was another decade

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before his life of wine and women gave way to a Christian

conversion, but he always counted Cicero as one of his chief
influences – along with Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry: a formi-
dable group – a claim confirmed by his saying in old age that
‘there is no greater consolation than the loyalty and mutual
love’ of friends.2
The fourth book of Augustine’s Confessions contains his
account of friendship. One of its interesting features is that
there is, at the outset, an obvious difficulty for Christians in
thinking about friendship, given that their religion’s founder
enjoins them to agape, indiscriminate love for their fellow
human beings. Christianity is not alone in this prescription;
Buddhism and Mohism likewise exhort universal love for one’s
fellows (and in the case of Buddhism, even more widely and
compassionately, for all things). But any such view is incompat-
ible with a selective and preferential love for one or a few
others, elevated above the rest of humankind by the special
place they hold in one’s affections. These thoughts by them-
selves would seem immediately to imply that one should not
have friends as such, in order to be a friend to all; and then one
falls foul of the criticisms Plutarch levelled at those who have
too many friends.
In the case of Augustine the dilemma was the more acute
because of the friendship he enjoyed with a youth who had
been his schoolfellow and playmate and was now living with
him in his home town of Tagaste, to which he had returned as
a teacher of rhetoric. ‘Like myself, he was just rising up in the
flower of youth . . . it was a sweet friendship, being ripened
by the zeal of common studies.’3 Writing in Christian retro-
spect, Augustine had to qualify this by saying it was not a ‘true

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friendship’ (the ‘no true Scotsman’ again) because only friend-

ships bound by God through the Holy Spirit can be such; but
he adds, ‘my soul could not exist without him’, their friendship
being ‘sweeter to me than all the sweetness of my life thus far’.4
The young man died of a fever:

My heart was utterly darkened by this sorrow and every-

where I looked I saw death . . . All the things I had done with
him, now that he was gone, became a frightful torment. My
eyes sought him everywhere, but they did not see him; and
I hated all places because he was not in them, because they
could not say to me, ‘Look, he is coming’ . . . [when I asked
my soul] ‘hope thou in God’ she did not obey, because that
dearest friend I had lost was an actual man, both truer and
better than the imagined deity I ordered her to put her hope
in. Nothing but tears comforted me and they took my
friend’s place in my heart’s yearning.5

The agony Augustine suffered over his lost friend drove him
from Tagaste to Carthage so that he could escape the scene of
his grief. In time the grief abated, and ‘what revived and
refreshed me, more than anything else, was the consolation of
other friends, with whom I went on loving the things I loved’,
though not (as Augustine retrospectively laments) God himself.
Then he gives the following superb account:

to discourse and jest with him; to indulge in courteous

exchanges; to read pleasant books together; to trifle together;
to be earnest together; to differ at times without ill-­humour,

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as a man might do with himself, and even through these

infrequent dissensions to find zest in our more frequent
agreements; sometimes teaching, sometimes being taught;
longing for someone absent with impatience and welcoming
the homecomer with joy. These and similar tokens of friend-
ship, which spring spontaneously from the hearts of those
who love and are loved in return – in countenance, tongue,
eyes, and a thousand ingratiating gestures – were all so
much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of the many
made us one.6

Superb.
This is, though, a noticeably secular account. ‘This is what
we love in our friends,’ Augustine says; ‘and we love it so much
that a man’s conscience accuses itself if he does not love one
who loves him, or responds in love to love, seeking nothing
from the other but the evidences of his love. This is the source
of our moaning when one’s friend dies – the gloom of sorrow,
the steeping of the heart in tears, all sweetness turned to
bitterness – and the feeling of death in the living, because of the
loss of the life of the dying.’7 Immediately after these words
Augustine writes a long prayer, as if making it up to the deity
for the fact that he loved his friends better than he loved him. A
dithyramb to God obliges him to end by saying, ‘These things I
did not understand at that time [the time of those friendships],
and I loved those inferior beauties.’8
But the key dilemma for the Christian is tucked away in the
very first line of the prayer: ‘Blessed is he who loves thee, and
who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake;

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 Christianity and Friendship

for he alone loses none dear to him, if all are dear to Him who
cannot be lost.’9 If our greatest love is to be reserved to God,
then to love another human too much, or more than God, is
wrong. It is moot how much love for anyone other than God is
left over if we are to love God ‘with all our heart and all our
might’, as the adjuration has it; but anyway such love has to be
experienced ‘through God’. But we are to love our enemies
as well as our friends; we are to love everyone; ‘love thy neigh-
bour as thyself’ is the second of the new commandments issued
by Christ, and in answer to the question ‘Who is my neigh-
bour?’ the answer is given in the Good Samaritan story about
complete strangers.10 In the passionate and moving letters
of Héloïse to Abélard after their misfortunes, the power of
human love is as well displayed as in Augustine’s pre-­conversion
friendships; both Abélard’s po-­faced responses and Augustine’s
post-­conversion regrets illustrate the reverse.11
Yet the story of friendship in Augustine did not end with his
conversion. In fact the Confessions makes it clear that as well
as Ambrose of Milan it was his friends Nebridius and Alypius
who were his companions on the road to conversion and there-
after. Of Alypius, alongside whom he was baptised and who
became bishop of Tagaste when he was himself bishop of
Hippo, Augustine wrote, ‘he was the brother of my heart . . .
anyone who knows us would say that he and I are distinct
individuals in body only, not in mind; I mean in our harmoni-
ousness and trusty friendship.’12 This is the attestation of
someone for whom friendship is a matter of great human
significance, which all the obeisance to a third party (viz. the
deity) in the relationship does not change; one could edit out
the apostrophes to the deity and be left with a marvellous

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rendering of what friendship means to someone with an

evident genius for it.
At times, indeed, Augustine himself seems impatient with
the implication of the divine demand that we give our total
concentration to the task of obedience, for there is this world
and our unignorable existence in it to be dealt with: ‘Two
things are essential in this world – life, and friendship.
Both must be prized highly, and not undervalued. They are
nature’s gifts. We were created by God that we might live; but
if we are not to live solitarily, we must have friendship.’13 And
again,

The love in friendship should be given freely. The reason you

have a friend and love him ought not to be that he can do
something for you; if you love him so that you can get money
or some other advantage from him, then you are not really
loving him, you are loving what you can get by his means. A
friend is to be loved freely, for his own sake, not for the sake
of something else.14

One might note that the ‘something else’ could equally be

the approval of a deity, and one might note also that to love a
friend because doing so is required by God is not to love freely.
Again, it would seem to be wisdom, not God, that places value
on friendship, if a remark in a letter to Proba is taken at face
value: ‘So to these two things that are so necessary in this
world, well-­being and friendship, along came Wisdom as a
visitor.’15
But of course Augustine’s official position is, as it has to be,
that ‘true’ friendship is ‘of God’; ‘You only love your friend

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 Christianity and Friendship

truly, after all, when you love God in your friend, either because
he is in him, or in order that he may be in him . . . there is no
true friendship unless God welds it between souls that cling
together by the love poured into their hearts by the Holy
Spirit.’16 This was the major theme of the converted Augustine,
and the tension between love of God and love of human friends
was resolved in the piety that it is God who forges the friend-
ships in the first place. And it had better be so, Augustine
admonishes, for if friendship is allowed to be wholly secular,
it can lead us astray: ‘The bond of human friendship has a
sweetness of its own, binding many souls into one. Yet because
of these values, sin is committed, because we have an inordinate
preference for these goods of a lower order and neglect the
better and the higher good.’17 What he had in mind was the
‘unfriendly friendship’ that had led him to steal pears as a
boy: blaming his companions for leading him astray, he
famously recounts the occasion on which he stole pears from
a neighbour’s farm, pears that were not very tempting to look
at or eat, so that it was not the fruit itself but the mere pleasure
of the adventure that counted, because it was forbidden.
‘Looking back I am now certain that I would not have done it
had I been alone. Maybe what I really loved was the compan-
ionship of the friends with whom I did it . . . Oh unfriendly
friendship!’18
The finished doctrine of friendship in Augustine is unim-
peachably a theological one. ‘There can be no full and true
agreement about human things among friends who disagree
about divine things, for it necessarily follows that one who
despises divine things esteems human things more than he
ought, and that whoever does not love God who made man, has

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not learned to love man rightly.’19 The two commandments of

Christ are given this gloss:

You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and
soul and with all your mind; you shall love your neighbour as
yourself; so, regarding the first, there is agreement on divine
matters, regarding the second, there is goodwill and love; if
you and your friend hold fast to these two commandments,
your friendship will be true and eternal, uniting you not only
to each other but to the Lord himself.20

The question whether human friendships are only ‘true’

friendships if forged by God and enjoyed by mutually encour-
aging Christians is a ‘true Scotsman’ question, of course,
because it is an act of legislation to say that heretics or atheists,
or followers of a different religion altogether, who love each
other and are fast and loyal friends, are ‘not really’ friends, or
indeed ‘unfriendly friends’ (and thus enemies) because they
encourage each other in the continuance of their mistakes. We
soon get led into paradox when we note that if those who are
outside the pale of Christian fellowship love their ‘unfriendly
friends’, then they are obeying the injunction to love their
enemies; and that is no mere sophism.
But the complication is greater in connection with enemies,
for Augustine eventually has to find means to deal with the
problem that we are ordered by God to love our enemies as well
as our friends, thus blurring the boundary between what we
owe to friends and what significantly cannot be owed to
enemies, as it were by definition: these are friends, those are

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enemies; there is a fundamental difference. But they must both

be loved; therefore he needs to draw a distinction between the
two kinds of loving, and does it this way: ‘Moreover, how can
that [i.e. love] be denied to friends which is due even to enemies?
To enemies, however, this debt is paid with caution, whereas to
friends it is repaid with confidence.’21
Such are the difficulties which the necessity of conforming
to dogma imposes. If we detach the account in Confessions
Book IV from the theological overlay, we get a remarkably
warm human portrait of the relationship that Augustine, with
Cicero, recognised as central to life as actually lived in the real
world: ‘to discourse and jest with [one’s friend]; to indulge in
courteous exchanges; to read pleasant books together; to trifle
together; to be earnest together; to differ at times without ill-­
humour; to find zest in our agreements; sometimes teaching,
sometimes being taught; longing for him when absent and
welcoming him home with joy . . . This is what we love in our
friends . . . seeking nothing from the other but the evidences of
his love.’22 By any standard that has to be part of what we mean
when we speak of friendship.

What Augustine does not address, and what Aquinas does, is

the question of friendship – if that remains the right word –
between profoundly unequal beings: humans and God. It might
seem surprising that friendship should be regarded by anyone
as quite the right relationship to be considering in relation to
the putative creator, master and commander of the universe, to
whom the appropriate attitude is so often said to be worship,
submission and obedience, hardly the stuff of chumminess. But
this indeed is what St Thomas Aquinas says.

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We do well first to consider the difficulties. In Aristotle a

condition of friendship is equality and shared activity and inter-
ests; neither equality nor sharing is possible in the human–God
relationship. In all of Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine the reliance
that friends place on each other is a feature of the reciprocity
distinctive of friendship; but what reciprocity is there with the
deity? Can even the holiest and most faithful epigone of God rely,
for example, on his answering a call for some sort of present
help? The inferior party to this relationship is largely ignorant of
God’s nature, and wholly ignorant of God’s view of things and
purposes; how can Aquinas even contemplate describing the
human–divine relationship in terms of friendship?
And yet, in the scattered places where the subject comes up
in Aquinas, he sets himself that task: he takes it that human
friendships provide analogies for, and further provide models
of and staging-­posts towards, the human–divine relationship –
which anyway in its perfected and final state is, according to
Aquinas, intended to be a friendship in a quite straightforward
sense of the term.
In the Summa theologiae Aquinas places friendship among
the goods that go to constitute a happy life.23 The happy person
does not need friends either for assistance or for pleasure,
because as he is otherwise virtuous (he would not be happy
unless he were so) he is self-­sufficient and has all the enjoyment
he needs from being conscious of his virtue. But friends are
indeed necessary; he needs them so that he can engage in
virtuous activities, including being able to exercise benevolence
towards them.24
Aquinas’ basic anatomy of the different kinds of love we
can bear others follows Aristotle’s in distinguishing genuine

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friendship, in which the parties love one another for themselves

and desire the other’s good, from relationships predicated on
utility or pleasure.25 The former is friendship love, the latter is
concupiscent love; the two kinds of love, often overlapping in
practice, are the causes of all human action and feeling.26
The appearance of conflict between charity and friendship
– that is, between universal brotherly love, agape, and the
partial, preferential affection of friendship – which bedevils
Christian thinking about the latter does not appear to be a
problem for Aquinas. Somewhat like Augustine he takes the
route of differentiating between orders of intensity of charity,
the hierarchy allowing a preferential form of charity to be
focused on just one or a few others, which can survive even in
our ‘homeland,’ patria, meaning heaven.27
The problem of charity is framed by the assertion in Luke 6:
32 that ‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to
you? For even sinners love those who love them.’ In order to
substantiate the claim that Christian charity is human friend-
ship elevated by grace to a new status, Aquinas quotes John 15:
15, ‘I do not call you servants any longer . . . I call you friends.’
On this view, charity is the perfected and spiritual version of
what in their inadequate corporeal way human beings achieve
in friendship.28
It is not clear that the words from John’s Gospel quite do
what Aquinas intends. More fully quoted from verses 14–15
they say, ‘You are my friends if you do what I command. I do not
call you servants any longer, because a servant does not know
what his master is doing.’ This rather better fits the special sense
of ‘friendship’ that would apply if this were a factual state of
affairs; but it is not friendship in any other recognisable sense.

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A yet larger problem looms for Aquinas, however: how can

charity towards an enemy be accounted a type of friendship, given
Aristotle’s requirement that friendship involves reciprocated love?
Aquinas’s solution is a paradigm of the kind of reasoning
required to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem: we love our enemies
indirectly, says Aquinas, through a chain of people whose love for
friends eventually arrives at one’s enemy. Thus, I love you, you
love your friend whom I do not love or even perhaps know, that
person loves someone else . . . and so on until the enemy is
reached by an intermediary chain of lovings.29
And our enemies love us back by this same indirect route.
In any case, all charity in fact has God as its ‘formal object
and not merely its end’, which obviates the further difficulty
that to love a sinner or an enemy (however indirectly or – a
different problem yet again – inadvertently) might in some
sense be to condone what makes them so.30 In the case of
sinners, this cannot be right; for Aristotle required that we
should love only those who are virtuous, and that honour is
a prerequisite for anyone to be lovable as a friend. How can
one love the sinner, even granting that we do not love the
sin? Once again, this problem is solved by making God the
‘formal object’ of our love. Thus in loving the sinner we are
loving God, and therefore we love something virtuous and
honourable after all.
But it does not solve the problem of God’s love for us,
because we are emphatically not virtuous or honourable. How
can he love us, if our being virtuous is a requirement for our
being lovable? In this case we are told that God’s loving us is a
function of his virtue, not ours: his loving us makes us good, he
does not love us because we are good.31

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 Christianity and Friendship

In this barrage of casuistries there is an interesting remark

that lends additional subtlety to the Aristotelian observation
that appropriate self-­love is required for one to be a good friend
to another. Aquinas quotes Leviticus 19:18 ‘love your friend as
yourself’, and uses it to introduce a twist to the ‘another self’
trope: if we cannot be good friends to ourselves, how can we be
good friends to others? If we have no self-­respect, how can we
expect our friends to respect us, and in that case to be our
friends at all? The point is a good one, though it can be taken
to extremes: there is a now-­standard trope in our own times,
the ‘because I’m worth it’ trope, that shows how self-­love can
become a justification for not even seeing the existence of
others, especially the less fortunate. Self-­respect is one thing,
egoism another; the ancient authors are thinking of the former
rather than the latter.

The principal difficulty for a commentator on religious views

about so human and sublunary, yet so necessary and important,
a matter as friendship is that whereas some good things might
be said in the course of them – as is manifestly the case with
Augustine, a man of strong human passions and experience of
their exercise – their subordination to doctrine much devalues
them. The problem was stated by Russell in connection with
Aquinas: that when conclusions are antecedently given, or
when at the very least one knows that they have to be consistent
with conclusions antecedently given, the value of arguments
leading to them is minimal.32
As is usual with doctrine, though, epigones live a double
mental life: the doctrine says one thing, human interests and
needs assert themselves nevertheless – as with Roman Catholics

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 Ideas

and contraception. The importance of friendship to human

beings leads to people making friends independently of theory
or doctrine, and even to creating theory and doctrine which are
at odds with official theory and doctrine.
Look at any Christian website on friendship and we see
familiar things being said: friends help each other in times of
need, share the joys and sorrows of life, trust each other, forgive
each other, share aspirations and goals and encourage each
other to realise them.33 The idea that one’s love for others
should be universal and should not single out any one person
more than another would not merely be unacceptable but
unlivable, exactly like the Gospel teaching which says that if we
really wish to follow Christ we must give away all our money
and possessions and, like the lilies of the field, make no plans
for the morrow. The most consistent and honest of epigones is
regarded as a zealot for doing what the scriptures of the major
religions actually say; if everyone were zealot enough, human
life would be intolerable, but (mercifully, perhaps) would not
last long anyway.
Even for a devout believer it is hard to see what difference
would be made to her friendships if the moral theology
attending the concept of them were stripped away. What does it
add to Augustine’s striking account of the nature of a warm
and loving friendship to say that the parties to it were brought
together by a deity, as in an arranged marriage? The fact is that
the endeavours of Augustine and Aquinas were necessitated by
the problem that this wholly secular phenomenon was too
likely to be disruptive of the idea that there is nothing good but
what is from God, and therefore has to be accommodated by
means of some intricate argumentation. Like the deities of the

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 Christianity and Friendship

countrymen (the ‘pagans’) it had to be habilitated into the

ambit of the faith, just as the popular winter solstice celebra-
tions of antiquity had to be transformed into Christmas. And
thus we see what Augustine and Aquinas respectively make of
the task; were we to compare their efforts we might say that
Augustine wins by a country mile.

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 CHAPTER 5

Renaissance Friendship

In the face of entrenched historical labels we are bound to enter

the usual disclaimers: that the three or more centuries lumped
together as ‘The Renaissance’ were internally as diverse as any
unlabelled three centuries could be, and that we obscure as
much as illuminate by giving it a capitalised name. At the same
time we are bound to notice contrasts with the preceding high
medieval period, ‘medieval’ being the name chosen by Petrarch,
one of the fathers of the Renaissance, to denote what he saw as
the gulf separating his time from a world in which life in the
flesh was regarded as a vale of tears, a dark and dangerous
antechamber to the felicity promised those who could endure it
with as little stain of sin on their souls as possible. Such medi-
eval literature as there was on the subject of how to live was in
the contemptus mundi genre, warning that the devil and his
minions were lurking in wait to take every opportunity – even
the opportunity of a sneeze! – to snatch your soul down to
everlasting perdition.

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 Renaissance Friendship

This ugly view – whose upside was the soaring beauty of

Gothic cathedrals pointing to the sky as if to lift away from
earth’s filth and fly upwards – was replaced by the Renaissance’s
celebration of life in the here and now. Medieval art is relent-
lessly religious; its happiest manifestation is the endlessly
iterated iconography of that successor to a goddess of lost
or more likely suppressed memory, the Madonna1 – or the
prelude to her, the Annunciation. But its majority manifesta-
tion is flagellation, crucifixion, deposition, entombment, the
suffering on and at the foot of the cross, depictions of hell
and its torments designed to frighten the onlooker,2 with the
occasional more positive note of resurrection and ascension
thrown in.
By contrast, Renaissance art gives us landscapes and picnics
in them, portraits of ordinary (of course, rich or powerful; but
not divine) people, still lives, mythological subjects, erotic
subjects, nudes, battle scenes, animals, a wider variety of narra-
tives from biblical and literary sources illuminating aspects of
human life and destiny, and much besides. With the art came
poetry and music, a revolution in architecture to provide
ampler housing for life in the empirical present, the beginnings
of renewed enquiry in science and philosophy, increased literacy,
and travel; indeed, in the voyages of Portuguese explorers at
this time lay the beginning of globalisation. All these things
were inspired directly or otherwise by the recovery of the clas-
sical past, by the rebirth of attitudes and practices which centu-
ries of religious dominance had rather successfully managed to
obscure and in many cases to obliterate.
Petrarch’s contemporary and friend Giovanni Boccaccio,
standing on the threshold of the Renaissance, wrote this at

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the end of his Tenth Day story of Titus and Gisippus in the
Decameron:

Friendship, then, is a most sacred thing, worthy not only of

singular reverence but of being commended with perpetual
praise, as the most discreet mother of liberality and honour,
the sister of gratitude and charity, the enemy of hatred and
avarice, ever ready, without waiting to be asked, to do virtu-
ously to another what it would wish done to itself. Its sacred
results are today most rarely to be seen in two persons, by the
fault and to the shame of men’s miserable cupidity which
makes them look only to their own interests; so friendship
has been driven to the ends of the earth and left in perpetual
exile.3

Neither the story itself nor this peroration invokes religious

grounds or sanctions. It was written a century after Aquinas’s
discussion of friendship, but bears no marks of that or any
other theology. It is, in both the then contemporary and today’s
contemporary senses, humanist in character.

This was a promising start, and the Renaissance is full of exam-

ples of celebration of secular friendship as a chief value of the
age. Perhaps inevitably, however, the great majority of those
references are mere iterations of each other, and, worse, almost
all involve repeating the one remark in Aristotle which, argu-
ably, should least define what friends are to each other: the
‘another self’ remark.4 Its ubiquity of quotation makes it a
cliché of the Renaissance. This fact has not done much to add

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 Renaissance Friendship

to the quality or interest of the great flowering of ‘Renaissance

friendship studies’ noted by Christopher Marlow in his survey
of the subject, and which he explains by the latitude it offers for
cross-­disciplinary research.5 A cynic might say that academics
in search of something to do in these fields have developed a
tortured and prolix way of writing presumably intended to give
an impression of scholarship, depth and originality, which does
not help matters: but in this case the matters are not much to
be helped anyway, for Plato’s Lysis, Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia were the set texts, and ‘another
self’ was the key quotation; to know this is to know all.
Meanwhile in practice the idea of a ‘friend’ in the functional
sense of a coadjutor, colleague, supporter, kinsman and anyone
who is ‘with us because not against us’ continued to demon-
strate that the literary and philosophical sense of ‘friend’ was
still an idealisation as it had been in those classical texts, and
entered into the discourse of literates as an affectation, for
example in the high-­flown language of the consciously literary
letter, where the feelings of both writer and addressee are
couched in passionate terms.
A pivotal moment in the dissemination of the amicus alter
ipse trope must be John Tiptoft’s 1481 translation of Cicero’s
De amicitia for the Caxton Press.6 The sayings of Erasmus – the
Collectanea of 1500 and Adagiorum chiliades of 1508 – were
hugely popular in the sixteenth century, and scores of them
relate to friendship, iterating the classical sources in a variety of
disguises: ‘a friend is another self’ and ‘friendship is equality’,
‘between friends all is owned in common’, and so on. But these
were not always merely rhetorical flourishes; Erasmus enjoyed
famous friendships with Sir Thomas More and Hans Holbein,

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 Ideas

and even wrote a dialogue under the title Amicitia, although as

this has more to do with the natural sympathies and antipathies
of animals (how the lizard hates the snake, for example), it
devotes hardly any space to human friendship. A lesson Erasmus
draws, however, is that liking and aversion are inexplicably the
work of something natural in us, and so we must seek our
friends among those ‘towards whom we feel a propensity’, there
being no trumping reason.7
The ‘another self’ trope appears in every notable source.
Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named The Governour (1531) has ‘a
frende is properly named of Philosphers the other I’; Richard
Taverner’s The Garden of Wysdom (1539) reports that when
Aristotle was asked ‘what a frende is, One soule (quoth) he, in
two bodyes’; a poem attributed to Nicholas Grimald in Tottel’s
Miscellany (1557–87) has the couplet ‘Behold thy friend, and of
thyself thy pattern see;/One soul, a wonder shall it seem, in
bodies twain to be.’8
And so it goes on. The 1580s saw a veritable rush of publica-
tions on friendship, for example Walter Dorke’s A Tipe or
Figure of Friendship, wherein is livelie, and compendiouslie
expressed, the right nature and propertie of a perfect and true
friend (1589), Thomas Churchyard’s A Sparke of Friendship
and warme goodwill, that shewest the effect of true affection
and unfoldes the finenesse of this world (1588), and Thomas
Breme’s The mirror of friendship: both how to know a perfect
friend, and how to choose him (1584).9 Given that none of
these texts offers startlingly new insights into their subject, it is
evident that there was a good deal of recycling going on – of
one another, Erasmus, and the ancients. The endlessly repeated
points are ‘another self’; ‘equality’; ‘all things in common’;

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‘agreement’; and all concur that the ‘sweete communication’ of

friendship is a ‘consolation’ and a ‘most cordiall medicine’.10
It is easy and instructive to turn to Shakespeare and the
dramatists to find windows to peer through into current
conceptions of friendship in the period. Consider briefly just
one – but a pertinent – example: Timon of Athens. It is a
portrait not so much of false friendship as of the effect of
disappointment writ large. What Timon gave and did not
receive in return is not the point, nor even that he did not
receive in return, for case-­by-­case reciprocity does not have to
be automatic. Rather, the point is that in his need he was
refused, when he had refused nothing even to those not in need.
The injustice, betrayal and devastating failure of friendship’s
assumed bond of reciprocal commitment are what underlie
Timon’s rage against humankind. The character of Timon,
questionable though it is first in its profligate folly and then in
its generalisation of hatred against all when it was only some
who betrayed him, nevertheless provides an interesting hook for
a remark by William Hazlitt: that in this play Shakespeare
seems unwaveringly in earnest throughout. Because the crux is
what false friends do to Timon, there has to be a premise that
friendship is about the opposite of falsities: that it is or should
be about mutuality, help, trust and the keeping of an implicit
contract, at least. None of these things holds in Timon, which
is why Timon falls.
The two discursive texts on friendship that have survived
from the period as part of an educated person’s reading today,
are both late Renaissance contributions whose authors are
famous for other reasons. They are essays by Montaigne and
Bacon respectively entitled ‘On Friendship’ and ‘Of Friendship’.

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 Ideas

Each of them is substantial in content, but they are very

different. Montaigne regarded his feelings for his dead friend
Etienne de La Boétie as special, out of the ordinary, not like
common friendship and indeed of a kind that very few would
be capable of experiencing – even though he was not immune
to the general contagion: he says friendship is ‘one soul in two
bodies, according to the fit definition of Aristotle’. But so great
was his feeling for his lost friend that he did not claim resem-
blance for it to what constituted the great friendships of myth
and antiquity; he seems to have felt that it surpassed even them.
Bacon’s essay, by contrast, while full of meat and good
observation, is addressed to the question of what friendship
does – its ‘fruits’, as he calls them. The difference between the
two essays arises from the difference of temperament and
purpose between their two authors. Montaigne wrote out of
his private feelings, Bacon saw himself as an educator of
mankind: theirs is the difference between the subjective and the
objective impulse to communicate ideas.11

It is interesting to note that Montaigne’s ‘Of Friendship’

appeared in the second book of his essays, published together
with the first book in 1580, and his essay ‘On Three Kinds of
Relationships’ appeared in the third book, published in 1588;
and that in speaking of friendship in the latter he is not quite
as exclusive as he had made himself out to be in the former.
Indeed, he even regrets that he is not so formed as to be capable
of enjoying easy acquaintanceships with all sorts and condi-
tions of people, including the carpenters and gardeners on his
estate; he envies those able to strike up a casual conversation
with them.12

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 Renaissance Friendship

Having acknowledged that his retiring demeanour in

company might have lost him the goodwill of many, Montaigne
proceeds to claim that nevertheless he has ‘a great aptitude for
acquiring and retaining rare and admirable friendships. Since I
grasp very eagerly at any acquaintance that is to my liking, I
make such advances, and rush so eagerly forward, that I rarely
fail to attach myself and to make an impression where I strike.
I have often had happy proof of this.’13 Alluding to the great
friendship when younger with Etienne de La Boétie, he says
that he has learned that friendship is ‘for companionship not
for the herd’ (here quoting Plutarch), and that he cannot abide
those imperfect and commonplace friendships which result
from the parties to them not giving themselves to each other
wholeheartedly.14
In criticising himself for not being apt for easy acquaint-
anceships Montaigne also criticises Plato for saying that a
master should always speak as a master and never as a familiar
to his servants. Montaigne’s honourable reason is that ‘it is
inhuman and unjust to lay so much stress on this chance
prerogative of fortune’.15 But this is not friendship, although it
is not noblesse oblige either; it is that great but simple good
thing, humanity. This in turn suggests that there is a distinction
in the offing between the desire to be well disposed to all others
– our humanity towards them – and the particular needs we
have for friends. In this later essay Montaigne describes those
needs in less exigent terms than Aristotle, or Aristotle’s more
zealous followers, would countenance.
The account Montaigne proceeds to give is a down-­to-­earth
one, despite beginning with what seems a demanding require-
ment. ‘The men whose society and intimacy I seek are those who

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are called well-­bred and talented men; and the thought of these
gives me a distaste for others. Their kind is, rightly considered,
the rarest that we have, a kind that owes almost everything to
nature.’16 To nature, he says, and therefore not education; but
we had better register here that ‘good breeding’ is not a gift of
nature. There are kindly and noble people whom we might call
‘nature’s gentlefolk’, but that is a different matter; Montaigne
might have found them among his gardeners, and in this account
they are not in his library with him sitting beside his fire.
‘The purpose of our intercourse,’ he continues, ‘is simply
intimacy, familiarity, and talk; the exercise of the mind is our
sole gain. In our conversations all subjects are alike to me. I do
not care if there is no depth or weight to them; they always
possess charm, and they always keep to the point.’17 What
makes such intercourse pleasing is that it is the meeting of
mature judgements seasoned with ‘kindness, candour, gaiety
and friendship’. It might be difficult to see how it can be an
indifferent matter whether talented and rare interlocutors
discuss their subjects without ‘weight or depth’, but the formu-
lation is misleading. Earlier in the essay Montaigne apostro-
phises pedants who mask rather than illuminate their interests
with long words and intellectual conceits.18 Here he says that
learning can only be part of the talk if it is not ‘schoolmasterly,
imperious and tiresome, as it usually is, but ready to take a
lesson. We are only seeking to pass the time.’19 The point,
however, is that the value of talk with people chosen for their
personal qualities is guaranteed by the latter: ‘The mind of a
well-­bred person, familiar with the world of men, can be suffi-
ciently agreeable in itself. Art is nothing else but the register
and record of the works of such minds.’20

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As a description of what friends should be and what friend-

ship should yield, this is a more modest account than the more
famous earlier one, to be discussed in a moment; it is presum-
ably because Montaigne does not expect to experience such a
friendship again, and therefore settles for a norm which is
nevertheless good – this time, a case of not letting the best drive
out the good. The unemphasised central point is the same as
Plutarch’s: choose the friend well, and the benefits of friendship
follow: obvious, but no less persuasive for being so.
Still, the discussion ends on a melancholy note. The three
relationships of the essay’s title are friendships with men,
sexual affairs with women (he says in passing, ‘I would rather
have beauty than goodness in my bed’), and love of books.
Friendships are ‘disappointingly rare’; love affairs ‘wither with
age’; the one true constant and comforting relationship is with
one’s books.21 There follows a charming account of his library
and its pleasures.
‘Of Friendship’ is a different and more intense work. It was
originally written as a preface to a treatise by Etienne de La
Boétie called Discourse on the Voluntary Servitude (or The
Protest) which Montaigne planned to publish, but which
appeared in print elsewhere before he could do so. It was used by
Huguenots in their struggle for survival in the Wars of Religion
then engulfing France. Although deeply sympathetic to the
cause of religious peace, Montaigne – himself an outwardly
observant Catholic but something of a sceptic within – did not
wish to get embroiled in the quarrel. As a result he published the
essay as a preface to a number of de La Boétie’s poems instead.
De La Boétie’s treatise does two things: it offers an analysis
of how tyrants get and keep power, and it argues that real

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power is in the hands of the people, who can get it, without
violence, if they will. As the work’s title suggests, de La Boétie
thought that, by accepting their servitude, the subjects of a
tyrant were more at fault than the tyrant himself. In its time and
context it was a work with potential to be inflammatory, and its
adoption by the Huguenots as propaganda in their cause made
it so. De La Boétie was himself Catholic, but in his work as a
magistrate he had tirelessly striven to keep the peace between
the religious factions, in his jurisdiction allocating churches or,
where there was only one church in a village, different hours of
worship to the different persuasions. When the edict of tolera-
tion for Huguenots was published in January 1571 he welcomed
it joyfully.
Alas, de La Boétie was not long for the world. He fell ill and
died at the young age of thirty-­three, after he and Montaigne
had enjoyed an intense and wonderful friendship for just four
years. Montaigne, two years the younger, had also served as a
magistrate, and they knew of one another long before they met.
Montaigne had moreover read and greatly approved the
Voluntary Servitude tract when it was circulating in manuscript
‘among men of understanding’.22 When they met it was as if
they were predestined for friendship, so irresistibly were they
drawn to each other, so immediate the attraction and under-
standing between them. ‘At our first meeting, which happened
by chance at a great feast and gathering in the city, we found
ourselves so captivated, so familiar, so bound to each other,
that from that time nothing was closer to either than each was
to the other.’23
Despite the concord of interests and outlook, and the prepa-
ration their friendship had received from the fact that they

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knew of each other – and approved of what they knew – long

before they met, Montaigne could only say, ‘If anyone urge me
to tell why I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by
answering: Because it was he, because it was myself.’ He was
emphatic in his view that

[s]uch a friendship has no model but itself, and can only be

compared to itself. It was not one special consideration, nor
two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; it was some myste-
rious quintessence of all this mixture which possessed itself
of my will, and led it to plunge and lose itself in his; which
possessed itself of his whole will, and led it, with a similar
hunger and a like impulse, to plunge and lose itself in mine.
I may truly say lose, for it left us with nothing that was our
own, nothing that was either his or mine.24

This beautiful and eloquent evocation of the psychological

state they mutually felt they were in comes as close as anything
can to the ‘another self’ ideal. Montaigne claimed that he felt
complete certainty regarding his beloved friend’s intentions and
judgements, and that he could understand the motivations of
any of his actions, because ‘our souls travelled so unitedly
together, they felt so strong an affection for one another, and
with the same affection saw into the very depths of each other’s
hearts, that not only did I know his as well as my own, but I
should certainly have trusted myself more freely to him than to
myself.’25
Montaigne was convinced that everyday friendships could
not be compared to this. Ordinary friendships are sustained by

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mutual help and kindnesses, but in so complete a union such

considerations are irrelevant; for just as one cannot be said to
be grateful for services one performs for oneself, or love oneself
more for having performed them, so there was no question of
anything implying ‘separation and difference’ between him and
de La Boétie. Such words would include ‘benefit, obligation,
gratitude, request, thanks’ – they simply did not apply.26
In preparation for describing this ‘friendship so complete and
perfect’ Montaigne surveys the kinds of close relationships that
might be supposed to rival it. First, it is natural to human beings
to wish for the society of others. This is why Aristotle says that
a statesman will be less interested in justice than in fostering ties
of friendship, because a perfect society is one in which all are
bound together by friendship. But the friendship has to be for its
own sake, for relationships premised on the getting of pleasure,
profit or some other advantage are less noble and fine – and in
being less, are not properly friendships at all.27
Some might regard family relationships as comparable to
the highest friendships, says Montaigne, but he disagrees; the
sentiment of a child for its parents is one of respect, and cannot
be friendship because friendship is nourished by ‘familiar inter-
course’ requiring some equality of condition, age and knowl-
edge, which by its nature the parent–child relationship lacks.
Parents cannot confide their innermost thoughts to their chil-
dren, and children cannot admonish their parents – admonition
being among the first duty of friends, Montaigne says – so
this even more emphatically rules friendship out of family
relationships.28
The same is true of sibling bonds, for even though the ‘name
of brother is indeed a beautiful and affectionate one’ there are

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many reasons (of inheritance, rivalry, conflict) which conspire

to weaken that bond or break it. And anyway there is no
obvious reason why the similarity and harmony required for
the best kind of friendship should exist between brothers; it
often happens that siblings and parents are very different from
one another, and fail to get along as a result; that is a common-
place.29
And then there is the fact that family ties are obligatory
impositions; they are not freely chosen on the basis of mutuali-
ties, but happen by accident. Our free will, on the contrary,
‘produces nothing that is more properly its own than affection
and friendship’.30
Montaigne does not think there can be friendship between
men and women. Relationships between the sexes are ‘carnal
and subject to satiety’, whereas friendship is increased by
enjoyment, not satisfied by it, for it is not a physical but a
spiritual thing.31 He therefore also affects to frown on homo-
sexual relations, the ‘alternative permitted by the Greeks’, but
allows that when they occur in nobler hearts the relationship
between a man and a boy could be salutary: the former can give
the latter

instruction in philosophy; lessons in religious reverence and

in obedience to the laws; encouragement to die for the good
of the country; examples of valour, wisdom, and justice, the
lover studying how to make himself acceptable by the charm
and beauty of his mind, that of his body having long ago
faded, and hoping by this mental comradeship to make a
stronger and more lasting union.32

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The two parts of the account here are detachable. On the

one hand what Montaigne says about his friendship with de La
Boétie is moving and the finest rendering of what a friend’s
being ‘another self’ might actually involve. On the other hand
there is little to accept in the rest of what he has to say. It is not
clear that the best and highest kind of friendship is impossible
across the sexes, nor that the bond of brothers cannot achieve
that status, nor that as children grow up there cannot be friend-
ship between them and their parents. Friendship need not
displace other relationships, which is why lovers and siblings
can be friends while still being lovers and siblings.
Moreover our contemporary sensibility finds the pederastic
relation ‘permitted by the Greeks’ questionable for more
grounds than the chief one. Do we want ‘lessons in religious
reverence and . . . encouragement to die for the good of the
country’? Do we even want unquestioning ‘obedience to the
laws’ when there might be grounds for changing some of them
for better ones?
To say that the two parts of Montaigne’s account are
detachable is to say that it is unnecessary to the celebration of
the kind of friendship he achieved with de La Boétie that other
kinds of relationships, some of them involving friendship, have
to be downgraded. This thought has a significant implication:
that we might need a variety of relationships, not all of them
friendships, and not all of our friendships necessarily of the
highest quality and intensity, to live fully human lives. Montaigne
described the immediate affection he and de La Boétie felt as
inexplicable, but it is as surely the case that all relationships are
prepared by antecedent experience, and that an explanation
might be forthcoming from them. If so, it would include

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relationships which he compares unfavourably with the one

they made possible.

Bacon remarks that the person who claimed that whoever

delights in solitude must be either a god or a wild beast,
managed thereby to pack a lot of truth and untruth together in
very few words. For whereas a person who is averse to society
indeed has something of the wild beast about him, there are
those who seek solitude for reasons of meditation or self-­
improvement, and they are not gods but men; Bacon names
some philosophers and hermits of the Church who fill the bill.
But theirs is not real solitude just because they are not in the
company of others. Real solitude is experienced by those who
have no friends; for them the world is a wilderness.33
It might be commented here that by the phrase ‘real soli-
tude’ Bacon means aloneness, and this, moreover, in the sense
of loneliness; and this reminds us that we need to distinguish
between solitude properly understood, which is generally the
welcome physical absence of others, and loneliness, the unwel-
come psychological absence of others (one can be very lonely in
a crowd). In this sense solitude is a good, much needed on occa-
sions, and loneliness invariably a bad thing for essentially social
creatures such as humans are. Bacon’s ‘real solitude’ should
accordingly be construed as ‘loneliness’; it is loneliness that
makes the world a wilderness.
‘A principal fruit of friendship,’ says Bacon, ‘is the ease and
discharge of the fullness and swelling of the heart, which
passions of all kinds do cause and induce.’ The only medica-
tion for an oppressed heart is a friend, to whom one can
‘impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels’ – rather

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like (he astutely observes) a non-­religious ‘shrift or confes-

sion’.34 And he even notices how great monarchs, at some risk
to their own security, are eager to have what the terminology of
his own day denominated ‘favourites’ or ‘privadoes’, but which
the Romans gave a more explanatory name: participes curarum
– sharers in cares.35 He cites examples of great Romans who,
despite having extensive families, could not have the ‘comfort
of friendship’ without someone to whom they were drawn and
whom they had chosen to be such.36 All of which proves, he
says, the truth of the observation that those without friends are
cannibals of their own hearts because they are unable to
disburden themselves of what is in them.
So, says Bacon, the first great fruit of friendship is what it
does for us emotionally, regarding our joys and griefs. The
former are greater and last longer when we tell them to friends,
and some of the burden of the latter is lifted when told to a
sympathetic ear.37
The second fruit is as healthful for the intellect as the first is
for the emotions. ‘For friendship maketh indeed a fair day in
the affections, from storm and tempests; but it maketh daylight
in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of
thoughts.’ This is because by discussing ideas, marshalling
thoughts, turning them into words, communicating them, ‘he
waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an hour’s discourse,
than by a day’s meditation’.38 How true.
But this is the lesser benefit of two from this fruit of friend-
ship; the first is getting wise counsel from someone who has
your interests at heart and wishes you well. ‘There is as much
difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a
man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend,

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 Renaissance Friendship

and a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self,

and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self,
than the liberty of a friend.’ We might remonstrate with
ourselves, we might read improving books of morality, but
nothing compares to admonition delivered by someone who we
know is concerned about us and desires to help.39
So: friendship’s first fruit is ‘peace in the affections’; the
second is ‘support of the judgement’; the last, ‘like the pome-
granate, full of many kernels’, is the aid that friends give each
other in many different ways in many different connections. It
is to say far too little, Bacon asserts, to agree with the ancients
that ‘a friend is another self’, because a friend is far more than
himself. If a man has children, say, and dies, leaving them to the
guardianship of a friend, then he is as it were living on in the
friend and continuing his obligations to his children. If he is
bodily confined somewhere, but needs to fetch or take some-
thing to another place, and his friend does it for him, then he
has, as it were, two bodies. And so on: friends are more than
another self because they multiply one into several selves by
their aid.40
And there is more. How can a man speak of his own merits?
They would ‘blush in a man’s own mouth’ whereas they would
sound gracefully in his friend’s mouth. Again, a man might not
be able to speak to his son but as a father, to his wife but as a
husband, whereas his friend can speak to them as the case
requires. ‘To enumerate these things were endless,’ says Bacon;
‘I have given the rule, where a man cannot fitly play his own
part; if he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.’41
There is all the merit of common sense and truth in these
observations. The most notable thing about their tenor, in

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 Ideas

comparison to what is reported in foregoing pages, is their

pragmatism and absence of high-­flown sentiment or idealisa-
tion. And yet they catch the sense in which friendship is life-­
enhancing, by explaining succinctly and accurately how it is so.
Perhaps Bacon wrote like this because he lived on the cusp of
the time in which Renaissance turned into the dawn of science,
a change to which he himself contributed.

If one were to choose a best account of friendship from the

materials provided by these various sources so far, one that
drew on Bacon and a de-­theologised Augustine would recom-
mend itself powerfully. They have the practicality, the real-­
world maturity, of thinkers who have lived as well as meditated
on living; in their views one encounters experience and truth.

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 CHAPTER 6

From Enlightenment back to the

Roman Republic

More slices of history, more labels: but as before, there is some-

thing definite captured by the labels, for the Enlightenment and
the distinctive counter-­movements it inspired are personalities
in their own right, and ones that have made large differences to
the course of history.
We would expect to find new elements in thinking about
friendship in the Enlightenment, and indeed we do. What
explains them is the change wrought by two major develop-
ments. The first is that the Enlightenment’s leaders – meaning
the thinkers and writers who articulated its new sensibility:
Diderot, Voltaire, Hume, Kant and others – wished to apply the
concepts and methods of natural science, as this had made such
progress in the preceding century, to matters of society and
human life. An empirical approach to enquiry, involving obser-
vation and the testing of evidence, and a discipline of reason
shrived of ‘Rationalist’ elements which say that ultimate truths
can only be ascertained by a priori means, constitute the

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method. Accordingly they place a new governor in the seat of

authority over our minds and actions, supplanting tradition,
dogma, the divine right of kings, revelation, ancient scriptures,
pieties, or anything else that is not empirically derivable or test-
able, or which cannot survive the independent scrutiny of
reason.
The second element follows from the first. It is that most of
humanity had lived (and alas today still lives) under the false-
hood that there is one great truth about everything, one and
only one right answer to the question of how we should live:
and that those in charge know what it is. Everyone must accept,
conform and obey; failure to accept and obey carried very
weighty punishments for most of history, the death penalty not
the worst of them.1 In contrast, the Enlightenment pointed to
the existence of great diversity and plurality in human nature
and talent, which shows that there are many more ways than
one of making and living good lives.
The freedom to make choices consonant with one’s own
talents is indeed a precondition of good lives; and this freedom
in turn requires freedom to think and act. Hence Kant’s famous
remark about Aufklärung, ‘enlightenment’, which incorporates
both developments: ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from
his self-­imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use
one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This
immaturity is self-­imposed if its cause lies not in lack of under-
standing but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own
mind without another’s guidance. Sapere aude (dare to know)!
“Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore
the motto of the enlightenment. Nothing is required for this
enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

the least harmful of all, namely the freedom to use reason

publicly in all matters. But on all sides I hear: “Do not argue!”
The officer says, “Do not argue, drill!” The tax man says, “Do
not argue, pay!” The pastor says, “Do not argue, believe!” . . .
We find restrictions on freedom everywhere. I reply: The public
use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring
enlightenment to mankind.’2
Kant’s own views on friendship underwent development as
his philosophical position became more elaborate and fully
worked out. In his early lectures on ethics (which consist of
edited versions of his students’ lecture notes) he regarded it as
problematic to define friendship as arising from a concern to
promote the happiness of others out of a general love for
mankind, which is what morality asks of us. This is because
‘anthropology’ (meaning observation of human nature) does
not suggest that human beings are naturally predisposed to
‘confidence, cordial well-­wishing and friendship’, given that the
primary motivation driving action is self-­love, understood as
the overriding interest in promoting one’s own happiness.3 So
there appears to be a conflict. But Kant says that genuine
friendship resolves the conflict by its mutuality: each will be
interested in the other’s happiness, each will nurture the other’s
welfare; ‘the happiness of each is promoted by the generosity of
others, and this is the Idea [sic, with a Platonic capital ‘I’]
of friendship, where self-­love is swallowed up in the idea of
generous mutual love.’4
But this is an idealisation, and in practice one cannot always
rely on others to compensate for the neglect of one’s own
interests implicit in devotion to the interests of others. The
ideal says this is how it should work, and the ideal is ‘true and

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 Ideas

necessary’ and it is what we ought to do from a moral point of

view, even if from a ‘natural’ point of view it must be accepted
that we will not do it. But we posit the ideal to ourselves
because it is what gives us our sense of mankind’s value.5 There
is a prefiguring here of the notion, fully developed in the
‘Critical Philosophy’ of Kant’s later works, that we must make
use of certain concepts in order to key a region of thought – for
example, we must take it that we have a metaphysically free
will, even though our empirical will is trapped in the mesh of
causality, because otherwise we cannot make sense of moral
agency and responsibility. The idea that the unattainable ‘Idea’
of friendship as complete mutuality of interest which trumps
self-­interest plays just such a role.
In these earlier thoughts on friendship Kant followed the
Aristotelian division of kinds of friendship into those of need,
taste and disposition. The first occurs when the parties ‘entrust
each other with reciprocal concern’.6 The second is premised
on the mutual pleasure taken in the association, and is typically
expressed in courtesy or good manners; moreover it is more
likely that the parties are attracted to each other more by their
differences than by any similarities between them.7
The third kind of friendship is the highest, because it
consists in a ‘pure sincere disposition’ of each towards the
other. It rests on free and open-­hearted communion, self-­
revelation and acceptance; each thereby has a friend ‘in whom
he can confide, and to whom he can pour out all his views and
opinions; from whom he cannot and need not hide anything –
with whom, in short, he is able to communicate fully’.8
In the later lectures on ethics Kant adds the idea that friend-
ship requires equality in almost all respects, since without it

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

there will be an aspect of the superior doing the inferior a

favour by means of their friendship. But there is one respect in
which there does not have to be equality, and that is in the
degree to which one feels well-­wishing love towards others. It
does not have to be reciprocated, Kant says, because if recipro-
cation were necessary then it would not be possible for anyone
to have a well-­wishing attitude to mankind in general. However,
when well-­wishing is reciprocated by another person, the rela-
tionship turns into friendship; this is amor bilateralis.9
Kant’s finished theory of friendship is found in his Metaphysic
of Morals.10 His definition of the ‘general idea’ of friendship is
‘the union of two persons through equal mutual love and
respect’. Love and respect operate differently in this union; love
draws the two together, respect pushes them apart because by
its nature it consists in there being a proper distance between
them. ‘This limitation upon intimacy,’ he says, ‘is expressed in
the rule that even the best of friends should not make them-
selves too familiar with each other.’11 As a result, true friendship
is very hard to achieve; Kant quotes Aristotle’s remark made
in service of the same point: ‘Friends, there is no such thing
as a friend!’ But it is ‘a duty set by reason’ to strive towards
such friendship nonetheless. Kant’s ethics in general is founded
on the notion that duty – not inclination or affection or
sentiment – is the sole ground of what is truly moral. In line
with this austere deontology, he says that although the emotions
engaged in friendship make it ‘tender’ they cannot be the
ground for it, because they are too easily disrupted; the mutual
liking and self-­surrender have to be ‘subjected to principles or
rules preventing excessive familiarity and limiting mutual love
by the requirement of respect’.12 This requirement even qualifies

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 Ideas

how far the friends should go in the mutual disclosures of their

confidential thoughts and feelings.13
‘True friendship’ – our ‘no true Scotsman’ is present
again – is wearing a very stiff-­collared Prussian uniform here,
as does all of Kant’s unbending ethics of duty. Elsewhere Kant
says that one is not being moral if one plays with one’s children
out of affection or kindness, but only if one is doing it out of
parental duty.14 These are not very sympathetic views. Some
have located their source in the strict and puritanical Pietistic
version of Christianity in which Kant was brought up, though
he was not a practising Pietist (or any kind of Christian, for
that matter) in adult life; but a sense of unyielding duty can
survive its origins.
A more likely reason, or pair of reasons, is that he disagreed
with two fundamental tenets of David Hume’s philosophy, one
being that only emotion can be an impulse to action; the other
being that our moral valuations spring from our emotional
reactions, not from an objective source outside us.
On the first point Hume thought that if our ‘passions’ (our
emotions) did not impel us to act, we never would, because no
reason for doing something would ever seem compelling enough
to override the opposing reason for not doing it. If we rely on
reason to motivate us we would be in the position of Buridan’s
ass, which, standing between two bales of hay, died of starva-
tion because it had no better reason to eat one than the other.15
The second point, relating to Hume’s subjectivism regarding
morals, is one’s reaction to the loss of a law-­giver as provided
by religious tradition in the form of a suitably conceived deity.
If moral principles and rules are not handed down from the sky,
then what is the justification for saying that we must abide by

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

them? Hume’s optimistic answer is that the innate benevolence

of human nature provides us with our morality. Kant could not
agree, and sought the required objectivity in the rule of reason:
the right thing to do is what reason tells us is the duty of anyone
similarly placed.16
A less exigent view of the work done by reason in thinking
about such ethical goods as friendship would allow it to recog-
nise the importance – indeed the fundamental importance – of
emotion in life. This is true of the emotions’ role not just in our
relationships, and in giving meaning, colour and flavour to our
experiences, but even in our reasoning itself; as empirical work
in psychology shows, emotionless reasoners are not good
reasoners.17

The Enlightenment elsewhere has much less austere, far more

human accounts to give of friendship. Voltaire’s Candide might
be a satire on the Leibnizian belief that this is the best of
all possible worlds, but it is also an extended celebration of
a variety of friendships, which Candide – by nature as by
name – is so well disposed to form and maintain. The group of
friends end up happily tending a garden in Istanbul after all
their adventures, during which they stick together despite
differences and difficulties. It is always interesting to inspect
whether creators of fictional good companions had the capacity
to be so themselves, and the thought occurs with Voltaire.
People like Voltaire might lose as many friends as they make
because of a too acidulous wit, but in his case there are proofs
of high ability in this field; his friendship with Emilie du
Châtelet was more than a ‘mere’ friendship for a time, but what
principally underlay it was a meeting of minds and interests, an

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intellectual equality more powerful and interesting than

anything else that could bind them together.18
There is no more direct statement of Voltaire’s views on
friendship than his poem ‘The Temple of Friendship’. He imag-
ines a plain little temple in a woodland retreat, dedicated to
Friendship, where ‘truth, simplicity and nature reign’. Few
worship there, however, because hypocrisy, rivalry, betrayal,
selfish ambition, petty differences that grow to great divisions,
and envy destroy any chance people have of winning the prize
that Friendship offers. What friendship is, then, is the reverse of
these things: sincerity, co-­operation, trust, concern for the
other’s interests, tolerance, mutual admiration and respect.
In his Philosophical Dictionary he writes,

Friendship is the marriage of the soul; and this marriage is

subject to divorce. It is a tacit contract between two sensitive
and virtuous persons. I say “sensitive,” because a monk, a
recluse can be not wicked and live without knowing what
friendship is. I say “virtuous,” because the wicked have only
accomplices; voluptuaries have companions in debauch, self-­
seekers have partners, politicians get partisans; the generality
of idle men have attachments; princes have courtiers; virtuous
men alone have friends.

Not a great deal separates Voltaire’s view of friendship from

that of Cicero (in the Philosophical Dictionary entry he points
out that Cicero had a friend – Atticus – which meant he was a
virtuous man), and from Aristotle’s view his own differs prin-
cipally in not idealising friendship beyond the reach of most if

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not all people. But this difference is crucial. To take friendship

out of the realm of idealisation into moral reality does it a
service, something that arguably Kant fails to do.
Recognition of the difference between the contexts for
discussing friendship in classical antiquity and the emerging
industrial and commercial world of the eighteenth century
helps to explain Adam Smith’s views.19 For him the resources
for understanding personal relationships principally lie in facts
about social organisation. Pastoral societies require extended
families to stay together for ‘common defence’, whereas in
commercial society where the rule of law will protect the least
individual in the state, families disperse as each member seeks
opportunities wherever his interests or talents take him.20 Social
relations therefore become more voluntary, and friendship
emerges from the innate propensity people have to ‘truck,
barter and exchange’.21 A similar idea occurs in Hume, who in
an essay on trade remarks how commerce expands markets and
trading activities, and therefore the range of acquaintances and
friends that people acquire.22 Commentators on both Smith
and Hume notice the idea in both of ‘cool’ friendship – not in
the sense of calculating, indifferent friendship, but neither – at
the other end of the spectrum – the intense and personal bond
to which the parties are happy to apply the term ‘love’, as in
Montaigne’s amazing mutuality, but something in between –
something more like the respectful attachment that Kant, were
he less formulaic, might applaud.
Two key Enlightenment ideas expressed in the views of
Smith and Hume are progress and cosmopolitanism, and the
latter partly helps to explain the idea of ‘cool friendship’: in a
bigger and more diverse world the interactions of individuals

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who are no longer embedded in tight webs of family and

community relationships – in village life, as Smith himself put
it – might easily have a more transient and superficial quality.
Another, connected, part of the explanation for this lies in the
impersonal operation of markets and the increasing size of
towns and cities where relationships are harder to form.
But this did not mean for Smith that friendship is doomed
to become ever more instrumental and utilitarian, and more
conditional on whether it is successfully both. On the contrary,
he thought that once individuals escape from the obligation-­
imposing web of relationships which traditional societies throw
around them, their friendships come to be more open, more
freely chosen, based on sympathy and similarity of interests
rather than instrumental necessity or prior commitment.23 If
that is the trade-­off for the loss of traditional ties, themselves
not always salutary, it looks like a good bargain.
Smith thought that commerce has a positive effect both on
people and their relationships because it makes them more trust-
worthy and punctual, at very least in their business dealings,
because it is in their own interests to be so. But he had a worry
too, which was that the new deracinated urban experience and
the new patterns of working life could have ill effects, especially
on morals and education, and on relationships themselves. He
wrote that a man might have a character to lose in his country
village because his behaviour would be constantly observed
there, so he would have to mind himself; ‘but as soon as he
comes to a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His
conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is there-
fore likely to neglect himself, and to abandon himself to every
low profligacy and vice.’24 The remedy he suggested was that

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people should join a church so that others could help by keeping

a watch on them. There is something bleakly Scottish and
Presbyterian about this prescription, as there is in the pessimistic
view of human nature that makes the solitary newcomer to
town an inevitable catch for vice.
A man plays the part of a friend, says Smith, when he is
generous from worthy motives, and thereby earns the good
opinion of those he has treated well. To be ‘in friendship and
harmony with all mankind’ as a result of deserving the favourable
estimation of others is to be happy and at peace with oneself.25
This, note, is a ‘friendship to all’; the satisfactions that earlier
theorists of friendship wished to achieve through more personal
and intimate bonds Smith implies we can have in a tempered
version of agape. No doubt, though, this way of being a friend
also works at the personal level. Properly motivated generosity, if
reciprocal, and reciprocally prompting ‘favourable estimation’,
would be just the kind of cool friendship already described.
The idea of ‘cool friendship’ needs qualification in the case
of Hume, though. He was famous for his sociability, nick-
named ‘le bon David’ because of it; is that the extent of what
he too meant? It would not seem so. ‘Nothing touches a man of
humanity more,’ he wrote, ‘than any instance of extraordinary
delicacy in love or friendship, where a person is attentive to the
smallest concerns of his friend, and is willing to sacrifice to
them the most considerable interest of his own.’26 Hume was an
admirer of Cicero, and the idea of a ‘man of humanity’ is a
Ciceronian version of the classical ideal of friendship.
A salient implication of these conceptions of friendship
is that they are recognisably humanist in the contemporary
meaning of the term, in the broad sense that they start from

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practical concerns of real people – not ideally virtuous or spir-

itually elevated agents – in the real circumstances of life, not in
equally idealised circumstances where the cultivation of lofty
virtues and the development of refined friendships can take
precedence over the avocations of normal life.
Likewise the morality associated with these conceptions is
secular and immanent, which is to say, humanistic too; this idea
of a genuinely moral person is articulated by Henry Fielding –
the morality of good-­heartedness embodied in the characters of
Tom Jones and Parson Adams. Tom, Fielding writes, had ‘a kind
and benevolent Disposition, which is gratified by contributing to
the Happiness of others’.27 The point is not to be morally
perfect, but morally good. Tom has faults, of course, but as Mrs
Miller tells Squire Allworthy (whose own name indicates a
Fieldingesque ethical standing) even if Tom does not overcome
them in time, ‘they are vastly over-­balanced by one of the most
humane tender honest Hearts that ever Man was blest with’.28
One of several implications is that such a person would be a
good friend indeed, and two such people in relation would
between them create a friendship such as friendship ought to be.
Good-­heartedness is, of course, a close cousin of benevo-
lentia; as this shows, the ancients and moderns do not differ by
much in identifying the qualities indispensable to the possibility
of friendship.

At the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth

century – as it were with a combination of Enlightenment
licence and Romantic zeal despite the sharp opposition of these
outlooks, but with more of the latter so that one thinks of him
as one of the first English Romantics – stands the extraordinary

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figure of William Godwin. No one has anatomised him and the

impracticalities of his thought better than William Hazlitt, who
knew him from childhood upwards and was much helped by
Godwin’s childlike benevolence. Hazlitt thought that Godwin
had put morality above the reach of ordinary people by
demanding ‘universal benevolence’ and a utopian dispensation
as the theatre of its operation.29 But there is more to Godwin
than that, as his essay ‘Of Love and Friendship’ shows.30
Right at the beginning Godwin denies that equality is essen-
tial between friends. ‘Who is it that says, “There is no love
among equals?” Be it who it may, it is a saying universally
known, and that is in every one’s mouth. The contrary is
precisely the truth, and is the great secret of every thing that is
admirable in our moral nature.’31 Love – of every kind: not just
romantic or sexual love, but strong affection felt for another, as
happens in friendship too – is not a ‘calm, tranquil, and as it
were half-­pronounced feeling, but a passion of the mind’. It is
not mere approbation of others, the kind of positive feeling one
might have for acquaintances or clients, but a sentiment ‘where-
in the person in whom it resides most strongly sympathises
with the joys and sorrows of another, desires his gratification,
hopes for his welfare, and shrinks from the anticipation of his
being injured; in a word, is the sentiment which has most of the
spirit of sacrifice in it, and prepares the person in whom it
dwells, to postpone his own advantage to the advantage of him
who is the object of it’.32
Essential to this feeling is imagination. The cold light of
scientific measurement, where everything is understood and
reduced to a rule, is inimical to love, for the good reason that to
love is to think of what is more absent than present, of things

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 Ideas

unseen rather than seen, of the future or the past rather than
the present moment. ‘Sentiment is nothing, till you have arrived
at a mystery and a veil, something that is seen obscurely, that is
just hinted at in the distance, that has neither certain colour nor
outline, but that is left for the mind to fill up according to its
pleasure and in the best manner it is able.’33
For Godwin the ‘great model’ of love in human beings is the
‘sentiment which subsists between parents and children’, and
the charms even of sexual attraction and what Milton calls ‘the
rites mysterious of connubial love’ are a function, Godwin
claims, of the hope that they will produce offspring. Much of
the essay is taken up with an examination of how the emotion
of love is most fully expressed in this relationship. Given his
view that love springs from ‘the conscious feeling of the
protector and the protected’, and that it needs to be acted
on – ‘Our passions cannot subsist in lazy indolence; passion
and action must operate on each other; passion must produce
action, and action give strength to the tide of passion’ – it is
entirely natural to see the parent–child relationship as paradig-
matic.34 It is a view which does him warm credit, but it is
implausible; by any standards the love of parents for children
and its reciprocal are two very different kinds of feeling, and
each is different again from the several other kinds of love there
are. Godwin ignores the distinctions drawn by the Greeks
between agape, eros, ludus, storge, pragma – respectively love
for one’s fellow humans, erotic love, playful love, companionate
love, pragmatic love – and the combinations and different
strengths of mixtures of these and perhaps yet others.
For our purposes the thesis is interesting when Godwin
applies it to friendship as such. There too we find inequality the

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‘inseparable attendant’ of perfect ties of affection.35 He cites as

the most celebrated instances of friendships those between
Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Aeneas and Achates,
Cyrus and Araspes, Alexander and Hephaestion, and Scipio and
Laelius. The parties to these relationships are, respectively, ‘the
true hero, the man of lofty ambition, the magnificent personage
in whom is concentrated every thing that the historian or the
poet was able to realise of excellence’, on the one hand, and on
the other ‘the modest and unpretending individual in whom his
confidence reposed’.36 As Godwin sees it, the ‘grand secret’ of
friendship is thereby revealed. It is that it consists in the repose
of the loftier soul, its unbending or relaxation into the confi-
dence and love of the inferior party. The greater party wishes to
set aside the burden of greatness for a while, and be himself,
relating to someone else ‘as a man merely to a man’. He wishes
to be sure that he is not being accosted with insincerity, flattered,
adulated, fawned upon for gain or interest. ‘What he seeks for,
is a true friend, a being who sincerely loves, one who is attached
to him, not for the accidents that attend him, but for what most
strictly belongs to him, and of which he cannot be divested. In
this friend there is neither interested intention nor rivalry.’37
But the inequality must not be too large; the inferior has to
be able to comprehend the qualities of the superior, they must
be able to discuss, to share attitudes and feelings about things,
there must be confidence and trust between them; it will seem
as if perfect equality subsists between them in their interaction,
and this is premised on the understanding by both that

[t]here is in either party a perfect reliance, an idea of

inequality with the most entire assurance that it can never

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operate unworthily in the stronger party, or produce insin-

cerity or servility in the weaker. There will in reality always
be some reserve, some shadow of fear between equals, which
in the friendship of unequals, if happily assorted, can find no
place. There is a pouring out of the heart on the one side, and
a cordial acceptance on the other, which words are inade-
quate to describe.38

Godwin is in one sense assuredly right in his analysis of the

friendships he cites; they were indeed friendships between
unequals; and in speaking exclusively of masculine friendships
Godwin is making his analysis turn on examples that could
only plausibly be masculine, even if there are relationships
between women that have the same inequality. But arguably the
inequality upon which Godwin focuses existed only in respect
of an external and perhaps superficial ranking of who and
what the men in his examples were. In the inner sanctum of
these relationships there had to be equality of a different and in
the end more fundamental sort – something indeed implicitly
acknowledged by Godwin himself in saying that the ‘greater’ of
the two needs a friend so that he can lay down the incum-
brances of station and be ‘merely as man to man’. (And this is,
very persuasively, what one would take to be the case in friend-
ships between women: that setting aside differences in status or
station would be precisely what allows the commonalities of
female experience to make and sustain the friendship that
ensues.) More to the point, the confidences and mutual under-
standing, the trust and shared knowledge and insight, without
which there could be no possibility of communion between

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friends, require equalities of mind and character that are inde-

pendent of social status or reputation.
Another implicit acknowledgement of this point, incon-
sistent with Godwin’s main thesis, lies in his closing remarks,
where he revisits the essential role of imagination in ties of
affection. He there says,

each party must feel that it stands in need of the other, and
without the other cannot be complete; each party must be
alike conscious of the power of receiving and conferring
benefit; and there must be the anticipation of a distant
future, that may every day enhance the good to be imparted
and enjoyed, and cause the individuals thus united perpetu-
ally to become more sensible of the fortunate event which
gave them to each other, and has thus entailed upon each a
thousand advantages in which they could otherwise never
have shared.39

It is hard to see this excellent description of what friendship

requires of friends in any light other than that of equality, at
least of an inward equality, which could alone make it possible.
And yet some of the examples we see in literature and
legend have just the shape that Godwin argues is the right one
for love in general and friendship in particular; not least the
friendship of Achilles and his ‘squire’ Patroclus, described in
the next chapter.

In the nineteenth century the theme of friendship takes a twist

as a result of what in my opinion is a hitherto largely unnoticed

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 Ideas

connection: that as the European empires grew and came

increasingly into conflict, leading directly and otherwise to the
debacles of the twentieth century, the professionalisation of
military and imperial service reawoke idealisations of Spartan
hardiness and Roman Republican virtues, and with them the
kind of men needed for demanding times – men, note: though
some grand ladies of Rome are mentioned, and those Greek
mothers who robustly told their sons to ‘come home with their
shields or on them’, that is, victorious or dead. These trends
have of course been noticed; what have been unnoticed are the
models and examples cited in educating boys – specifically
boys – destined to become District Commissioners in the jungle
and cavalry officers at the head of a troop, in the duties of
national and personal loyalty.
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, creating the Europe of
nations which set the disastrous course towards nationalism and
its discontents from which we still suffer, eventually required us
to become patriots, as the Romans were. And therefore genera-
tions of schoolboys were made to read (in Latin) about Mucius
Scaevola putting his right hand into the flames to show that no
matter how much Lars Porsena of Clusium tortured him, he
would never betray Rome. We know with Dr Johnson that patri-
otism is the ‘last refuge of the scoundrel’, but we still feel a tear
welling up at dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, so thorough
has the unconscious indoctrination been.
Tucked inside these confected sentiments, in novel after
nineteenth-­century novel of schooldays and imperial adven-
tures and soldiering, and in cheap popular fiction about lads on
the loose (forgotten now because not literary enough), are what
in their own right are better matters: more and less direct, more

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and less po-­faced and upstanding, dissertations on the ethos of

friendship required for these Spartan and Roman Republican
virtues. Examples are the two picaresque novels by Pierce Egan,
Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry
Hawthorn, Esq. and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accom-
panied by Bob Logic, The Oxonian, in their Rambles and
Sprees through the Metropolis (1820–21) and its sequel, The
Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic in their
Pursuits through Life in and out of London (1827–28); Edward
Bulwer-­Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830), William Harrison
Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), Thomas Hughes’ Tom
Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Tom Brown at Oxford’ (1861),
Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), the friendships in Dickens and
Trollope, the virile comradeships in Buchan and Henty – the
reading list is long, and to be complete it would have to include
its tail reaching into the twentieth century to which – to cite a
perhaps unexpected example – the Western (‘cowboy’) novel’s
trope of the hero and his sidekick belongs.40
Egan’s trio of friends are rich and free to enjoy themselves,
constituting a model for aspiring contemporaries and youths;
the first of the two novels was a best-­seller. Bulwer-­Lytton’s
cheerful highwaymen heroes, Paul Clifford, Long Ned and
Augustus Tomlinson, are three musketeers, though he himself
likens them to Robin Hood’s band. The group of men associ-
ated with Jack Sheppard are Jonathan Wild (these two are
named for historical figures in the Newgate Calendar of crimi-
nals), Blueskin and Darrell, and between them they illustra-
tively play out the nexuses of betrayal and loyalty around which
nineteenth-­century discussions of the hardy Roman-­style
concept of friendship revolved.41

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 Ideas

Male friendship in the nineteenth century was the key to

acceptance into masculine status by peers. Becoming a man lay
in the gift of one’s male friends after the cursus honorarium of
life in boarding school or apprenticeship (both of which started
very young); these all-­male environments and their codes were
formative, so it is inevitable that, in the way of those uncon-
scious, undirected developments that so often look like conspir-
acies, a literature of direction should emerge, extolling the
virtues (vir, remember, means ‘man’ in the sense of ‘male’, not
‘humankind’) required for, and warning against the vices
attendant upon, masculine life.
Scarcely any discussion of male friendship in this or any
period escapes speculation about the degree to which homo­
sociality is in practice or in latency a form of homosexuality.
Academic literary criticism naturally and inevitably pounces on
the question, because anyone thinking about these matters natu-
rally enough finds it hard to imagine psychological intimacy
without the possibility that it might spill into physical intimacy.
Of course, in the practice of our own lives we find little difficulty
in resisting such spillage; it does not even seem to require resist-
ance, for it is harder to cross the boundary between psycholog-
ical and fuller forms of physical connection than otherwise. But
presented with closeness between two people of any permuta-
tion of sexes, we automatically begin to wonder.
In the case of all-­male upbringings in boarding schools or
apprenticeships, and especially in the former, there is an insti-
tutional recognition that adolescent homosexuality occurs
because of the unavailability of other outlets for the effect of
raging hormones. As with homosexual practices in prisons, it is
more often than not ‘situational’ and opportunistic (in America

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

the phrase is ‘gay for the stay’). The institutional recognition

takes two forms: severe punishment if discovered, as a deter-
rent, and/or relentless scheduling from rising bell to lights out,
filled with vigorous sports that leave no energy for sex.
It was a problem especially for the educational tradition that
encouraged youths to take classical heroes as their models that
there should be any ambiguity attaching to the question of
friendship. In the Victorian public schools and two ancient
universities, an expressly religious ideal of ‘muscular
Christianity’ was proposed, and the propaganda against dero-
gation from it was unequivocal. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays
Thomas Hughes leaves nothing to the imagination about what
side we should be on, talking of a boy of suspect tendencies as
‘one of the miserable pretty white-­handed curly-­headed boys,
petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote
their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad
language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything in
this world and the next’.42 Yet the intense friendships there and
in the sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, are couched in the
language of sentiment and romance; at Oxford Tom makes the
acquaintance of a manly Christian called Hardy, and is soon
‘rapidly falling into friendship with Hardy. He was not bound
hand and foot and carried away captive yet, but he was already
getting deep into the toils.’43
The propaganda designed to deflect attention from paeder-
astia and the sexual side of male friendships in the classical
world was able to take a cue from Plato and generalise it:

That such friendships [as the heroic] in Greece and Rome

existed with perfect purity of thought, and inspired a love of

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 Ideas

fame and noble action, can hardly be doubted . . . the form

that love then so frequently took was in friendship, and there
aroused, as in its highest nature it always must, a desire for
all that is good and honourable in man.44

There is no reason to think that ‘situational homosexuality’

does not occur outside the intense environment of boarding
school, given that almost all societies, even our much more
integrated contemporary Western society, still practise sexual
segregation of the young. But the question is whether these
considerations are pertinent to friendship as such. With what
frequency is it the case that if two men are close friends there is
something more to it than friendship? I address this question at
the end of the next chapter. At this juncture, though, it has to
be said that in the absence of public anxieties about homosexu-
ality, and in line with the Romantic privileging of intense
emotions and sentiment, friendships between men were allowed
to be close and emotional, arm-­in-­arm, full of openly expressed
affection, and absorbing. The best proof of this is the photo-
graphic record, showing men hugging, holding hands, sitting
on one another’s knees for the posed studio shot. Of course
some of the pictures might be of gay couples, but the likelihood
is that most were not; there are far too many of them, the poses
adopted by friends in front of the camera being intended as
visual records and expressions of their bond.45
What, though, is the ideal of friendship being expressed in
these treatments of it? It is a straight reprise not so much of the
classical ideal of the philosophers as of the classical example of
the heroes. In the jungle or on the battlefield, as on the sports
field, your friend is the one who will not let you down. He can be

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

trusted, relied upon. He will do the honourable thing. More, he

will sacrifice himself for you; one recalls Sydney Carton doing a
far, far better thing than he has ever done at the end of A Tale of
Two Cities, and (in real life and death) Captain Oates leaving the
tent in the Antarctic. He will ‘play up and play the game’ where
you are concerned – and this therefore applies to you where he is
concerned. Whatever other differences there are in rank or
station, you are equals as friends. There need be no explicit
contract of loyalty and service, because it is implicit in the very
terms of friendship. If you wish to know how friends behave
towards one another, you go to those classical sources, to the
examples in legend and myth, and you do as friends did there.

As usual, the focus has been exclusively male so far, and that is
because the theatre of friendship in this period was a public,
external or outward one, and women were still enclosed in the
domestic sphere, their relationships within it regarded as
limited and shallow. That nothing could be further from the
truth is obvious in the vastly richer and deeper analysis of rela-
tionships to be found in Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot
and Mrs Gaskell. It takes a single example to illustrate the
point: the friendship between the two Bennet sisters Elizabeth
and Jane in Pride and Prejudice (1813). Contrastingly, Emma
(1816) explores how a woman can fail to be a good friend to
another woman, as Emma’s behaviour towards Harriet Smith
and Miss Bates illustrates, and likewise with the set of contrasts
between Frank Churchill, George Knightley, Mr Elton, Jane
Fairfax, Mr Woodhouse and the rest.
What these novels show is that in Austen’s ethics of friend-
ship, the virtues of loyalty, love, steadfastness, frankness,

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 Ideas

honourable behaviour and truth are the overriding ones; a

friendship is not merely premised upon but constituted of
these, or it is not a friendship. It turns out that this is her ethics
of love too, because she has little time for infatuation as a
substitute; the love tie must be mature, considered and chosen;
in short, marriage is a form of friendship (friendship with the
addition of babies, you might say) and has to achieve that
status at the outset if it is to be achieved at all.
Our own time finds this approach to love, though perhaps
not to friendship, too cold and calculating. Conditioned by
movies and romantic novels we think of ‘relationships’ in two
categories. One is romance, which actually means infatuation,
from which the question of sex is ineliminable, and which is
thought to belong to early adulthood in the period before
marriage (more accurately, a wedding) or a marriage-­like
settling down (more accurately, the decision to move in
together), which is its natural terminus. Here all is intensity
and breathlessness, longing, yearning, heartache and heart-
break, soft-­focus rosy scenes, tenderness, passion, desire,
delight, and the correlative pains when things do not work out.
In this relationship people are besotted by a crystal-­covered
false image of the other, as Stendhal says; they are in love
with love, their bodies are responding to chemical messengers
within and without and not to another human being; sex,
longing and the dream are a thick opaque sheet between the
lovers, who fondly imagine they are closer to each other and
mutually more intimately known and knowing than with
anyone else ever.46
Jane Austen thought infatuation irresponsible, and the
ancient Greeks thought it the cursed mischievousness of Cupid

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 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

with his arrows, against which none, not even the gods them-
selves, are proof.
The other category is marriage or marriage-­like settling-­
down, with children and a mortgage in many cases; and the
discussion of this relates to its challenges and problems, its
failures, how to keep the sex going, how to cope with the infi-
delity that the artificialities of monogamy prompt, and so on.
Here, if one or more of habit, compromise, affection and kind-
ness have not made a peace, all is effort (‘one has to work at a
marriage’) and even struggle, with discussion, emotional nego-
tiations, concessions, silences, quarrels, perhaps marriage
counsellors, too often lawyers – and then perhaps Dr Johnson’s
triumph of hope over experience, though often the second or
subsequent attempts have more of the character Jane Austen
would approve, than the allure of ignorance on whose basis the
first attempt was made.47
Homosexual relationships of the cottaging variety stand,
with certain others, outside these categories, though perhaps
closer to the first; but it is interesting to note how, as this sexu-
ality becomes ever more accepted and mainstream, many gays
themselves wish to conform to the heterosexual norms,
including marriage and family life.48
If nothing else is shown by the modern forms of relationship
that see ‘love and marriage’ as higher goals than friendship,
contrasting with the belief through most of history that frien-
ship is the highest form of human relationship, it is that we
have a less clear idea than our forebears had of what friendship
is. Perhaps this is not just because it is less important than ‘love
and marriage’-type relationships now are; perhaps it is because
it now takes so many more forms.

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4164.indd 120 16/07/13 7:57 PM
 PA R T I I

Legends

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4164.indd 122 16/07/13 7:57 PM
 CHAPTER 7

Excursus: Friendship Illustrated

There have been many references to legendary friendships,

fictional and otherwise, in the foregoing pages. It is of central
interest to know what those who cited them intended to illus-
trate by their means. The assumption made in the references to
them was that if you wish to know what a friend is, what
friendship is, how friends behave towards one another, you go
to the classical examples and learn from them.
The first two examples in the world’s formative literature,
standing as the pillars of the gate into this subject, are Achilles
and Patroclus, and David and Jonathan. Both pairs introduce the
immediate difficulty, discussed more fully at the end of this
chapter, that so many of the classical examples seem to be
homoerotic loves as well as – or differently from? – friendships.
There are very few examples of woman–woman friendships in
this category, or man–woman friendships. In the latter case the
exceedingly few outstanding relationships of the kind that existed
between Pericles and Aspasia also had other dimensions, and

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 Legends

some would doubtless argue that perhaps they were those dimen-
sions more than they were friendships as such; but that would be
to beg the question against the thought that such relationships
could be both friendships and sexual loves, which the characters
and intellects of both Pericles and Aspasia strongly suggest.1
Let us begin with the first of the first: the relationship
between two Greek warriors, one of whom was the beautiful
and all but invincible young hero whose quarrel with
Agamemnon is the starting point for Homer’s Iliad.
Homer does not say that the two were lovers. In fact he
seems to suggest otherwise; in Book IX when the two go to bed
after being visited by Odysseus and Ajax, Achilles sleeps on one
side of an inner room with ‘beside him the daughter of
Phorbas, lovely Diomede, whom he had carried off from
Lesbos’, while Patroclus ‘lay on the other side of the room, and
with him fair Iphis whom Achilles had given him when he took
Scyros the city of Enyeus’.2
This heterosexual arrangement is clear enough. But what
would hearers of the Homeric poems in the ancient Greek
world, and later – after they were collected and written down
at the behest of Peisistratus – their then readers, have assumed
about them? The answer is that they did indeed assume that
they were lovers also; for this we have the authority of Aeschylus
in fragments from his lost play The Myrmidons, Plato in the
Symposium, and Aeschines’ Timarchus among others.3 And
there was a frisson of disapproval about them on the part of
some ancients, because although Achilles was the younger, or
thought to be so – in ancient depictions on vases and the like he
appears without a beard while Patroclus has one – he was
regarded as the lover, playing the part of the erastes, and

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Patroclus the beloved, thus playing the part of the eromenos.

This upsets the right order in several ways: the erastes was
meant to be a bearded man, the eromenos a beardless boy,
usually taken to be between twelve (the lowest legal age for this
in ancient Athens) and about seventeen, when too much body
hair was becoming visible.
Aeschylus is responsible for nominating Achilles as the
erastes, prompting Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium to disagree,
arguing that he must have been the eromenos on the grounds of
his beardlessness. In his own Symposium Xenophon has
Socrates say that Achilles and Patroclus were not lovers, giving
no indication to that effect in the Iliad, to which Aeschines later
responded by saying that any educated person could read
between the lines to see what the true state of affairs was.
It has been pointed out that the tradition of paederastia –
love between men and boys – was of much later date than the
Trojan War period, whenever that date was, in which case there
is considerable anachronism here. If there was no such tradition
at the time, the social superiority of Achilles to Patroclus might
in any case have made its own material difference to who was,
so to speak, on top in this aspect of the relationship if there
were one such. Other scholars, however, say that pederastic
relationships were common and widespread throughout prehis-
torical Europe as an important part of social structure.
Possibly though, the identification of Achilles’ and Patroclus’
respective ages is a mistake; in the scene in Book I where Athena
materialises beside Achilles to prevent him from drawing his
sword on Agamemnon (because of their quarrel over the slave
girl Briseis), Homer describes Achilles’ chest as ‘shaggy’, which
suggests maturity; although he also describes his hair as

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 Legends

‘yellow’, which suggests youth in so far as blond hair tends to

darken with the years.
The evidence either way is not definitive, though the time
and its traditions would make perfectly plausible the claim that
the two were or had been lovers too, or were simply not both-
ered by any supposed difference between the two statuses. But
we are emphatically shown, not just told, how very close they
were as friends: to sleep in the same room each with his own
concubine suggests great mutual ease.
There does however seem to be a good deal of Godwin’s
inequality in the relationship. When the heralds come, in Book
I, to take Briseis away from Achilles for Agamemnon, it is
Patroclus who does his ‘dear friend’s’ bidding to fetch her out
of the tent and hand her over. In Book IX, when Odysseus and
Ajax go to plead with Achilles to rejoin the battle because the
Trojans are gaining the upper hand, Achilles instructs Patroclus
to set out a bowl and mix the wine and water for the guests.
‘Patroclus did as his comrade bade him,’ Homer tells us; and
then Patroclus proceeded to cook dinner for them all, mending
the fire and roasting loin of sheep and goat and ‘the chine of a
fat hog’ on it. Achilles carved and Patroclus handed the meat
round on bread; Achilles then told Patroclus to offer sacrifice to
the gods, after which they all fell to eating.
Despite the best efforts of the visitors to persuade him to
relent, Achilles refused, so after dinner they left. Aged Phoenix
remained to stay the night, so Achilles told Patroclus to arrange
a bed for him. Acting as steward, Patroclus ordered the slaves
to lay out a mattress covered with fine linens for the old man.
All this shows that Patroclus was in a servitor’s role, even
though he is Achilles’ ‘dear friend’, as Homer puts it. The

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 Excursus: Friendship Illustrated

impression of inequality is reinforced in Book XVII when

Patroclus is described as Achilles’ ‘squire’. In Book XI, when
Achilles sees from the stern of his ship how badly the battle is
going for the Greeks, he calls Patroclus and tells him that he
saw old Nestor carrying a wounded man back to camp, and
instructs him to find out who it is. Patroclus runs to ask; Nestor
invites him in but Patroclus says, ‘Noble sir, I may not stay, you
cannot persuade me to come in; he that sent me is not one to be
trifled with . . . I see who has been wounded; I must go back
and tell Achilles, you know what a terrible man he is, and how
ready to blame where no blame should lie.’4 This does not
sound too good; Patroclus is scared of Achilles’ wrath; the rela-
tionship now appears more unequal than even Godwin would
approve.
Nevertheless Patroclus welcomes Nestor’s suggestion that he
should put on Achilles’ armour and lead out the Myrmidons,
and sets off to return. On the way he sees another friend,
Eurypylus, staggering from the battle with an arrow in his thigh,
and stops to help him. He is still with Eurypylus, ‘entertaining
him with his conversation and spreading herbs on his thigh to
ease the pain’, when the Trojans breach the Achaeans’ long wall
and advance towards the ships. Seeing the mortal danger of the
Greek host, Patroclus leaps up; ‘I know you want me now,’ he
says to Eurypylus, ‘but I cannot stay longer, for there is hard
fighting going on; a servant will care for you now. I must hasten
to Achilles, and make him fight if I can; maybe the gods will help
me to persuade him. A man does well to listen to a friend.’5
The Trojans were getting perilously close to setting fire to
the Greek ships when Patroclus ran up to Achilles, weeping for
the fate of his fellows. ‘When Achilles saw him thus weeping he

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 Legends

was sorry for him and said, “Why, Patroclus, do you weep like
a silly child who comes running to its mother and begs to be
taken up and carried?”’ Patroclus answers,

I weep for the disaster that is befalling our Argives; all our
champions are lying wounded at their ships . . . O Achilles –
so inexorable? May it never be my lot to nurse a passion such
as you have done, to the harm of your own good name! Who
in future will speak of you unless you save the Argives now?
You know no pity; Peleus was not your father or Thetis your
mother, but instead the grey sea and the sheer cliffs are your
parents, so cruel and remorseless are you . . . At least send the
Myrmidons with me; let me wear your armour; the Trojans
may mistake me for you and therefore quit the field, giving
the hard-­pressed Achaeans some breathing time.6

Achilles was ‘deeply moved’ by this straight talking, such as

one friend might well address to another. Although unable to
relent in his anger against Agamemnon, he fatefully agreed to
Patroclus’ suggestion. While Patroclus put on the personating
armour Achilles went through the camp rousing his troops. The
Myrmidons then swarmed out of their camp like wasps,
Patroclus calling to them ‘at the top of his voice, ‘“Myrmidons,
followers of Achilles son of Peleus, be men, my friends, fight
with might, that we may win glory for the son of Peleus, who
is far the foremost man at the ships of the Argives – he, and his
fighting followers. . .”’7 The sight of them threw the Trojans
into confusion. They fought hard in retreat; Patroclus drove his
chariot into all the thickest parts of the fighting, cutting off the

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 Excursus: Friendship Illustrated

Trojan battalions as they tried to escape, doing terrible slaughter

among them right up to the walls of Troy, which he would have
attacked had the god Apollo himself not warned him off on the
grounds that it was not his destiny.8
It was also Apollo, carrying out the decrees of fate, who
undid Patroclus after the latter’s mighty acts. He struck
Patroclus a blow on the back, between the shoulder blades, that
dazed him, and before he could clear his head one of the
Trojans thrust a spear into his back, and Hector drove another
into his belly, pulling it out by placing his foot on Patroclus’
chest, and then claiming his armour – the armour of Achilles.9
For the rest of the day the battle raged around Patroclus’
corpse, each side trying to claim the body of ‘the squire of the
fleet son of Peleus’.10
With Patroclus dead the Trojans again began to get the
upper hand. A messenger, Antilochus, was sent to Achilles to
tell him of Patroclus’ death, which however Achilles had
already begun to fear because he could see the Greeks being
driven back towards their ships again.11 Confirmation had the
inevitable effect.

A dark cloud of grief fell upon Achilles as he listened to

Antilochus. He filled both hands with dust from the ground,
and poured it over his head, disfiguring his comely face, and
letting the refuse settle over his shirt so fair and new. He flung
his huge length down at full stretch, and tore his hair with his
hands. The bondswomen whom Achilles and Patroclus had
captured screamed aloud for grief, beating their breasts, their
limbs failing them for sorrow. Antilochus bent over Achilles

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 Legends

the while, weeping and holding both his hands as he lay

groaning, for fear that he might stab himself. Then Achilles
gave a loud cry and his mother heard him as she was sitting
in the depths of the sea at the side of the Old Man her father,
whereon she too screamed, and all the goddess daughters of
Nereus that dwelt at the bottom of the sea came gathering
round her.12

Achilles’ grief is not just for the loss of his friend, but for his
failure in not being by his side to protect him. ‘Said Achilles in
his great grief, “I would die here and now, in that I could not
save my comrade. He has fallen far from home, and in his hour
of need my hand was not there to help him.” ’13
Achilles’ mother, silver-­footed Thetis, arranged to have a
new set of armour made for him by Hephaestus. He had to wait
for it until the next day before he could set out to take revenge
on Hector. But to give the Greeks heart he mounted the defen-
sive trench by the wall, and three times shouted, which sent
panic among the Trojans, and heart into the Greeks, who were
at last able to drive Hector off the body of Patroclus and bring
it back to Achilles.14
All night long the Myrmidons gathered with Achilles around
the bier of Patroclus where it was laid after they had ‘washed
off the clotted gore’. The next day, wearing the beautiful
armour made for him by the god, Achilles went to battle,
killing many and driving the rest behind their city’s walls; and
at last killing Hector himself, whose body, in his grief and rage,
he dishonoured by dragging it three times round the walls of
Troy behind his chariot.15

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That night Patroclus came to him in a dream, saying,

‘Let not my bones be laid apart from yours, Achilles, but with
them; even as we were brought up together in your own
home, what time Menoetius brought me to you as a child
from Opoeis . . . your father Peleus took me into his house,
entreated me kindly, and named me to be your squire; there-
fore let our bones lie together in a single urn, the two-­handled
golden vase given to you by your mother.’ Achilles answered,
‘Why, true heart, I will do all as you ask. Draw closer to me,
let us once more throw our arms around one another, and
find sad comfort in the sharing of our sorrows.’ He opened
his arms towards him as he spoke and would have clasped
him, but there was nothing, and the spirit vanished as a
vapour . . . Achilles sprang to his feet, smote his two hands
together, and made lamentation.16

After the funeral and the games that followed, in which

Achilles gave prizes to the victors, there was a feast, and
everyone went to sleep;

but Achilles still wept for thinking of his dear comrade, and
sleep, before whom all things bow, could take no hold upon
him. He turned this way and that as he yearned after the might
and manfulness of Patroclus; he thought of all they had done
together, and all they had gone through both on the field of
battle and on the waves of the weary sea. As he dwelt on these
things he wept bitterly and lay now on his side, now on his
back, now face downwards, till at last he rose and went out as

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one distraught to wander upon the seashore. Then, when he

saw dawn breaking over beach and sea, he yoked his horses to
his chariot, and bound the body of Hector behind it that he
might drag it about. Thrice did he drag it round the tomb of
Patroclus, and then went back into his tent, leaving the body
on the ground full length and with its face downwards.17

The relationship between Patroclus and Achilles is a

Godwinian friendship, sure enough, in the inequality of status
and station between the two; but contemplating it makes one
think that it is so because of the antecedent condition of the
parties to it in the sense that it is not a friendship because one
of the parties is the natural or social superior of the other, as
Godwin would have it, but rather it is a Godwinian friendship
because one is the natural or social superior of the other.
Achilles was a king, Hamlet was a prince, so Achilles’ relation-
ship with Patroclus, as Hamlet’s with Horatio, as Prince Hal’s
with Falstaff, is conditioned by the antecedent fact of rank.
People do not become friends because one has some form of
superiority over the other, unless it is a friendship instituted
by the inferior for his gain or advancement, which we do not
think is genuine friendship at all; on the contrary, it would
seem that there has to be a sharing of outlook and interests,
and near-­equality of abilities and moral nature, for any two or
more people to bond, sometimes in spite of other reasons –
those selfsame social reasons, and other differences of natural
endowment – that might keep them apart.

The questions that arise with Achilles and Patroclus also arise
with David and Jonathan in the first book of Samuel in the

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Tanach (the work that Christians call the Old Testament).

Biblical stories have an arbitrariness of narrative direction
variously altered, explained, justified and glossed by the conven-
ient interventions of a deity – and the deity’s equally convenient
absences at other times – which masks their oddity. In the
story told in Samuel Book I we have simply to take the following
as background: the first king of united Israel is Saul, who as
a young man had been out looking for his father’s donkeys
one day when Samuel saw him and, prompted by God, chose
him to be king. But God came to regret the choice of Saul
because of his disobedience; ordered to massacre all the
Amalekite men, women, children and livestock, Saul chose
to keep the best livestock and the Amalekite king Agag
alive. When Samuel remonstrated with him on God’s behalf,
Saul had Agag brought to him, and chopped him up into small
pieces.18
This was not enough to reconcile God and Samuel to Saul,
so God sent Samuel to anoint the person whom he had identi-
fied among the sons of Jesse in Bethlehem to be the next king
of Israel. This was David.19 Saul’s abandonment by God
resulted in an evil spirit tormenting him, and he needed
comfort; someone had spotted how well David played the lyre,
and as he was accomplished in other ways too, he was recom-
mended to the king. When David played the lyre it refreshed the
king and the evil spirit left him alone. Saul therefore kept David
with him.20
At that time Israel was at perpetual war with the Philistines,
who had stolen the Ark of the Covenant. As the two armies
were facing one another across a valley between Elah and
Socoh one day, the Philistines’ champion, Goliath the giant,

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issued a challenge to single combat. David responded, and

stepped forward armed only with a sling and five smooth
stones, provoking Goliath’s contempt. He only needed one of
the stones; it sank into the giant’s forehead and killed him.21
While Saul was commending David after this incident,
Saul’s son Jonathan, standing by, seems to have fallen instantly
in love with him. ‘As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul,
the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and
Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took David that
day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then
Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as
his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that
was on him and gave it to David, and his armour, and even his
sword and his bow and his belt.’22
Saul put David in command of his army, and David was
immensely successful. David married Saul’s daughter Michal.
When the women of Israel sang ‘Saul has killed his thousands,
and David his tens of thousands’, jealousy rose in Saul’s breast
against David, and he plotted to put an end to him by sending
him on a dangerous mission: to get a hundred Philistine fore-
skins. David brought back two hundred.23
Saul resolved to have his son Jonathan and his servants kill
David. But because he ‘delighted’ in David, Jonathan warned
him of his danger, and then succeeded in dissuading Saul – but
only temporarily, for soon thereafter Saul himself attempted to
kill David by hurling a spear at him; and when David fled, set
agents to watch his house in order to catch and kill him.24
All this time David benefited from Jonathan’s protection
and help. Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan because
of this:

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You son of a perverse, rebellious woman, do I not know that

you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to
the shame of your mother’s nakedness? For as long as the son
of Jesse lives on the earth, neither you nor your kingdom
shall be established. Therefore send and bring him to me, for
he shall surely die. Then Jonathan answered Saul his father,
‘Why should he be put to death? What has he done?’ But Saul
hurled his spear at him to strike him. So Jonathan knew that
his father was determined to put David to death. And
Jonathan rose from the table in fierce anger and ate no food
the second day of the month, for he was grieved for David,
because his father had disgraced him.25

When the friends met in a secret place soon afterwards ‘they

kissed one another and wept with one another, David weeping
the most. Then Jonathan said to David, “Go in peace, because
we have sworn both of us in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘The
Lord shall be between me and you, and between my offspring
and your offspring, forever.’”’26
Saul and Jonathan died in the wars against the Philistines –
Saul voluntarily, falling on his sword to avoid capture –
prompting a lamentation from David which includes the moving
verses: ‘Jonathan lies slain on your high places; I am distressed
for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to
me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of
women. How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war
perished!’27
The verses are few in which the relationship of Jonathan and
David is described, but a mighty edifice has been erected on

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them. There are immediately recognisable features: one is the

instant liking that Jonathan took to David, exemplifying the
point so frequently made that the affinities of the best kinds of
friendship are natural and spontaneous. Another is the inten-
sity of the bond; it ‘surpasses the love of women’. They kiss and
embrace. Even though Jonathan is a prince, the son of a king,
and David a commoner, it is Jonathan who defers to David,
telling him that he will be at David’s side when the latter rules
over Israel; Jonathan is David’s social superior but inferior in
quality and destiny, which seems to balance out. They were
‘very pleasant’ to each other, they loved each other, and with a
love surpassing that of women: the avowal to that effect is a
passionate one, whether homosocial or homosexual.
The biblical account compresses and distorts time in such a
way that one does not know how much of it the two spent
together, nor their respective ages. They were brothers-­in-­law
as a result of David’s marriage to Jonathan’s sister Michal, and
it is possible to imagine that there were periods of time when
they all lived in the same city, and when the two men went to
war together, before Saul’s jealous madness made David a fugi-
tive. But that is surmise merely, on the basis of the slender
evidence.
On this same slender evidence the debate takes familiar
contours. Rabbinic commentators use it to illustrate the enduring
nature of unselfish love, as contrasted with the inconstancy of
love founded on utility or interest only. Christian writers wish to
see the relationship as platonic, an inevitable choice given that it
belongs to a tradition which sees the overtly erotic Song of
Solomon as an allegory for God’s love of the Church.28 But by
the medieval and Renaissance periods others were thinking

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differently. The openly homosexual love of Edward II and Piers

Gaveston was expressly likened in near-­contemporary accounts
to the love between Jonathan and David and Achilles and
Patroclus.29 In the Annals of Roger of Hoveden the relationship
between Philip II of France and Richard I of England (the
‘Lionheart’) invited the same comparisons in being described
thus: ‘Richard Duke of Aquitaine [later Richard I], the King of
England’s son, stayed with Philip King of France, who so much
honoured him for a long time that they ate at the same table
every day from the same dish, and at night were not in separate
beds. The French king loved him as his own soul, and so much
did they love each other that the King of England was amazed
by it and marvelled at it.’30 This amity did not last; the two went
to war against each other later.
That this was a homosexual affair and not merely an intense
friendship is suggested by Roger’s report, further on in the
Annals, that when Richard was king he was harangued by a
hermit warning him of the punishment suffered by Sodom and
telling him, ‘ “Abstain from what is unlawful, for if you do not,
the vengeance of God will overtake you.” But the King, intent
on the things of this world and not those of God, was not so
readily able to withdraw his mind from unlawful things.’31
Interpretations of the relationship between Jonathan and
David that see it as expressly homoerotic are very naturally
offered by gay men, of course; the beautiful and influential
depictions of David by Donatello and Michelangelo are cases
in point. Their legitimacy has much to do with the fact that
David is described in the Bible as handsome, and it is natural to
think that when physical beauty is part of the reason for one
person’s attraction to another, it adds to the interest of the

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attractor’s personality. Jonathan’s liking for David is instanta-

neous, which is of a piece with the sexually based interest
immediately felt when people are attracted by one another’s
looks in the ordinary course of life.
On the other hand, the Jewish tradition was emphatically
against homosexuality, and the penalties for it were harsh.
David and Jonathan had wives and concubines and children, so
it is perfectly possible that they might both have been straight
men, and the love they felt for each other which ‘surpassed the
love of women’ might have been a purely intellectual and
emotional one – which is to say: friendship as such, friendship
in the most straightforward sense. Or there is yet another inter-
pretation, one that might apply to many non-­sexual close rela-
tionships between men which might have been given physical
expression in more favourable circumstances, but might not
even have been fully realised as sexual by the parties themselves;
and which precisely for that reason were intense, loyal and
consuming, but again amounted to friendships in the simplest
sense of the term even with the unexpressed implications as a
given.

The best-­known story from ancient literature that contains an

account of devoted friendship between women is the Bible’s
Book of Ruth. In its opening chapter it tells of how a widow,
Naomi, whose husband and two sons have died, leaving her
with her daughters-­in-­law, decides to return to her homeland of
Judah, and tells the daughters-­in-­law to go home to their own
families because, being too old, she will have no more sons for
them. ‘Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the
Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your

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dead husbands and to me. May the Lord grant that you will
find peace in the home of another husband. Then she kissed
them goodbye and they wept aloud.’32
One of them, named Orpah, does as she is bidden; the
other, Ruth, ‘clung to her’ and refused to go: ‘Do not urge me
to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you will go I will
go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my
people and your God will be my God. Where you die I will die,
and there will I be buried. May the lord deal with me severely
if even death separates you and me.’33 Things turn out well for
the two women in Judah, where Naomi helps Ruth get a kind
new husband, by whom she has a son, Obed, who is the father
of Jesse, who is the mother of David.
The story is, as usual, multiply appropriated; it is a text for
Jewish converts, which Ruth was, and for lesbians, and for those
who have moral points to make about women or daughters-­
in-­law, and for those who see allegory everywhere. Scholars
point to the possibility of a very late composition of the story,
which has all the marks of a novella perhaps composed in
Hellenistic times.34 The characters’ names have meanings suited
to the story; ‘Naomi’ means ‘gracious one’ but she asks to be
called ‘Mara’ after her bereavements, for it means ‘the bitter
one’. ‘Ruth’ means ‘friend’. The other names work likewise.
This is a story about friendship, straightforwardly so, despite
the best efforts of those who claim that a lesbian relationship is
proved by the fact that the word ‘love’ in ‘Ruth loved Naomi’ is
the same ‘love’ as is used in Genesis in saying ‘Adam loved Eve’
– that is, conjugal or sexual love, ‘how spouses are supposed to
feel for each other’.35 It would be to the good if such an infer-
ence were otherwise supported, but it is not. What the Book of

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Ruth seems to offer is something every bit as good: an example

of friendship across generations, and as it happens across a
cultural divide too, given that Ruth was not Jewish by origin.
Ruth’s reluctance to part from Naomi demonstrates her attach-
ment, but the words of Naomi to her daughters-­in-­law, and the
kissing and weeping that attended them, show the attachment
to be mutual. There is however no discussion of the nature or
source of the feelings involved; they are just there to be taken
for granted.
We are anecdotally familiar with the historical fact, no less
comfortable now for being one, that most women’s lives have
been segregated ones lived mainly in circumscribed domestic
spheres. Within them all their relationships took shape; chiefly
with other women and children, and in more limited and
defined ways with one or a very few men. Anecdote also tells us
that hostilities between women can be bitter, but that the
comradeship of a shared and often difficult lot was a powerful
and strengthening fact too. Ruth and Naomi represent two
women on their own, travelling, having to make their way in
circumstances inimical to independent women – in fact their
salvation lies in Ruth’s being able to remarry. That their society
provided protection for women against being left outside the
ambit of help does it credit, but the better point of the story is
that the friendship of the two women is the basis for over-
coming the difficulty they were in.

A second Homeric pair quoted as a model for friendship is

Diomedes and Sthenelus. Diomedes is a victim of editing; some
say that the account of his prowess and deeds in Books V and
VI of the Iliad was once a separate poem in his honour, and he

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was indeed much cited in ancient times, admired, accorded

eventual divine status, and claimed as the founder of many
cities. But when the poem was edited into the body of the Iliad
he lost the salience it gave him. Even then, he is described there
as second only to Achilles in valour and fighting ability, and
unlike Achilles he retains his nobility of bearing throughout.
He was friendly with Odysseus, like whom he had a sharp
mind, and he was one of those who hid in the belly of the
Wooden Horse to overcome Troy at last.
Diomedes began as one of the Seven Against Thebes, and
was a suitor of beautiful Helen. Her suitors made an arrange-
ment among themselves that whoever won her hand would have
the support and protection of the others should anything
happen. Diomedes was accordingly bound to help Menelaus
after the rape of Helen.
Everywhere there is Diomedes, there is Sthenelus. They were
side by side as two of the Seven Against Thebes, they were both
in the belly of the Wooden Horse. When Diomedes is struck by
an arrow in the shoulder during fierce fighting in Book V of the
Iliad, Sthenelus pulls it out. Afterwards, as two mighty warriors
of the Trojan force are rushing at them, he says to Diomedes,
‘Diomed, son of Tydeus, man after my own heart, let’s get out of
here.’ (Diomedes refuses, on the grounds that he never runs away
from danger.) When Agamemnon criticises the pair, Diomedes
remains calm but Sthenelus gets very cross. In Book IX, addressing
the Greek host which is contemplating packing up and leaving,
Diomedes says that even if the rest of them go, he and Sthenelus
will stay and fight until the towers of Troy fall.
The interest attaching to Diomedes and Sthenelus is that
they figure in the twenty-­second of the Private Orations of

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Themistius, a philosopher and statesman who lived in fourth

century ce Constantinople. The essay, written in Greek , is en­­­
titled ‘On Friendship’. The warrior pair is cited with others,
including Achilles and Patroclus, who are bonded together
because in Themistius’ view they make contrasting pairs.
‘Homer, you know, knew how to depict friendship as well as
war,’ he wrote. ‘He represented Patroclus as Achilles’ friend,
gentle Patroclus and pompous Achilles. He also wrote about
Sthenelus and Diomedes, the latter long-­suffering and the other
unable to bear any insolence.’ Homer gives evidence of this in
Book IV of the Iliad where Agamemnon chides Diomedes and
Sthenelus for not being quicker to join in the battle, as their
fathers would have done. Diomedes is embarrassed by this, and
keeps quiet, but Sthenelus is very annoyed: ‘Don’t lie, son of
Atreus, given that you can speak truth if you want to! We
regard ourselves as better men than our fathers, for we captured
seven-­gated Thebes, though the walls were thicker and our men
fewer in number than when our fathers tried, whereas they died
in that earlier attempt.’ At this Diomedes chides him in his
turn: ‘Diomed looked sternly at him and said, “Hold your
peace, my friend, as I bid you. It is not wrong for Agamemnon
to urge us on, for victory will be to his glory, and defeat to his
shame. Let us ago, and acquit ourselves with valour!”’36
The oration on friendship advises on how to choose a
friend, and how to keep him once got.37 Themistius describes
himself as a devotee of ‘true and sincere friendship’, and would
rather have one such ‘than a Nisean horse, a Celtic hound,
Darius’s gold, the bull in Crete, or Achilles’ shield’.38 He has
therefore given much thought to how one finds really good
friends. ‘And the first thing to say is that we have to give as

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much attention to the matter as we would in choosing a horse

or armour. Is the person we aspire to befriend someone who is
loving to those close to him? How does he treat his parents and
siblings, his relatives? What is known of how he has dealt with
both pleasure and difficulties in life?39
‘Does he love money, does he get jealous? Is he a lover of
fame, and addicted to being first? For if he is not generous, if
he is intolerant of the equality that is essential to friendship, is
he rivalrous, easily irritated and inclined to anger? Such a
person is no candidate for friendship. Nor is he if he is over-­
much given to gambling or some other obsession.40
‘Do not be friends with someone who has too many friends.
It is not possible for large numbers to share sympathies, inter-
ests and tastes in the way that friendship requires. When some
of his friends are delighted by the things that trouble others,
which group will he favour? If one of his friends wishes him to
share his pain, and another wishes him to go feasting with him,
to which of the two will he go?’41
As the example of Diomedes and Sthenelus shows, it is good
if the friends have opposite tendencies in being quick or slow to
anger, energetic or languid in affairs. If these traits are comple-
mentary, the friends will match each other well, and be able to
counterbalance and help each other. ‘Such were the friendships
of the past that won glorious remembrance,’ Themistius says.42
As to keeping a friendship once gained: here too we must
pay as much if not more attention as we would in keeping our
weapons and tools in good order, or our garden. Friendship
needs tending, and care. And when we have made the commit-
ment to be someone’s friend, we must honour it; that is what
friendship is.

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Put aside delay on every front. Share your friend’s sufferings,

be with him during his sleepless nights. Join with him when he
is in danger, incurs expenses, and suffers disgrace. Do not wait
to be invited to join with him. Rush to do it on your own. Keep
anticipating what a given situation means. Try, in response to
each need your friend has, to keep changing the role you play:
play the part of physician when he is ill, of a lawyer when he
is involved in a lawsuit, of an adviser on all occasions, of a
helper when he has come to a decision . . . If fortune advances
you, be sure to take your friend along with you.43

And for our purposes, finally, he urges that friends ‘put aside
rivalry, contentiousness and competitiveness, for friendship is
not found among those who struggle against one another, but
among those who aid one another in struggle’.44

The happiest chance that could befall a friendship, if for some

reason it is not allowed a long and peaceful continuance, is to
be sung by a poet. That is the case of the friendship between
Nisus and Euryalus, Trojans in Aeneas’ band in Italy, who died
together in the course of a courageous military attempt. Theirs
is a perennial in the list of classic friendships, and although it
seems to acknowledge a homoerotic element much more clearly
than in the case of the foregoing male pairs, Virgil is at some
pains to avoid the implication.45
A Trojan band was being held at bay by a Rutulian force, cut
off by it from their leader Aeneas. Two of the Trojans on guard
that night were Nisus, a courageous warrior skilled in the use
of javelin and spear, and Euryalus, ‘than whom none was more

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beautiful among the Aeneadae . . . a boy, whose unshaven face

showed the first bloom of youth’. They loved each other – ‘one
love was theirs’ – and always fought side by side in battle.46 As
they kept watch Nisus was revolving a plan in his mind, to steal
through the sleeping Rutulian camp so that he could get to
Aeneas and tell him of their plight. He told it to Euryalus, who
immediately insisted on going with him. Nisus tried to dissuade
him, saying first that he wanted someone to perform his obse-
quies if he did not make it, and secondly that he did not want
to risk depriving Euryalus’ mother of her son. But Euryalus
would not agree to be left out. So the two went to the leaders
of the group to get their permission, which was willingly given.
As they made their way through the sleeping Rutulians,
silently killing those in their path – Virigil describes the
attendant gore with relish – Euryalus made the fatal mistake of
being attracted by some of the armour available as plunder,
including a glittering helmet. Just as the two were about to slip
away into the safety of the woods beyond the Rutulian camp, a
cavalry patrol was alerted to their presence by the gleam of
Euryalus’ stolen helmet, which he was now wearing.
Nisus had got safely away, but Euryalus, trailing behind
weighed down with his plunder, was caught; and Nisus in a
desperation of anxiety rushed back to help him. He saw that
the Rutulians were about to kill Eurylaus in revenge for their
dead comrades in the camp: ‘truly maddened with fear, Nisus
shouted aloud, unable to hide himself in the dark any longer,
or endure such agony: “On me, Rutulians, turn your steel on
me, me who did the deed! The guilt is all mine, he neither dared
nor had the power; the sky and the all-­knowing stars be
witnesses: he only loved his unfortunate friend too much!”’ But

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it was too late, The powerfully thrust blade of a sword drove

through Euryalus’ white breast, and he ‘rolled over in death,
and the blood flowed down his lovely limbs, and his neck,
drooping, sank on his shoulder, like a bright flower scythed by
the plough, bowing as it dies, or a poppy weighed down by a
chance shower, bending its weary head’.47
All thought of getting to Aeneas forgotten in his grief, Nisus
rushed among the Rutulians who had killed Euryalus, and
revenged himself on as many as he could before their spears
and swords overpowered him. ‘Then, pierced through, he threw
himself on the lifeless body of his friend, and found peace at
last in the calm of death. Happy pair! If my poetry has the
power, while the House of Aeneas lives beside the Capitol’s
immobile stone, and a Roman leader rules the Empire, no day
will raze you from time’s memory.’48
Virgil’s promise has been kept. He first introduced the pair
in the fifth book of the Aeneid, where they compete in the
funeral games instituted by Aeneas for his father Anchises.
Virgil enumerates those who gathered to take part, ‘Nisus and
Euryalus the foremost among them, Euryalus famed for his
beauty, and in the flower of youth, Nisus famed for his devoted
affection for the lad.’49 What happens to them in their running
race is both prophetic and illustrative. Nisus would have won
if he had not slipped in some blood from a sacrificed bull.
Had Nisus not slipped, Euralyus would have come third. But
Nisus quick-­wittedly uses his fall to trip the runner coming
second, enabling Euryalus to win. In the end all three are given
prizes.
Virgil calls the love between Nisus and Euryalus an amor
plus. The intention is to make it seem to be a non-­sexual

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devoted friendship, no doubt in deference to the Roman tradi-

tion that homosexuality in the army was severely frowned on.
Homoeroticism anyway was not regarded as manly, even though
it was tolerated; those who took the passive role in penetrative
encounters were viewed with disfavour.
Nisus and Euryalus are cited among other reasons because
they are a paradigm of a pair whose members are fully prepared
to die for each other, ‘greater love hath no man’ being the theme.
In the statue of them by Jean-­Baptiste Roman in the Louvre,
Nisus is shown protectively kneeling above the dying Euryalus,
holding his hand, even as he looks up at the enemies who are
killing him. One reading of the relationship has it that whereas
in the Greek outlook a friendship between a pair such as Nisus
and Euryalus might develop into a love affair, in Virgil – given
the dignity and high tone of the Aeneid, consistent with the
serious matter of the origins of Rome itself – such bonds move
in the opposite direction, as with Plato; going beyond the carnal
to something more like the spiritual, or at least the ethical.

Amys and Amylion in medieval romance, Enjolras and

Grantaire in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Annibal and Lerac in
Dumas’ La Reine Margot, and many others, are likened to the
mythical princes Orestes and Pylades, who figure in every list
of pairs of heroic friends; and their friendship is sung in
Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and Handel’s pasticcio L’Oreste.
Orestes is he who killed his mother in revenge for her
murder of her husband, his father. The father was Agamemnon,
the mother Clytemnestra, and the story of the House of Atreus’
terrible fate was often told, not least by Aeschylus in the
Oresteia trilogy, as well as in Sophocles’ Orestes, and Euripides’

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Iphigenia in Tauris. It is one of the great soap operas of world

literature: Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia
so that the Greek fleet could sail for Troy; in his ten-­year
absence a resentful Clytemnestra took a lover and with him
plotted Agamemnon’s death; in fulfilling his duty to avenge
his father’s murder, Orestes committed matricide and had to
flee the torments of the Erinyes (the Furies), demon-­deities
whose job it is to punish those who kill their parents. He
was finally freed from this agony by Athena and Apollo, who
had him tried by the first ever sitting of the Court of the
Areopagus in Athens, summoned on purpose for this trial;
which acquitted him.
But the point of interest for lovers of friendships is that
while Agamemnon was at Troy, Clytemnestra and her lover sent
Orestes to live at the court of her relative King Strophus of
Phocis. There he and his cousin Pylades were brought up
together, and they formed a powerful and indissoluble friend-
ship. When Orestes learned of his father’s murder, he was
encouraged in his plan of revenge by Pylades. In the adventures
that followed, Pylades accompanied him everywhere. On one
occasion they attempted to steal a statue of Artemis from
Tauris but were caught and condemned to death; Orestes was
struck mad by the Furies and Pylades nursed him back to sanity,
wiping the foam from his mouth and tending him lovingly. The
priestess of Artemis ordained that one of them had to die, the
other had to take a message back to Greece. Orestes was chosen
to be the messenger, Pylades to die, but Orestes refused,
begging that Pylades be allowed to carry the message and that
he be allowed to die in his place. The priestess turned out to be
none other than Iphigenia, who had survived being sacrificed

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by her father, and she now recognised Orestes, whereupon the

three made their escape together (taking the statue of Artemis
with them).
The Greek writer of the second century ce who speaks of
them as lovers more than friends is Lucian (if attribution to him
of the Erotes, in Latin Amores, is correct).50 In this dialogue the
following account of them is given:

‘Taking with them the god of love as the mediator of their

mutual feelings, they sailed together on the same vessel of life
. . . as soon as they reached Tauris the Fury of mother-­
murderers was there and in the midst of the Taurides struck
Orestes to the ground with madness. Pylades wiped away the
foam and tended his frame, and sheltered him with a fine
well-­woven robe, in this way showing the feelings not only of
a lover but of a father. When it was decreed that one was to
go with a letter to Mycenae and the other to remain and be
killed, each wished to be the one to remain so as to save the
other, saying that he would live on in the continued life of his
friend. And Orestes showed himself almost to be the lover
rather than the beloved, in insisting that Pylades was the
fitter to be the one to carry the letter.’51

Devotion, absolute loyalty, a passionate readiness to die in

the other’s place in order to save him: this combination is the
key trope in these passionate friendships, and even if the occur-
rence of the trope in later literature was strictly homosocial,
appeal to the example of Orestes and Pylades is always intended
to evoke the bond’s unyielding strength.

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The medieval Orestes and Pylades, as noted, were Amys and

Amylion, whose story gripped that period’s imagination so
strongly that it was told and retold, embellished and developed,
in almost all the European traditions and languages including
French, Latin, Norse, Welsh, German and Flemish. In the
English version Amys and Amylion are brought up together,
their passionate friendship forming in their early years before
they are knighted in young adulthood. Various adventures
result in Amylion contracting leprosy in punishment for a
deception he engaged in to save his friend Amys. The two are
told in simultaneous dreams that he can only be cured if he
bathes in the blood of Amys’ children. Amys kills his children
and douses Amylion in their blood: he is cured, and the chil-
dren are miraculously restored to life when this happens.
Thereafter the two live together for the rest of their lives, and
are buried together.
In the development of different versions a considerable
backstory is invented. Amys is ordered to fight a duel, which
Amylion successfully does on his behalf; later, when Amylion
has wandered for three years in his diseased state, destitute and
suffering, the two recognise each other because they each have
one of a pair of matching gold cups. The devices of the plot,
such as this, are predictable ones, the theme of loyalty and
devotion is standard, but was so deeply attractive to its hearers
and readers that the story became a classic.
‘That Amys and Amylion was one of the most famous
stories of friendship in the Middle Ages may seem surprising
now,’ writes Stephen Guy-­Bray, ‘as the poet relates what is, in
effect, the story of a same-­sex marriage and in doing so firmly
subordinates both marriage and reproduction to homosocial

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concerns.’52 This is true in the medieval versions; Victorian

commentary more primly says that the two ‘give up the
remainder of their lives to the cause of charity’.53 Spenser uses
the story, but inversely, so to speak; Guy-­Bray’s study claims
that he uses its tropes to support conventional romance and
marriage. In Spenser’s The Squire of Low Degree Aemylia is
enclosed in a dungeon with a lustful monster, but her virginity
is kept intact because every time the monster ‘burnt in lustful
fire’ an old woman imprisoned with her ‘instead supplied his
bestiall desire’.54 This is not laying down your life for your
friend, but, so to speak, laying down for your friend. The theme
of substitution in this case does not involve the love that the old
woman (‘hag’, as Spenser calls her) and Aemylia bear each
other, or a history of togetherness, so it is not a contribution to
the literature of friendship, only of expediency. For it to be so,
Aemylia would have to think of the ‘hag’ – and vice versa – as
Montaigne thought of de La Boétie: ‘each one gives himself so
wholly to his friend . . . he is sorry that he is not double, triple,
or quadruple, and that he has not several souls and several
wills, to confer them all on this one object’. This adds reci-
procity or mutuality to devotion, absolute loyalty, and a
passionate readiness to die in the other’s place.

These few examples of tales of friendship are the tip of an

iceberg, whether in history, legend or story. Take a random
sampling of each: in history Petronius and Nero, Hereward the
Wake and Martin Lightfoot, Edward II and Piers Gaveston,
Adams and Jefferson; in myth, to those already mentioned add
Theseus and Pirithous, Damon and Pythias, Jason and his
Argonauts, Arthur and Lancelot, Jane Frances de Chantal and

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Francis de Sales; in story – where to start and stop? – Don

Quixote and Sancho Panza, the Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn, Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo,
Miles Standish and John Alden, Jack Aubrey and Stephen
Maturin, Tiberge and Des Grieux, Biddy and Pip, Holmes and
Watson, Ratty and Mole, Biggles, Ginger and Bertie, Fred
Flintstone and Barney Rubble, Harry, Ronald and Hermione –
all three lists can be expanded to the scale of a dictionary, and
not just because we do not quite know where the lines would be
drawn to stop us. Are Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram
friends? Are Cathy and Heathcliff friends? Do lovers and
spouses whether fictional or otherwise fit into these lists, given
that spouses can be enemies and at least some categories of
lovers (O and René, for example) are scarcely friends?
Were the friends in these couples or groups to read the
Hindu text known as The Book of Good Counsels they would
be in agreement with it: ‘That friend is the only true friend who
is near when trouble comes . . . words are wind; deeds prove
promise; he who helps at need is kin’; and again, ‘He who
shares his comrade’s portion, be he beggar, be he lord/Comes
as truly, comes as duly, to the battle as the board/He is friend,
he is kinsman; less would make the name a lie.’55

It is plain common sense to accept that some of the great male

friendships of myth, legend and history were doubtless homo-
sexual loves. This raises interesting questions in thinking about
friendship. To employ the crudest of generalisations and stereo­
types for a moment: are male friendships which are homo-
sexual loves like ordinary male friendships with sex involved, or
are they like female friendships between men? That is, are they

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companionate relationships which are more about doing things

together (as the stereotype depicts male friendships: going to
football matches, helping each other fix the car) than commu-
nicating (as the stereotype depicts women’s friendships: chat-
ting at length about relationships, medical problems, gossip,
the children)? Has the belated and welcome acceptance of
homosexuality in society allowed one aspect of homosexual
experience – the camp aspect: by a long chalk not all gays are
camp – to become more salient as a parody of heterosexual
relationships?
This is a complication in understanding what doubtless
often is, and in the classical past almost certainly was meant to
be, a masculine relationship – whether or not a homosexual
one – in the sense that it did not ape heterosexual relationships
and their associated role behaviours. (In any case these, in
equally welcome ways, are now challenged as part of the
process by which women liberate themselves from imprisoning
stereotypes imposed by patriarchy.) Some homosexual stereo-
types are deliberately and ironically camp, and there is a carry-­
over to relationships where one partner is regarded as the ‘wife’
(in the television sitcom Modern Family this is something of a
running joke about the relationship between Cam and Mitchell,
although the former – played by a straight actor – is clearly the
‘wife’ and the latter – played by a gay actor – is clearly the
‘husband’). In the idealised version of classical homosexuality
the roles of lover and beloved are defined by age and station;
the lover is a man, the beloved a boy; the acceptable form of
sexual congress (intercrural sex, or frottage of the man’s penis
between the boy’s thighs56) tacitly respects the convention of
not turning the boy into a female by playing the passive role in

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full penetration. It was, as noted, a scandal for some ancient

commentators that Achilles, the younger, a practically beard-
less youth, was thought by some to be the lover while Patroclus,
the elder, was the beloved, for this inverted the proper order of
things.
The point of raising these questions is that the idealised
male friendships depicted in myth and legend are hard to
understand if they are not in some sense fully masculine – they
portray comrades in war together, adventuring together, with
wives and families – while yet being loves in the fullest and most
passionate sense, even though not all of them are acknowl-
edged as sexual passions too. What was that relationship like?
Does it belong to a seventh category, different from hetero-
sexual male friendships, male–female non-­sexual friendships,
heterosexual female–female non-­sexual relationships, contem-
porary male homosexual relationships that mimic heterosexual
relationships in partner balance, lesbian relationships, and
standard male–female sexual relationships including marriage?
And yet: these six categories are themselves very far from inter-
nally homogeneous, and they neglect such further boundary-­
blurring phenomena as bisexuality and gender change. (Into
which pigeonhole would one put the friendships between
people one or more of whom used to be of a different sex?)
The more one itemises the permutations, the more one sees
that it is plain silly to think that there are types of friendship
that follow the contours of this stereotype or that. At the
same time, it goes mightily against intuition to say so, because
we are so wedded to our classifications: witness how readily
people accept the caricatures of male and female friendships
given above: men have companionate relationships involving

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activities (going to football matches, helping each other fix the

car), while women have communicative relationships (talking
about relationships, medical problems, the children – as if, in
most societies, the women are not ‘doing’ far more than the
men: in my childhood in Africa it was commonplace to see
women – with babies strapped to their backs – pounding corn,
carrying water, washing clothes in a river, hoeing a maize
patch, while the men sat under a tree flapping idly at flies and
chatting).
It is considerably easier to anatomise friendship into a set of
identifiable patterns in history, when roles were imposed on
people in vastly more rigid ways. The penalties for stepping
outside a social and functional slot were great, and very few were
in a position to do so, not least because their upbringing was
directed at making it impossible to contemplate, even perhaps
to imagine, alternatives. Consider a relatively late example:
the position of young women in late eighteenth-­ and early
nineteenth-­century England, as depicted with such minuteness
in Jane Austen’s novels. The constraints they endured, the
limited expectations they were allowed, seem to us suffocating
now, and were doubtless experienced as such then; but there was
no way out that was not highly fraught. But it makes it easy to
say what external shape relations between people were meant –
more accurately, permitted – to have. Today it is impossible to
attempt classifications of types of friendship by gender, age, or
any other of the lines of demarcation that we now see to be far
too crude to be helpful – even, in fact, to be unhelpful.
But still the thought presses: were those legendary friend-
ships, even when idealised, actually closer to a human norm
that some powerful religious and social traditions had reason to

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oppose? It is sometimes said that the hostility to homosexuality

in the Judaeo-­Christian-­Muslim tradition stems from the expe-
rience of the early Jewish people as herders of sheep and goats.
Their very lives depended on the successful breeding of their
flocks, so misdirection of sperm was a danger. One notes that
in Old Testament morality it does not matter how many
women a man sleeps with or has children by, or whether they
are his wives, concubines or slaves; monogamy and its ills are a
later gift of the deity. But woe to anyone who directs his seed
other than to the womb of a woman. Onan was struck dead for
spilling his on the ground in refusing to raise children to his
dead brother’s name;57 which is therefore as bad as ‘if a man
lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have
committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death;
their blood is upon them’.58 On this logic, masturbation is a
worse crime than rape because at least the latter can result in
pregnancy, which is all that matters.
The suppression of the classical outlook in Europe by an
oriental one – in the form of Christianity – meant that male
friendship had to assume a form, at least outwardly, in which it
was never sexual in expression. As with anything pushed into
hiding, it was more likely to accumulate aberrant margins. It is
tempting to surmise how that affected the nature of the roles
played; in a society where male homosexuality was accepted
and even encouraged, a man need not cease to be one because
he accepted or enjoyed the passive role in penetrative sex. In a
setting where this role is by exclusive definition a female one, a
man who accepts or enjoys playing it has opened himself to
redefinition as – given the subordination of women and the
throwing in of his sexual lot with them – ‘less’ than a man. And

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in the eyes of ‘real’ men, to lose status as male invites contempt,

hatred, and even (given commonplace male anxieties about
sexuality and potency) fear. Yet look at the social setting where
this is not the reflex view: it is hard to see Euryalus or Patroclus
or any other eromenos of legend as less than a ‘real man’ in
whatever macho way, exclusive of sexual behaviour, you care to
mention.

All these examples of friendship can be understood as iterating

the simple thought that friendship embodies not just camara-
derie and enjoyment, which any acquaintances might share, but
a deeper tie with an essentially mutual character, however that
works in practice; it is at least supportive, forgiving, and
durable, when it is at its best.
Durability has two meanings: robustness under pressure,
and survival over a long period. In friendship it is desirable in
both senses, and old friendships might by that very fact be the
best kind; but the ‘long period of time’ sense is not necessary.
Friendships do not fail to count as such because they end; it is
common enough for people who were friends in the fullest and
richest sense to cease to be so after a time, for any number of
reasons, even if they are usually bad ones.
This was the case with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth, whose dozen years of intimacy changed English
poetry, and who fell out at last because of misunderstandings
and hurt feelings rather than any shift in their philosophies.
While their friendship lasted they understood each other’s
genius, and felt the highest mutual respect, as well as real affec-
tion. Even when Coleridge’s gifts were obviously running into
the sands of opium and alcohol, Wordsworth and his family

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continued to house him and encourage him, and Wordsworth

himself continued to hope for Coleridge’s help in the grand
project they had together envisioned: the writing of a monu-
mental philosophical poem.
But Coleridge was an undisciplined addict who preferred to
talk than write, which is harder work by far; and who left too
little of his genius behind him – a few brilliant poems and
poetic fragments, along with sometimes suggestive, sometimes
insightful, but too often disorganised lucubration.
Meanwhile Wordsworth was an increasingly prickly and
self-­important lone male in a household of admiring women
(with consequences Coleridge had foreseen and warned against),
so between the two poets a falling-­out was inevitable. There
later rose from its ashes a thin and faltering acquaintanceship,
from which no flame of their earliest comradeship ever again
flickered.59
Equally productive during the time it lasted was the already
­mentioned brilliant friendship (for this it was, even more than
a love affair) between Voltaire and the remarkable Emilie,
marquise du Châtelet, one of the most unfairly neglected
(because a woman, and an aristocratic one at that) contributors
to the growth of modern science. She translated Newton into
French at her home, the Château de Cirey, and her theoretical
work on the nature of light is seminal.
The relationship of these two brilliant souls was full of fun
and storms, the balance between the two shifting from a
preponderance of the former to the latter as time passed. It was
an erotic comradeship in its first years, and just a comradeship
in its later years; and it was political, not least in the sense that
Emilie protected Voltaire as best she could from the injudi-

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ciousness of some of his writings. But above all it was an intel-

lectual friendship, in which each encouraged the other, directly
and by example, to produce some of their best work.
It was not without escapades, as when Voltaire had to flee
arrest in the middle of the night, or when Emilie paid their
debts by fiddling the lottery and dreaming up tax-­farming
schemes. There is always much to enjoy in the record of sharp
wits and high achievement, especially in uncertain times of the
kind those two free spirits inhabited.60
People most often write about their friends when they have
died, when they have the freedom to say more than they might
in non-­obituary mode. In these writings may be found the
minutiae which lie far below the surface generalities that a
treatise of friendship has to deal in. They are the proof that
friendships might have large structural similarities, sometimes
surprisingly so given other differences that obtain; but that
each is still individual and possibly eccentric.
One has to turn to such accounts to see why and how. There
is a variously striking, moving and delicious collection of such
called The Company They Kept, put together by Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein. Each piece is an obituary reminiscence of
an outstanding individual: Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke,
Robert Lowell on Randall Jarrell, Derek Walcott on Robert
Lowell, Edward Dahlberg on Hart Crane, Robert Oppenheimer
on Albert Einstein, Anna Akhmatova on Modigliani, Saul
Bellow on John Cheever, Joseph Brodsky on Isaiah Berlin,
Tatyana Tolstaya on Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney on Thomas
Flanagan – it is a formidable catalogue. Their variety throws
more light on the diversity and possibilities of friendship than a
treatise like this one can.

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One way they do so is by their generosity. As obituary remi-

niscences (not obituaries as such) they might predictably be
generous: we are mostly wedded to the principle de mortuis nil
nisi bonum after all – ‘of the dead say nothing but good’ – even
if its pieties too often require us to be hypocritical for a time,
and form a barrier to expression of franker, more honest feel-
ings we might have for the deceased. But the sense in these
accounts is not of forced generosity, but of real liking and
respect. Prudence Crowther says of S. J. Perelman: ‘Perelman
was one of those people who make you feel as charming as they
are.’ Derek Walcott told Robert Lowell that he liked the tie he
was wearing: ‘He took it off and gave it to me.’ Jason Epstein
recalls Edmund Wilson’s refusal in old age to accept a hearing
aid, a pacemaker, vaccinations, or Thomas Mann’s meta-
physics. Saul Bellow picks out exactly the right quotation from
John Cheever to illustrate the latter’s purpose: ‘The constants
that I look for,’ Cheever wrote, ‘are a love of light and a deter-
mination to trace some moral chain of being.’ Enrique Krauze
does the same for Octavio Paz, who described women as ‘the
gate of reconciliation with the world’.
Some people have a knack for being loved by the world at
large, and Albert Einstein was one of those. The revolution he
wrought in physics is a giant fact of history, but less well known
is the failure of his final quarter-­century. Robert Oppenheimer
acutely remarks, ‘He had a right to that failure.’ His disap-
pointment largely arose from his inability – despite persistent
efforts – to show that quantum theory, which he had fathered
but deeply disliked, was internally inconsistent.
Darryl Pinckney, in an essay as much about his own first
unsuccessful attempt at life in New York as about his ostensible

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subject, Djuna Barnes, brings the latter into vivid focus in her
old age, in one small cluttered room, struggling with mortality
but still bright-­eyed, like a tiny bird that will not give up the
desire to fly.
Not all the friendships related here would be called such by
observers: Susan Sontag never felt that she liked Paul Goodman
much, but missed him when he died, and Robert Craft’s rela-
tionship with Igor Stravinsky is one that goes as far beyond
friendship as it fails to approach its normal lineaments. But all
this does is to show how variously and strangely people’s lives
become intertwined, so that when the relationship ends – in
these cases because of death, that absurd and imponderable
interruption of so much creativity and intelligence – there is at
very least regret, and a large preparedness to understand.61
There should be more such books. For as one says: one
could go on. There is the Bloomsbury Group, the friendships
among the members of which were creative, not least in giving
scope for what has been called ‘the higher bitchery’ too. They
– an extended list would include Virginia Woolf and her sister
Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, at a pinch
John Maynard Keynes, and other lesser lights – were inspired
by G. E. Moore’s view in Principia Ethica that the highest
values, the ones chiefly worth pursuing and realising in life, are
beauty and friendship; so they economised by having beautiful
friends. Before and after them other groups of friends likewise
made coteries of creativity – the Shelleys and Byron in Italy,
Picasso, Braque and Apollinaire in Paris at the beginning of the
twentieth century, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred
Owen recuperating at Craiglockhart in 1917, the Algonquin
round table in New York, the Toynbee–Nicolson lunch club in

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1950s’ London: one could accumulate many instances. Not

every member of such groups produced work of lasting value,
but if one or some did it was in part because of the materials
provided and the encouragement given by being among friends.
In such cases friends are the interlocuteurs valables who provide
the safe ground for trying things out, the first audience and
critics, the refuge from failure.
Coleridge and Wordsworth provide examples of two people
of high talent fostering each other’s early abilities. Another
example is the pairing of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, without
whom there would not be The Waste Land we have. Less well
known is the fact that George Eliot only wrote fiction in the
twenty years she and G. H. Lewes lived together. Lewes was a
philosopher and biographer of real talent – his Life of Goethe
has yet to be bettered, and his Biographical History of
Philosophy was an inspiration to the present writer at school.
Eliot read to him every evening what she had written in the day;
he was her sounding-­board. When he died she ceased to write
fiction, no longer having the safe ear of such a friend.
Were Dr Johnson and Boswell friends? They were very
unequal in character, age and outlook, but there is something
Godwinian in the need that Johnson seemed to have for his
otherwise irritating and inquisitive little companion, who
devoted his time to whoring and – only a little differently by
choice of organ – poking his nose into other people’s business.
He went, for example, to snuffle around Hume as the latter lay
on his deathbed, to see how an atheist faces extinction. But he
might have played a friend’s role to Johnson in life as he has
certainly played one for Johnson’s reputation ever since. Friends
tell each other about their lives, feelings, anxieties and hopes; in

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this respect they do the service of the confessional; to talk to a

biographer might well feel like that. And so friendship would
enter, if by another window.

What more lyrical lament is there for a lost friend than

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H.62 The friend was Arthur
Henry Hallam, whom Tennyson met when they were under-
graduates together at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hallam was
a poet himself, and a friend of Gladstone, with whom he had
been at Eton. When he and Tennyson met they fell instantly
and deeply into friendship, like Jonathan and David. The tie
between them was strengthened when Hallam fell in love with
Tennyson’s sister Emily, and the two planned to become
engaged. The death of his father meant that Tennyson had to
leave Cambridge, and he also needed Hallam’s help with the
publication of his first two volumes of poetry. Their plans to
publish a joint volume of poetry never had a chance to materi-
alise. Hallam was a mere twenty-­two when he died suddenly of
a cerebral stroke while in Vienna, travelling with his father.
Tennyson writes of walking in the street where Arthur had
lived, to the door ‘where my heart was used to beat/So quickly,
waiting for a hand’; all the light has gone out of the places they
used to meet, ‘For all is dark where thou art not.’ He thinks of
the ship bearing Arthur’s body home, and asks the winds to
sleep ‘as he sleeps now,/My friend, the brother of my love,/My
Arthur, whom I shall not see/Till all my widow’d race be run;/
Dear as the mother to the son,/More than my brothers are to
me.’ He thinks of himself as a widower, and feels ‘A void where
heart on heart reposed;/And, where warm hands have prest and
closed.’ He and ‘The human-­hearted man I loved’ walked the

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track of life ‘with equal feet’; pain was halved because it was
shared with him. The word Tennyson consistently uses to
describe their mutual feeling is ‘love’.
Moreover it is love – ‘the spirit of true love’ – that reassures
him when he anxiously wonders whether the soul of his lost
friend will detect him in sin, seeing him think or do something
dishonourable: ‘Thou canst not move me from thy side,/Nor
human frailty do me wrong . . . So fret not, like an idle girl,/that
life is dashed with flecks of sin.’ The admonition not to behave
like a girl prompts a simile: ‘My spirit loved and loves him yet/
Like some poor girl whose heart is set/On one whose rank
exceeds her own.’
The metaphor of widowhood is Tennyson’s choice for
explaining his loss. ‘Two partners of a married life— /I look’d
on these and thought of thee/In vastness and in mystery,/And of
my spirit as of a wife.’ In revisiting Cambridge, and thinking of
their time together, Tennyson acknowledges himself as the
Patroclus, the Pylades of the pair, though not in those words;
he remembers Arthur’s effect on others, ‘While I, thy nearest,
sat apart,/And felt thy triumph was as mine . . . Nor mine the
sweetness or the skill,/But mine the love that will not tire, And,
born of love, the vague desire/That spurs an imitative will.’
The poem’s correlative religious themes – for it is a religious
poem too; although of religious doubt in the face of science,
and of a substitution of love itself as the agent of salvation – do
not do much to assuage the intense grief it expresses. The hope
of being posthumously reunited with those lost to death is said
to sustain many grievers who have a religious faith, but there is
little of that here. Rather the loss of one so loved seems to be
inconsolable. But in a later canto Tennyson speaks to a new

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friend, saying that he cannot transfer the whole of the love he

felt for his first friend, for it was ‘First love, first friendship,
equal powers,/That marry with the virgin heart’. All the same,
he cannot remain friendless for ever; ‘My heart, tho widow’d,
may not rest/Quite in the love of what is gone,/but seeks to beat
in time with one/That warms another living breast.’
The evidence of the poem itself would prompt questions
about whether the deep sentiment it displays is homosocial or
homosexual, and the answer would probably be the latter. But
the biographical evidence is against the textual evidence;
Hallam loved Tennyson’s sister, and in the poem there is
mention of the lost opportunity for Tennyson to dandle
Hallam’s sons on his knee. The fact that Tennyson married and
had children (the eldest called Hallam) is irrelevant, because
many homosexual and bisexual men marry and have children.
More to the point is to ask whether sentimental expressions of
affection without literal implications of homosexuality were
not after all more acceptable in the period; there was no outcry
by Tennyson’s readers of the kind that other Victorians, not
very much later, raised against Oscar Wilde.
From the point of view of understanding Tennyson’s take
on friendship, we see that it is greatly more encompassing than
the conventional part of what he says – ‘O friendship, equal-­
poised control,/O heart, with kindliest motion warm’ – for the
avowals of love and the feminine posture of grief permit a much
more extreme sense of loss, consonant with a much more
loving and strongly bonded relationship. Some might say that
this friendship, like the foregoing legendary ones, was a friend-
ship of youth; had Hallam survived and married Emily and
made a success at law (even Tennyson said he would not have

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been a good poet) it is possible that they would have ended as

the Victorians liked to say Amys and Amylion did: by devoting
their lives to charitable causes.
And there is a point here. We expect the friendships of youth
to be intense, those of middle and old age to be mellow, even if
they are not long-­standing ones. Is this true? Not invariably so,
but often and perhaps most often so. It would follow just from
the respectively more and less impetuous, urgent, striving
nature of youth and age; it would reflect the insight behind the
remark ‘When young I loved Ovid, now that I am old I love
Horace.’ There is a difference here with erotic love: it can be felt
with as much intensity in the middle and later years as in youth,
if the right spark is put to the right tinder. When passion is
ignited between older people of similar age it does not occasion
comment, but it is disapproved of between partners consider-
ably different in age. Few can believe, in such cases, that any of
the reasons people might have for falling in love apply as fully
here as elsewhere; even that the motive is a mature conception
of the finest possibilities implicit in the circumstance. That is
perhaps a lack of imagination; the conventions currently in
play tell us that it is not.

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Experiences

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 CHAPTER 8

Friendship Viewed

Consider these two claims: first, that friendship is one of the

two most significant kinds of relationship that human individ-
uals can have with each other – the other being intimate love,
itself a various and multiple phenomenon – and secondly, that
there are no rules setting out the rights and responsibilities
of friendship. Between them these claims alert us to the
complex nature of the relationship which is, second only to the
bond of intimacy between lovers in the honeymoon of their
love, the most important contributor to the possibility of good
human lives. To say this is not to undervalue the other great
contributors – creativity, knowledge and discovery, pleasure –
but there is every reason to think that these are in any case
connected in more and less direct ways with friendships, in
ways suggested later.
For this reason the major intellectual traditions of the
world, both Eastern and Western, are rich in discussions of
friendship, and Part I was a survey of some in the Western

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tradition. There are many kinds of friendship, achieved by

many different routes, and although they have a set of central
features in common – at least in their idealised versions – which
include affection, sympathy and loyalty, their additional dimen-
sions are determined partly by time, place and culture, and
partly by the individuality of those between whom they arise.
It is an interesting coincidence, and perhaps more, that
Mencius in ancient China thought the same as Aristotle in
ancient Greece: that a friend is ‘another self’. If one cares about
someone else in the best way of friendship, both of these
thinkers claimed, his good matters as much to oneself as
one’s own, making a pair of friends ‘one mind in two bodies’.
As noted several times above, most will justifiably think that
this overstates the case, even in those rare iconic instances
celebrated in literature – David and Jonathan, Nisus and
Euryalus – which as we have seen could be examples of love
more romantic than companionate. It indicates the way that
friendship has been taken to be more than just camaraderie and
the sharing of experience and enjoyment, but a mutual tie
which at its best, and during its best period, is supportive,
forgiving and durable.
Why is this so? The answer lies in the psychological facts
underlying human sociality. Human beings are essentially social
animals, ‘essentially’ having the force of ‘that which crucially
defines’. Relationships are vital not just to the well-­being but to
the identity of all but the oddest individuals. Explicitly intimate
relationships tend to be few in number (restricted as they are to
family and lovers) and idiosyncratic in character, and they play
a deep role in forming individuality. But it is also a person’s
range of more general friendships that helps to shape his or her

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social personae – note the plural – especially in the formative

period of youth.
There are different ways of expressing the point about the
formativeness of friendships, most familiarly perhaps by invoking
the idea of peer influence, which in turn is most obvious in
adolescence. But it is important not to restrict the idea of friend-
ship to people who are alive at the same time, despite this being
the main category. For one can have friendships with writers long
dead, with characters in their books, with historical figures, even
(after a fashion) with animals – typically pet dogs, cats and
horses. One good way to know what sort of person someone is,
is to examine the kinds of friendship he or she has maintained
through time, including these non-­standard ones.
The desideratum always of course remains: to know what
we mean by ‘friendship’. But the sheer variety and nuance of
relationships which deserve the name, given their overlaps with
other kinds of relationships and the infinite gradations on all
sides into relationships that are more informatively described as
something else, make this exceedingly hard. We might say that
it requires an understanding at least of the central varieties; but
this is only partly true, because there the temptation is to focus
on clichés, however accurate and informative these might be.
If we succumb for a moment to the last-­named route, we see
that both received wisdom and the models offered us by the
philosophical and literary debate, at least when they are suffi-
ciently down to earth, jointly have it that a friend is a person
one likes who returns one’s affection and concern; who shares
some of one’s interests and attitudes; who gives when asked or
even without being asked; who understands, or tries to, without
being too judgemental; who is loyal and constant, rejoicing at

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good fortune and supporting through bad; who tells unpleasant

truths and pleasant untruths when either is necessary; whose
affection is freely given, not bartered for services or advance-
ment or other interest; and who makes the innocent and proper
assumption that all the claims, expectations, rights and duties
of this vital and valuable human bond are reciprocal.
Reciprocity is indispensable. This of course is meant prima-
rily in relation to living contemporaries, but indirectly it applies
to friendships with the authors and characters of admired
books, say; there is indeed a kind of reciprocity even here, for
someone gets something – it might be very much – from a book,
which (as we put it) ‘repays’ thoughtful and attentive reading.
The human–human case of reciprocity is however the one at
issue here. Where one party to a relationship is the giver and the
other the taker of regard, kindness, affection and support, the
relationship might better be described differently, as a patron–
client one (if it is between unrelated individuals) or as a kin rela-
tionship, typically cross-­generational as with parent and child.
Indeed perhaps the most important human relationship is
the parenting, and especially mothering, of small children, a
very unequal affair although a certain reciprocity exists – the
child loves, needs and depends upon the mother, which can give
the mother a profound sense of self-­worth and satisfaction. But
even this relationship has friendship as part of its ultimate goal,
if successful: if friends are independent partners in their rela-
tionship, achieving friendship with one’s offspring means that
the project of helping them grow into freedom has worked.

One cannot talk of friendship without inevitably coming up

against the subject of love – love in its various guises, but love

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most especially of what (following the distinctions drawn by

the ancient Greeks) are called storge, pragma, and ludus, where
storge connotes the natural affection of kin ties, pragma the
bond that grows out of companionship and shared interests,
and ludus the lighter and less committed interchanges of
playful camaraderie. In the view of some, it is only by stretching
the notion of friendship somewhat that one would include in
this list agape, the benevolent concern for one’s fellow human
beings in general. In the first three cases at least, we are as apt
to talk of affection and warmth as of love, while distinguishing
them from eros with its explicitly sexual connotation, and
relatedly with what the Greeks named mania and which we
now call romantic love or even (when we accord it less dignity)
infatuation, because we wish to separate these latter from the
forms of interpersonal bonds not exclusively premised on
sexual attraction and desire.
But as we know, complications arise in friendship between
the sexes if they involve sex and, as we have copiously seen,
some male friendship has historically been presented as the
outward form of homoerotic love. When sexual elements enter
heterosexual friendship, socially constructed attitudes to sex
disrupt the classification we are inclined to give the previous
relationship, so that at very least we move it to a different place
psychologically, to make it conform to the place it now occupies
physiologically – even if the friendship remains and the sexual
activity stops. In this connection a disappointed would-­be lover
does not appreciate hearing the words, ‘I like you as a friend’,
precisely because they imply that the relationship desired by the
utterer is at most in the pragma–ludus family of affections and
not at all in the desired eros–mania one.

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The question of friendship between individuals of opposite

sex is an intriguing one. Can there be cross-­sex friendships
which are genuinely like non-­sexual same-­sex friendships?
Sceptics are inclined to think that such a thing could exist only
before and after the courting age, by which is meant the period
between the respective onsets of puberty and (if we allow
them to be this harsh) middle age. The facts would seem to be
against the sceptics, given that most of us can cite obvious cases
of individual men and women enjoying non-­sexual friendships.
Perhaps the real question here concerns not whether such
friendships are possible, but the degree to which they are like
same-­sex non-­sexual friendships. Surely, some might say, the
uncontroversial fact that there can be differences of perspective
and experience between the sexes makes cross-­sex friendships
different from same-­sex ones. It would hardly be surprising if
this were true, and if it were so, such friendship would surely
be all the more valuable for it. But it would be friendship still,
and – to repeat – friendship takes many forms.
‘Friendship takes many forms’: in fact this truism represents
both a problem and an opportunity. The wide variety of forms
that interpersonal connections can take while meriting the
name of friendship shows different characteristics and different
degrees of strength according to circumstance. A person’s sense
of self is a composite of influences and reactions to influences,
not least the influences of the people whom she admits into
her confidence because she likes, trusts and is interested in
them. Each individual is in truth a plurality and needs to
express different sides of herself in different settings, which is
one of the prime ways in which having a variety of friends is
invaluable.

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 Friendship Viewed

It has been well said that no single other person can meet all
one’s needs and interests, which reinforces this point. The
problem this raises is that it frustrates any attempt to give a
single neat definition of friendship. The opportunity it offers is
that friendship can be explained by examples, so that by
drawing from discussions of friendship and cases of it one can
illustrate its various aspects, and see how they reveal through
the veil of differences one of the supremest of the values that
make life worth living. That is why we have to turn from the
abstractions of the philosophers to the makers of myth and
story, and the writers of history and its personal form, biog-
raphy, to have a chance of seeing individual pebbles in the
mosaic, so that when we step back to see the whole, even if we
do not see it differently, we see it true.

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 CHAPTER 9

Friendship Examined

Because this is an examination of the idea of friendship offered

by the tradition of debate and portrayal in our sources, and
because we have seen the consensus agree with reason that
friendship is a great good, indeed one of the highest available
to us, we must now set that claim to work. But before doing so,
we have to try to answer some questions.
We say that friendship is a great good, and both the philo-
sophical and literary portrayals canvassed in earlier chapters
give us lists of reasons why. Let us inspect them.
We think we know what the philosophers mean when they
say that friendship is an intrinsic good – good in itself, not for
any other reason than that it is good, thus excluding the good
things that friendship brings us and does for us, for mention of
them introduces the idea of instrumentality, from which high-­
mindedness recoils. This recoil can be justified in light of exam-
ples of dishonest, hypocritical or deceitful cases of ‘false
friendship’, which has a particularly bad name in that it trades

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 Friendship Examined

on the bond of trust constitutively implicit in friendship, in order

to betray it for the advantage of the betrayer. But friendships can
be of many kinds of mutual usefulness without being hypo­
critical or deceitful. Friendships can and often do grow from the
mutual help and advantage that interpersonal relationships
supply. In fact, in the practice of life it is hard to see how any
friendship can be characterised as other than a trade-­off, because
it is typically a trade-­off of a very good and pleasing kind, at
very least giving pleasure, comfort and happiness to the parties
when they are enacting their friendship together. It would seem
that a purist (Kant, or Aristotle when he is thinking of the most
elevated form in his hierarchy of friendships) would have to
downplay what it is that friendship actually does for people
We should therefore be unabashed in answering the ques-
tion, Why is friendship good and valuable? by listing the
pleasure, the fun, the utility and the advantage that come from
a strong mutual liking between people who are interested in
each other’s welfare and benefit, and who help each other
because of that interest. All these things are goods too, whose
possession enhances the quality of our experience of life. But
there is of course more. We say that friends share things: not
just the pleasure already mentioned, but knowledge and experi-
ence, and also burdens and difficulties. These latter prompt the
thought that comfort, solace and sympathy are profoundly
valuable gifts of friendship in times of trouble, which no one
seeks a friend for – we do not think ‘I must make some friends
just in case, in future, I suffer grief or illness, and might need
them’ as the chief reason for having them; it is likely that we
never consider this when making friends – but for which having
a friend is an immense good.

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When talk of ‘sharing’ waxes sentimental it principally

means experience – the magazine version would probably focus
on laughter and tears, holidays, secrets – but it does not often
mean actual sharing of (say) one’s income or one’s wife. In antiq-
uity sharing had this more demanding character, of sharing one’s
substance with friends, and even sharing their fate – going into
exile with them, say. It is harder to do these things now that our
social arrangements and conventions are so much more complex
and pigeonholed. It is not a matter of just sharing your cloak
with your friend when it rains or is cold on a military campaign.
Duty to one’s family raises a question mark over sharing your
income with someone outside the family, even a very dear friend.
These days to give a friend a helping hand in her career smacks
not of friendship but of corruption. We still, happily, accept a
friend’s help with replastering the kitchen, digging up a flower
bed, pushing the broken-­down car off to the side of the road,
making the cakes for the children’s party, and the like.
One good thing about friendship which has survived changes
in social conventions is that it is a resource of guidance and
correction. A loyal friend whom one trusts can tell us when we
are going wrong, reprove us, advise us, can suggest a course of
action when we are wavering in a dilemma, can stand up for us
or do something for us when we need an ally. She can also tell
us helpful lies when we need reassurance or calming down.
If you think of someone who has no friends you see what
can happen: a human being, like a neglected garden, may
become rather overgrown – quite literally dirty and unkempt,
unsocial, introverted; after a bit, eccentric or half mad. Social
intercourse keeps people – quite literally – clean and reasonably
polite, sane and functional; how much more so does having

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friends help to keep people functioning in ways that they often

do not if left in the void of friendlessness.
Such are some of the goods of friendship. But friendship has
its negative aspects and dangers too. One is that when we make
friends, we contract for grief. This is the same for love.
Inevitably, one of any pair (save for the rare cases of both being
in the same plane crash) is going to be bereft of the other – by
death, by divorce, by the drifting apart that time brings as
people and circumstances change. In the latter case the drifting
apart might be mutual, scarcely noticed, and no great sorrow
to either. But death or a quarrel or a betrayal: these cause
suffering, and do harm. A friend gets cancer, worsens through
many trials of surgery and chemotherapy, and dies under one’s
eyes: this is a burden we willingly and actively accept out of
love for her, but it is no less painful for the willingness.
The pangs of betrayal in friendship have their own special
character. In too many cases betrayal or a bitter quarrel leads to
hostility; friendship becomes enmity, friends become enemies
– all made worse in cases where the erstwhile friends are still to
some extent embrangled, with mutual friends, membership of
the same tennis club, working together in the same company or
school – such complications ramify.
Some friendships can be ruined by becoming sexual; some
can be enhanced by it, whether as ‘friendships with benefits’
(the parties are rather inelegantly called ‘fuck buddies’ by
some) or by turning into a romantic or spousal relationship. In
the former case they provide an affirmative answer to the ques-
tion whether friendships can be sexual as well as being friend-
ships; examples of the latter are not necessarily part of a
negative answer to the same question.

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Some, among them certain Christian thinkers, think that

friendship is not a good because it is preferential and exclusive.
To have a friend is to put others lower down the scale of one’s
interest and concern for one’s fellow humans. A dispropor-
tionate amount of one’s resources, whether of time or substance,
is devoted to friends, resources which could be shared more
equitably with others. By putting a friend’s interest above that
of others, the latter could actually be disadvantaged, and
unfairly so.
The dangers of friendship are of course the worst of the
negative side, and one of them flows from the partiality just
mentioned. It is not only that one might deal unjustly with
others in light of one’s partialities, but that one’s judgement
might be distorted, and one could even do serious wrongs in the
name of friendship, giving bad advice and breaching moral
imperatives or breaking the law in helping a friend to do bad
things, or at least in fostering interests which are not worthy
ones. That requires a judgement about which things are worthy
and which unworthy, and that is where more general ethical
reflection does its work, so that one now sees an additional
motivation for it: that clarity in this respect has a chance of
making one a better friend to one’s friends.
So: a bad thing about friendship is what happens if one is a
bad friend to one’s friends. Another way to be a bad friend is to
be injudicious in one’s own actions in ways that harm one’s
friends. Arguably, Timon of Athens was a bad friend to those
around him because he acted unreasonably, first by being over-­
lavish in his generosity, and then by lurching completely to the
other extreme and being comprehensively misanthropic, even
though it was only a few who had been examples to him of

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ingratitude, and of betrayal of the bond he thought he had

established with them through his generosity.
In the temptations it offers to be too partial, too generous,
too dismissive of the competing claims of others who might
have some claim too, friendship risks being at odds with other
things regarded as goods. The ancients taught moderation in
all things – ‘nothing too much’ was one of the Delphic oracle’s
injunctions – and if that applies to friendship, then we should
not love friends too much, give them too much of our time or
substance, and the like. Is the idea of not being ‘too much’ of a
friend consistent with the idea of the selflessness sometimes
required of friendship, the unstinting aid when really needed,
the wholeheartedness of the commitment? Aristotle’s ethics of
reason enjoined the ‘middle way’, identifying the virtues by
their occupancy of a moral space between opposing vices –
generosity between meanness and profligacy, courage between
cowardice and rashness, and so on. Should the virtues of
friendship be calibrated between the vices of hostility and –
presumably – servile adoration? Well: perhaps so, in this case,
because it is not clear that servile adoration would be in a
friend’s interests anyway. And perhaps ‘calibrate’ is not the
right verb; ‘judge’ is better. We do well to judge when a friend
needs help, advice, admonition, unconditional acceptance and
affection, sympathy, being left alone, and so on.
So in this case the application of reason to the question of
how far one needs to go in the different interests and circum-
stances of friendship is appropriate. The real concern about the
place of reason in friendship is a different pair of vices: a cold
rationality that really does measure and weigh the degrees of
commitment and activity that one is prepared to give friends,

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on the one hand, and on the other the irrationality induced by

too great a partiality for friends. This is implicated in talk of
bad outcomes above, but there is a more general point, which is
that whereas there are non-­rational good things (pleasant
sensations are an example) there is never anything good about
irrationality. If friendship overthrows one’s judgement to the
extent that one does irrational things, then friendship is
harmful. And it often is so. The group of buddies go out for a
drink; they have too many, and egg one another on to do silly
things in the jollity that ensues; risky things perhaps – climbing
up a high wall to teeter along it, running across a train track –
with tragic consequences perhaps.

Another matter that merits further consideration is the ‘another

self’ trope started by Aristotle – as mentioned in what was
more or less an aside, but pounced on by many since. There is
a metaphorical use of this which is unexceptionable. I rather
think Montaigne’s beautiful memorial to his friendship with
Etienne de La Boétie treats the idea of the merging of two selves
into one as an effort to emphasise unity of outlook and interest,
of agreement, not of the loss of self in another’s self, or the
submerging of two identities into a corporate or joint identity.
For this would be to deny much of what is good and important
about friendship in the first place.
The quickest way to make this point is to remember that we
value autonomy, self-­determination, and the construction and
enhancement of a personal identity, as very high goods in them-
selves. To honour these things in another is to be a friend to
that other. To respect the autonomy of another, her right to the
final say on important decisions and choices, is to be a good

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friend to her. To want to subsume that separateness, to deny or

bridge it too closely, is to lose sight of the good of individuality.
And in fact the idea of two or more individuals whose differ-
ences are complementary and interesting, who respect each
other as different and whose differences are accepted, tolerated,
admired or honoured, is the very stuff of mature friendship.
The idea of the separateness that allows for complementa-
rity is not merely implicit, it is explicit in the idealised classical
versions of antiquity. Take almost any example – Nisus and
Euryalus, let us say, as described earlier. Both were young, but
Euryalus was significantly younger. Nisus had a reputation –
acerrimus armis, most swift in arms – as a tried and tested
warrior. Euryalus, less tested than Nisus, was a beardless youth,
beautiful, and devoted to his heroic older partner. They form a
type of a pair of fitting complementarity. Now, they might love
one another so deeply that they are willing to sacrifice their
lives for one another; they are inseparable, venturing all things
together; Nisus (as the foot race example shows) is prepared to
do wrong in the interests of his friend, which a more austere
theoretician of friendship would frown on. But they are not
twins. One of the ideas that grew out of the ‘another self’ trope
was the idea that twins are exemplars of what friends should be
– identical twins, that is, who often (especially when young) do
seem to be two halves of a single person.1 But this goes fully
against the idea that friendship is a relationship of respect
between autonomous individuals whose mutuality is freely and
willingly given, not taken automatically out of a common pool.
In fact the idea of ‘another self’ contradicts another of the
desiderata attached to idealisations of friendship: that friends
should be other-­interested in their friendship, not self-­interested.

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But if friends are one single self, then anything done for the
other’s good is ipso facto done for one’s own good. Other-­
interest is self-­interest; it is not the friend but oneself for whom
one acts. When an argument collapses into absurdity as this
does, one sees that it is of course not what is intended; but it is
the result of taking the ‘another self’ trope too seriously. The
very idea of a bond, of sharing, of giving, of mutuality, is
predicated on the idea of a duality or more: it seems essential
to friendship that it should be a relationship between ‘Others’.

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 CHAPTER 10

The Two Claims

At the beginning of Chapter 8 above it was said that a familiar

pair of claims is made about friendship: first, that it ‘is one of
the two most significant kinds of relationship that human indi-
viduals can have with each other – the other being intimate
love, itself a various and multiple phenomenon – and secondly,
that there are no rules setting out the rights and responsibilities
of friendship’.
Reflection on these claims suggests two surprising thoughts:
that it is an ethical obligation actively to pursue friendship; and
that friendship as the desired terminus of all relationships
therefore trumps other relationships.
Consider the nature of the good and well lived life, the flour-
ishing life which feels good to live because it involves endeavour,
satisfying in itself, towards the realisation of worthwhile goals,
and because it is, or in the main and sum is, positive in its impact
on others to whom the agent owes responsibility – which in
attenuating circles of concern might be the whole human race,

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indeed the planet. Now if friendship is one of the high goods

in such a life, and if we agree with Aristotle – as I think we
must – that without it the rest of the edifice of good in life
would crash down, then it is a duty to ourselves and others that
we are friends, that we have friends, that we promote friendship,
that we reflect on it, choose it, look after and foster it. In just the
same way as we reflect on and choose other valuable things to
live by, so we must reflect on and choose friendships.
This involves us in thinking how to be a friend, as well as
thinking about what we want from friendship, and therefore
what we want in our friends. Here another point presses to be
remembered. No one other person will ever satisfy all the inter-
ests, needs and desires that each individual typically has. People
might if lucky be deeply and happily in requited love with a
wonderful other, but still need friends and colleagues, acquaint-
ances, and sustained relationships with family members. Most
people can give love to and receive love from more than one
other person, and most people need to. This suggests that more
than one friendship is requisite, even if we have one particular
friend who answers to that part of oneself that is most oneself,
most central to one’s naked identity, most acutely conscious of
itself as desiring mutuality with another close to it.
It is possible to see family, acquaintances and workmates as
answering to the less exigent aspect of one’s need for commu-
nity, leaving just one or a very few entrances for particular
friends, ‘real friends’ as people say in marking the distinction,
whom one admits to psychological places that the others
cannot go.
The phrase ‘real friend’ suggests something else. There are
friends who are genuinely so, in being much closer and more

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privileged than acquaintances are, but with whom the connec-

tion has features that place limits on it. The pieties of those
who say that there is ‘no true friendship’ (the ‘no true Scotsman’
again) involved in mutual usefulness, or even in one-­sided
usefulness, are merely that: pieties. There is no reason why
mutually useful or even unilaterally useful (though there is
almost always a benefit of some kind to such transactions)
friends cannot both be and think themselves so. We distinguish
between friendship of any stripe and relationships in which
hypocrisy, cheating and insincerity attend the motives for the
connection, by means of those very words. If ‘A and B are
friends’ is a true proposition, then by definition none of hypoc-
risy, cheating and insincerity is involved. Now, if such a rela-
tionship evolved into a ‘real friendship’ – a much closer one,
where the utility aspect is no longer relevant to the fact of
friendship even if it is still there – would it not have been a
friendship before? It is temerity to legislate that a friendship
can only be one if it begins in a pure, non-­utilitarian, perfectly
mutual and equal moment. Not all do; perhaps not many do.
Recall that ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ have different meanings.
Morality is part of ethics, but ethics is a larger and more inclu-
sive notion. Ethics is a response to the question, ‘What sort of
person should I be and how should I live my life?’ while morality
is an answer to the question, ‘What are my duties and responsi-
bilities to others (and perhaps myself too, on some views)?’
One’s morality flows from one’s ethics, and reciprocally influ-
ences its character; but its scope is narrower. As a vital constit-
uent of the good in a life that is good, friendship is accordingly
a matter of ethics. This means not only that the good life needs
friendship in it, but therefore – as noted above – that two of the

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key ethical endeavours in it are reflections on how to be a good

friend to one’s friends and others, and how to know a good
friend to oneself. The distinction turns on being a friend as an
agent, and being befriended as a patient. In the ‘real friend’
nexus a necessary condition is that the parties are both of these
things to each other – the mutuality condition – although here
too it would be a mistake to ask for pure symmetry or equality,
because at different times and in different ways the parties will
surely be these things to each other in different degrees.
But there is an interesting catch to the idea of being a friend
– the agency half of the equation – where this can be general-
ised. In the examples and discussions canvassed in Part I above,
it was an implication that agape is not friendship, because it
does not discriminate or prefer one or some people over others,
but is intended to be universal. This is the ideal of Christian
charity (Latin caritas is the Greek agape). It is a comment on
human nature and institutions that these words and the lovely
ideas associated with them should have given eventual rise to
the proverbial phrase ‘as cold as charity’; but there it is. The
thought now is that whereas being a ‘real friend’ to another
necessarily assumes reciprocity and mutuality, ‘being a friend’
need not; if we said that the Good Samaritan befriended the
man who fell among thieves, or ‘was a friend to’ that man, we
would not be misusing the terms. On the contrary the office of
friend is very much performed by the Samaritan, and it captures
the idea well of what it would be for anyone to take the part of
a friend to another who needed it – or indeed to anyone else in
general, even in passing, even for a moment.1
The sense of obligation one might have in order to be
involved in human rights activism, in campaigns for social

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justice, in movements for the liberation of the human mind and

person, in working for more tolerant, generous and humane
legal and social dispensations, in engagement in charitable
work, would on this view be the outcome of taking a stance of
friendship towards humanity. I see no reason not to go further
and say: why cannot one be a friend to animals in opposing
factory farming and other forms of cruelty, or a friend to the
environment and through its protection to future generations?
This is not to stretch the term one whit, because what is impli-
cated in the general idea of being a friend to X, whoever
or whatever X is, is the set of more particular ideas about
concern, sympathy, interest, action towards the welfare of, and
preparedness to sacrifice something of one’s own substance or
convenience for, that person or object.
Now there is no question but that engagement in an agency
of friendship towards these general beneficiaries contributes to
the satisfaction of life. Put simply, it feels good to do good. So
as an ethical ideal, friendship merits being taken in this large
sense too, and is at one with the universalism in many ethical
outlooks (among which, for inclusiveness, the likes of Buddhism
and Jainism stand out).
At the same time, the central notion of friendship remains
the close mutual personal link between two or a very few people.
Whereas it does not take much to see what being a friend to, say,
the environment involves, personal friendship demands a great
deal more thought, because it requires a degree of knowledge
and understanding – two different things – of the other, suffi-
cient to make one’s agency towards him or her apt.
It also involves understanding what one is in for, so to
speak, though not in a reductive or calculating sense; accepting,

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tolerating and sympathising with a friend involves a grasp of

their failings and hopes – including the unrealistic ones –
because one has to be at times ready to deal with them, just as
one hopes one’s friend or friends will cope with one’s own.
It has been well said that we do not love our friends for their
achievements, but (in part anyway) for what they want to achieve.
A person’s sincere aspirations say much about them, as do their
efforts, and even if they do not quite get there in the end one can
honour them for wishing to, and can love them for trying.
The second thought offered above as a surprising one is that
friendship, as the desired terminus of all relationships, trumps
other relationships. By this I mean that if friendship is so high
a value – and reason and the consensus agree that it is – then it
is a top-­down, that is, it tells us what and how to value anything
that leads to it or results in it. Another and yet more tenden-
tious way of saying this is that friendship’s high value implies
that any conventions and constraints that prevent it or interfere
with it are wrong. And it happens that there are many such in
our contemporary society, as there have been – ringing the
changes on what some of them are – throughout history.
In devil’s advocacy I put the point at its most challenging by
offering this for discussion: one constant in the way of barriers
to friendship is sex. Sex is a controlled substance in almost all
societies, with strict customs, morals and laws regulating when,
where, with whom and in what circumstances it can happen.
Monogamous sexual fidelity is the norm of expectation in
Christian and Jewish societies, more honoured in the breach
than in the observance because human nature, with its under-
lying biology, is not good at observing historically conditioned
changes in customs and laws.

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In fact it is not just sex itself but anything to do with it –

pictures, words, naked bodies or body parts – that falls under
the custom, morals and laws barricading it in, buttoning it up,
hiding it away and repressing it as much as possible.2 The result
of organising anything to do with sex in these ways is that all
other human contact and interaction is controlled. Take the
example of a woman once she has settled into a domestic part-
nership such as marriage. She is thereafter supposed to restrict
not just her sexual life but her emotional intimacy to one man,
even though she might continue to have emotional intimacy
(but generally not with a physical aspect) with one or a few
women friends. She can have male friends, but there is a limit to
how close she can be to them and in what ways. Everyone knows
that as the domestic partnership passes through the years, it will
change; it might and in the best cases it will deepen, and mature
love will emerge from it; but as it changes, and as she does, she
is still bound by the original contract of exclusivity in the kinds
of relationships she can have outside it. She cannot love again,
except at the risk of destroying the complex structure of the
domestic project that arose from its origin.
Society, in its keenness to control and limit the kinds of
affections and intimacies, contacts and mutualities, that people
can have with one another, exacts a high cost for anyone in
breach of its rules. Suppose the woman of our example
becomes too friendly with a man other than her husband;
suppose this friendship takes its natural course of hugging and
close contact, kissing, perhaps even sexual congress, and this is
found out; a too-­likely cost is the break-­up of a family unit – a
massive penalty for a natural and – in itself, disentangled from
all the corrugated-­iron stacked around it in the ways of those

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customs, laws and expectations – a good thing. It will happen

because her partner has been taught to think that she has
committed a great wrong against him, the one who should be
the exclusive owner of her affection and its expressions.
Of course the destruction envisaged here is the overblown
penalty that our conventions exact for sexual infidelity mainly,
but the point is that everything in the neighbourhood of this is
affected by it – and this includes almost all friendships across
the sexes, across ethnicities, across religious divides, across
differences of age, all of them under the gaze of the moralising
and controlling suspicious eye.
But if friendship is a great and high good, and if it can be, or
can coexist with, or lead to, or arise from, neighbouring forms
of closeness, intimacy and mutuality between people, then the
customs and laws, moral or otherwise, which stand in its way
are wrong.
An alternative view, which is the one that is actually opera-
tive, is of course to say that only certain types of friendship
are acceptable. Most societies in their different conventional
ways extend social acceptance only to these or those types
of friendship, and this is perhaps why the commonplace
vaunting of friendship that they also all go in for is so superfi-
cial. In its turn, that is why the thoughts prompted by the idea
that friendship is a great ethical value are, when inspected, so
surprising – because they are no longer intuitive.

One question which some might think is begged in the fore-

going relates to the ambiguous and complex matter several
times alluded to already: the matter of friendships across the
gender divide. Are they really possible? Of course the question

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relates to men and women in the courting age and that part of
adulthood where sexual interest might be aroused by propin-
quity or intimacy; no one thinks this of the very young or the
very old, where it is perfectly obvious that such friendships are
common.
There are at least two assumptions embedded here. One is
that if a relationship is sexual, it is not a friendship. This is an
assumption denied in passing often enough in the foregoing.
The other is that if a relationship is a friendship, it is not
sexual. ‘We are just good friends,’ a publicity-­shy celebrity
couple might say when speculation arises because they are seen
together often; they are trading on this second assumption.
If one thinks that there is a distinction without a difference
here, consider: many relationships begin as attractions, and
develop into romantic affairs, these days usually with physical
intimacy as a standard and significant part of them. As the
couple come to know and depend upon each other more, still
with the attraction and sexual elements central, they come to
have the very features of a relationship which define friendship.
Even the most energetic of lovers in the honeymoon phase
might pause to eat or take a walk or have a conversation: in
those intervals what connects them is what connects friends.
Why not accept that they are friends too? Of course the ‘too’
is important: they are not only friends; and it is true that
generally the term is reserved for the only case. But it need not
be, and when it is said of lovers that they are good friends too,
the implication is that they are (as the phrase has it) good
together.
And looking at the relationship from the other end, we
note that the reason for thinking that if ‘they are friends’ is an

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accurate description of the relationship subsisting between a

couple or among a group, it is because we intend to convey the
only sense. An interest in who is connected with whom and in
what ways is a lively social one – studies of troops of baboons
show that they evidence an elaborate knowledge of who is what
to whom, because the different connections between kin and
associates are integral to the troop’s well-­being, even survival.
Human beings gossip for a deep reason: information about the
shifting patterns of social relationships is significant in ways
parallel to other primates (social survival might be the ultimate
objective in the human case, but failing to survive socially
is a kind of death). So the terminology marks a significant
distinction, but we know that it can be a mask as well. The
pragmatics of language play a role here: ‘friend’ said with a
faint inflection of an eyebrow or a minute emphasis of tone
removes the only.

There are relatively few cases where subjective personal experi-

ence is the right route to understanding a concept, but this is
one of them. Or at least, it is part of what goes into under-
standing it. According to certain views, there are fundamental
concepts in the architecture of our thought which are ‘primi-
tive’ or basic in the sense that they cannot be explained, or
explained adequately, other than by direct experience of their
referents. Most concepts are such that direct experience of their
referents is impossible: the concept ‘the height of Mount
Everest’ is one that we grasp through understanding words, and
the concept of an electron in particle physics is one that can
only be grasped fully with the mathematical apparatus used to
describe quantum phenomena. But one cannot adequately

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convey the meaning of ‘yellow’ unless at some point one can

display a focal sample of that colour; or ‘sweet’, as applied to
the sense of taste, without offering a sample of sugar or honey
or some other substance which provokes that taste.
For each of us individually and therefore differently, the asso-
ciation of ‘friend’ will have the equivalent somewhere of a
colour patch or a spoon of honey in personal experience. It will
also have cinematic and literary associations, and in some ways
these might be more powerful. Among my contemporaries at the
age of eleven or so, William Brown and Ginger, with Douglas
and Henry in tow, provided something of a model of what a
gang of friends might be; more tamely, so did Julian, Dick,
George and Anne with Timmy the dog.3 We might have emulated
them in our doings rather than understood their doings by
extrapolating from our own case. Either way, personal experi-
ence of enacting friendship was being garnered.
Over the course of the years between the ages of eight and
twelve I had four friends, not all of them at the same time or
place, with whom I spent a lot of time, playing and making
things, being cowboys and Indians, climbing trees, cycling
about, and getting into mischief, all in the normal way. I was
entirely unconscious of whatever it was that made me like
them. I scarcely knew that I did – though I knew it when I did
not like a boy: if I disliked a boy it was usually someone older
who bullied or was in any other way unpleasant. To boys who
were not friends I was indifferent or, more accurately, neutral;
with my friends I and they simply assumed that we shared our
interests.
One of these boys became a friend after we had encountered
each other in a lane that divided the backs of our gardens, and

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a bristling stand-­off resulted in which we averred that our

respective big brothers could beat the other’s big brother in a
fight any day. We went and fetched our bemused big brothers to
set them on one another, and the big brothers spoke in the
friendliest fashion to each other, each gave his younger brother
a cuff on the head, and they parted on good terms. The failure
of our enterprise was very bonding. There was never an occa-
sion when we decided to be friends; one of us said something
like ‘come and see my train set’, and we scampered off, and
thereafter during school holidays were forever in one another’s
homes or roaming about in boyish avocations.
The natural and instinctive bond at work is reflected in a
phenomenon I observe in my dog. She is disdainful of most other
dogs she meets while busy sniffing about in the park (the canine
equivalent of checking emails, I often think), but occasionally
will see another dog, even in the distance, and though to my
knowledge not having encountered it before, will bound off in
excitement to greet and play with it. No sense of smell is involved
at that distance, so it is hard to know what triggers the response;
someone wiser in dog ways might have a guess at the answer.
When I was a child there was one boy I know I liked because
he was clever and interesting, very knowledgeable about dino-
saurs and other arcana, and had a good collection of books.
The son of a widowed mother who was rather protective of
him, he had a head too large for his body – overloaded with
brains, we were all confidently sure – with a shock of red hair
curling all about it. Other boys disliked him for being smart
and much cherished by the teachers, who I think were even a
little nervous of him because although aged only about ten he
was better at mathematics than they. Other boys were contemp-

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tuous of his contempt for sports. I found him entertaining and

interesting, so I befriended him.
In the demanding and busy atmosphere of a boarding school,
in days crowded with noise and effort, it was still possible to find
oneself more in sympathy with certain boys than others, but it
was rare that one could talk in the spontaneous way that allows
confidences to be exchanged and real insight into the other to
grow. Perhaps that circumstance was an artefact of the school’s
ethos – rather like those Victorian boarding schools anxious
about the growth of homosexual feeling, it made every day a
race to exhaustion. Reading accounts of life in the army, in
barracks, even on campaign, is very reminiscent of that form of
boarding-­school regime, where comradeship emerged from a
shared experience rather than friendship from mutual encounter.
That is an interesting lesson.
My experience of friendship fully recognised as such, and
reflected upon while it happened, first comes sharply into focus
in the very last years of school, and in undergraduate life. In the
latter, in particular, I enjoyed close friendships with two others,
each of us very different from the others in external respects
(social background principally) but with a similar sense of
humour and – between the closest two of us – a range of shared
reference in music and books that formed the basis of a short-
hand way of talking. For our second and third undergraduate
years we three shared a cottage in a narrow back street, cold
and scarcely habitable, always untidy, but full of fun.
One of my two friends was diagnosed with cancer in his final
year, and died a year later. I had come to know his family, and
had grown close to his sister, before his illness; in the year of his
dying, and in the days leading to his death, I witnessed the inde-

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scribable suffering of his parents, especially his father, for whom

he was the proudest and most cherished fact of their lives, and to
whom his death seemed to make the world a thing of incompre-
hensible stupidity for taking away something so young, bright
and beautiful. My other friend had been the closer of the two,
but now that the third had gone there was a sudden loosening of
that bond. Of the three of us he had been the one to experiment
with drugs, and they had begun to take a toll. He was very clever,
but the drugs seemed to be ruining his mind; he was foolish
under their influence, and tiresome; it was deeply dismaying. As
with the other lost friend, it seemed that something else was
moving the tectonic plates beneath our feet, distancing us against
our power or will, making us irrelevant to each other.
Perhaps the richest experience of friendship came subse-
quently, when married life began, and the friendships then
formed were as one of a couple with other married couples who
had, as we did, young children. Here there were substantial
similarities and shared experiences, opportunities for helping
each other – mutual babysitting, taking the kids to school,
playing bridge because we could not go out as much as when
we were single and childless. These were opportunities for
getting to know others in more extensive and fuller ways
that combined the practical and the personal. And there were
of course real problems to deal with – the illness or accidents
that affected children, the occasional separation or divorce
involving one of the couples in the circle, the adulteries within
it or outside it: the texture of actual as opposed to virtual life
and the weight of responsibility we variously felt, made friend-
ships deeper. These were friendships that exemplified the
features celebrated in the idealised and the sensible versions:

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the mutuality, sharing of information, time, resources such as

infants’ clothing handed on, the reciprocated help, the under-
standing and forgiveness of others who knew one so well that
one did not have to repeat an explanation every time one
was due.
And with the accumulation of time since, some of those
friendships have matured into the kind that do not need to be
furbished on a frequent basis, but can be picked up and set
down even at the distance of years without a single beat being
missed in the rhythms that underlie them. They still exemplify
the central features of friendship, as one sees when asked:
would you get out of bed and go in the middle of the night
across country to a friend if they had a sudden urgent need of
you? The answer is Yes; how could one not? It would be an
honour to answer the call of a friend; to make a sacrifice of
something so minor, in the circumstances of a request for help,
as one’s sleep or time would be nothing – you would do more
if you could, or if it were needed.
Some people have a talent for friendship, others less so; but
the value of friendship to someone who has only one or a very
few friends whom they see only occasionally is no different
from what it is for someone who has a wide circle of acquaint-
ance among whom a few come in and out of focus as specially
close for a time. In both cases the fact is that there is one or
more others in whose company, or even in thoughts of whom,
there is something that lies on a significant side of the border
we set around ourselves to demarcate where the rest of the
world begins; and who therefore have a claim, and constitute a
possession, which we could be without only at the great cost of
making the world a far poorer place.

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We might conclude on the strange note that we never call

a friend ‘friend’. ‘Friend, would you like a cup of tea?’ is
something we might say to a stranger when serving at a village
fete. When the presenter on the television programme addresses
the children presumed to be sitting at home watching, she
might say ‘Hello my friends!’ but she does not know a single
one of them personally. In fact if you call someone ‘friend’ to
his or her face you might very well be feeling rather unfriendly
towards them – ‘You watch out my friend, any more of that and
I’ll punch you on the nose!’
The situations in which we use ‘friend’ are when we talk of
absent parties, or when we qualify the word as in ‘girlfriend’
and ‘boyfriend’, as we might when introducing the specified
person, and therefore in that person’s presence. But we would
only do so with permission, because to give someone that title
presumes a great deal which has to have been given and accepted
beforehand.
But if we do use ‘friend’ in addressing a friend, it is a mark
that there is something wrong in the offing. We are advising,
exhorting, warning, pleading; we remind the friend that we are
a friend, that we have the licence to do what we are doing or to
say what we are saying which is given by friendship. Or perhaps
it is at the end of friendship, or in a conversation when the
despairing realisation that the loss of friendship has occurred,
that we invoke the term and its power in hope of revival or
perhaps in acceptance of farewell.
Romances which are not destined to start because of
one person’s reluctance, or which have come to an end, turn on
the sharp point of the word, now occurring in a bleak guise: ‘I
like you as a friend,’ says the girl repelling the amorous boy;

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‘let’s always be friends,’ says the Lothario to the discarded

maiden.
One hears people use the formula ‘friend of mine’, which is
often a redundancy; ‘A friend told me’ says the same thing as ‘a
friend of mine told me’. It would be pointful to say ‘a friend of
X’s’ in order to discriminate between someone else’s friend and
one’s own. But the formula has stuck. It is nevertheless an inter-
esting one in its emphasis on the possessive: ‘my friend’, ‘a
friend of mine’; a friend belongs to me and I belong to him;
that is part of what feels good about it.
Friendship in the personal sphere is valued and desired. In
the political sphere it is regarded with suspicion at times,
because it provokes anxieties that the loyalties involved might
serve hidden and private interests and not those of office. In
business, friendships are important; people cultivate friends
and connections because they bring definite advantages which
are most valued when mutual so, unless deceit enters, such
friendships are a productive thing. We might hope that friend-
ships in any sphere of life are welcome, for Aristotle’s reason
that a society is the better for the amities and concords that
friendship creates among people, so that if the society were a
great nexus of good fellowship, it would be one where indi-
vidual and collective eudaimonia would exist.
Yet we limit the opportunity for friendships in too many
cases; the boundaries between genders, ages, religions, ethnici-
ties, roles and offices all bring down the shutters on personal
relations because of the assumed – and, to be fair, sometimes
real – dangers that might arise from their abuse. It could be
argued that in the interests of an Aristotelian ‘society of friends’
(not the Quakers) project, the default should be to start with a

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presumption in favour of friendship. That would not be so far-­

fetched; in earlier pages it was acknowledged that the essentially
social nature of human beings predisposes to friendship, and in
fact we have to work rather hard to put obstacles in the way of
it, especially among the young. Children in a kindergarten will
unconsciously be friends with anyone at all, of any persuasion,
background, colour, faith or political family; it is society – that
is: it is we who – create the friendship-­dismantling mechanisms
of division and difference.

In the end, though, it is personal friendship which is the central

point in this discussion. I repeat what I said at the outset: we
regard it as a success if we become friends with our parents
when we grow up, our children when they grow up, our lovers
and spouses and workmates even when they remain lovers and
spouses and workmates – for in every case a bond comes to
exist, and can be relied on, which transcends the other reasons
we entered into association with the people in question. Those
bonds are a large part of what gives meaning to our lives, just
as our lives give meaning to them: without them we are less,
and in danger of being too close to nothing.

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 Notes

Introduction
1. Vera Brittain, Testament of Friendship, p. 2.
2. Ibid. p. 10.

1 The Lysis and Symposium

1. Lysis 210 e, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 2 trans. Benjamin Jowett
in ‘The Symposium and Other Dialogues’ 3rd edn, 1924.
2. Ibid. 207 c.
3. Charmides 154 e Jowett op. cit.
4. Lysis 210 c, d.
5. Ibid. 211 e.
6. Ibid. 212–13 b.
7. Ibid. 214 e.
8. Ibid. 215 a.
9. Ibid. 215 a, b.
10. Ibid. 222 e.
11. Ibid. 223 b.
12. Ibid. 221 d, e.
13. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Sarah Brodie and Christopher
Rowe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 1155a5–10.

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 Notes to pp. 31–48

2 The Classic Statement: Aristotle

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a15.
2. Ibid. 1144a25.
3. Aristotle, Politics 1295b23–5.
4. Ibid. 1280b38–9.
5. Nicomachean Ethics, 1155b21–7.
6. Ibid. 1155a10–15.
7. Ibid. 1155b1–10.
8. Ibid. 1156a6–b10.
9. Ibid. 1156a20–25.
10. Ibid. 1156b–1.
11. Ibid. 1156b5–15.
12. Ibid. 1156a35.
13. Ibid. 1166b30 et. seq.
14. Ibid. 1166a31–2.
15. Ibid. 1166a12–20.
16. Ibid. 1166a1–28.
17. Ibid. 1094b7–10.
18. Ibid. 1094a1–3.
19. Ibid. 1098a16–17.
20. This tripartite distinction is reminiscent of what Pythagoras had
long before said about the three types of people: those who come
to participate in the Games, those who come to watch the Games,
and those who come to buy and sell under the stands: the prac-
tical, the contemplative, and the banausic.

3 Cicero De amicitia
1. Cicero De amicitia iv.18.
2. W. A. Falconer Cicero, Vol. XX Loeb Classical Library, London,
1929, p. 106.
3. Cicero De amicitia iv.15.
4. Ibid. iv.18.
5. Ibid. iv.19.
6. Ibid. iv.19–20.
7. Ibid. vi.20.
8. Ibid. vi.21.
9. Ibid. vi.22.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid. vii.23.
12. Ibid. vii.24.

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 Notes to pp. 48–61

13. Ibid. viii.26.

14. Ibid. viii.27.
15. Ibid. Ix.30–1.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid. x.35.
18. E. M. Forster Two Cheers for Democracy, London: Edward
Arnold & Co., 1951, p. 78.
19. De amicitia xi.37. Cicero is writing about contemporary as much
as past events here: the usurpation of the Republic by Caesar was
a very recent event from which he had personally suffered.
20. Ibid. xii.40.
21. Ibid. xiii.44.
22. Ibid. xiii.45–6.
23. Ibid. xiii.48.
24. Ibid. xv.52–3.
25. Ibid. xvi.57.
26. Ibid. xvi.58.
27. Ibid. xvi.59.
28. Ibid. xvii.61.
29. Ibid. xviii.65.
30. Ibid. xvii.63.
31. Ibid. xvii.64.
32. Ibid. xviii.66.
33. Ibid. xxii.82.
34. Ibid. xxi.80.
35. Plutarch ‘On the Abundance of Friends,’ in Moral Essays trans.
A. R. Shilleto, London, 1898. The essay is more often cited (by
Montaigne and others) as ‘On the Plurality of Friends’.
36. Ibid. p. 146.
37. Ibid. p. 147.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid. 148.
40. Ibid. 149.
41. Ibid. 150.
42. Ibid. 149.
43. Ibid. 150.
44. Ibid. 154.

4 Christianity and Friendship

1. Augustine Confessions III 56–7, trans. E. B. Pusey Dent, London,
1966.

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 Notes to pp. 62–77

2. Augustine City of God 447, trans. M. Dods, Peabody, MA:

Hendrickson Publishers, 2009.
3. Confessions IV.7.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. IV.9.
6. Ibid. IV.13.
7. Ibid. IV.14.
8. Ibid. IV.20.
9. Ibid. IV.14.
10. The Gospel According to St Luke 10: 25–37.
11. The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse, London: Penguin, 2004, passim.
12. Augustine Letter to Jerome 394 ce http://www.newadvent.org/
fathers/1102.htm.
13. Augustine Sermon 16.
14. Ibid. 385.
15. Augustine Letter 130.
16. Augustine Confessions V.19.
17. Ibid. II.5.
18. Ibid. II.4.
19. Augustine Letter 258.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid. 192.
22. Cited above, p. 64.
23. Aquinas Summa theologica I–II q. 4.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. II–II q 153–5.
26. Ibid. II–II q 170–1.
27. Ibid. II–II q 26.
28. Ibid. q 172.
29. Ibid. q 180.
30. Aquinas De caritate 7. 9.
31. Aquinas Summa Theologica II–II q 176.
32. Bertrand Russell History of Western Philosophy London 1967
edn, p. 463.
33. For example, http://www.fusion101.com/guide/christian-­friendship.
htm

5 Renaissance Friendship
1. According to Frazer in The Golden Bough, the Virgin Mary is the
successor to the virgin goddess Diana, worshipped at Aricia near

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 Notes to pp. 77–84

Lake Nemi. Because of the devotion to Diana at this holy place,

the early Church had a problem weaning Diana’s epigones away;
and therefore announced that Diana’s real name was Mary (etc.).
See Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough XVI; also ‘Certainly in
art the figure of Isis suckling the infant Horus is so like that of the
Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration
of ignorant Christians’: ibid. XLI.
2. Munich’s Alte Pinakothek is a repository of some remarkable
examples of the minatory and coercive art of medieval
Christendom in this line.
3. Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio,
trans. John Payne, New York, NY: Random House, p. 502.
4. A justification for this remark occurs in the final part of this book.
5. Christopher Marlow. ‘Friendship in Renaissance England’,
Literature Compass, 1, 1 (2003–4).
6. There is an excellent survey of these sources in Laurie Shannon
Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearian
Contexts, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002, pp. 3 et seq.
7. Desiderius Erasmus The Colloquies, Vol. 2, 1518, Ephorinus to
John.
8. All quoted in Shannon Sovereign Amity, pp. 3–4.
9. Ibid. pp. 5–6.
10. Ibid. p. 7.
11. By far the best translation of Montaigne is the one by M. A.
Screech, Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics new edn, 1993); not just the
best, but superb. For greater ease of reference I use the very
adequate Cohen translation, made earlier for Penguin Classics,
Michel de Montaigne Essays (1958), which more readers are likely
to have to hand, as it is a selection. Again for ease of reference, I
use an edition of Bacon’s Essays that appears free online, at http://
www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-­bacon-­essays-­54.html.
12. Montaigne Essays, ed. p. 254.
13. Ibid. p. 253.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. p. 254.
16. Ibid. p. 257.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid. p. 255.
19. Ibid. p. 257.
20. Ibid. p. 258.

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 Notes to pp. 85–98

21. Ibid. p. 261.

22. Ibid. p. 90.
23. Ibid. p. 97.
24. Ibid. pp. 97–8.
25. Ibid. pp. 98–9.
26. Ibid. p. 99.
27. Ibid. p. 92.
28. Ibid. p. 93.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. p. 94.
32. Ibid. p. 96.
33. Francis Bacon, Essays Harvard Classics, Vol. 3, p. 54 Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1910–14.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid. p. 55.
36. Ibid. p. 56.
37. Ibid. p. 57.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid. p. 58.
40. Ibid. p. 59.
41. Ibid.

6 From Enlightenment back to the Roman Republic

1. Death was not the worst penalty, though; leaving aside the
hideous tortures to which heretics, ‘witches’ and others were
subjected, it was asserted that the ecclesiastical powers on earth
had the ability to prevent someone from ever getting into heaven,
by excommunicating him; for ‘there is no salvation outside the
Church’, and to be shut out from it and not to repent and beg for
readmission was to be shut out of felicity for eternity.
2. Immanuel Kant ‘What is Enlightenment? 1784. (At the end of the
original, Kant signed his name and put ‘Königsberg in Prussia, 30
September 1784).
3. Kant Lectures on Ethics. The standard way of referencing these is
through the sets of notes from which they come; the references to
follow will direct the close scholar, should there be one, of these
words. R15: 321, L.E. Collins 27: 422.
4. Ibid. LE Collins 27: 422–3.
5. Ibid. R15:624.
6. Ibid. LE Collins 27: 424–5.

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 Notes to pp. 98–107

7. Ibid. LE Collins 27:426.

8. Ibid. LE Collins 27: 427, adjusting ‘we’ to ‘he’.
9. Ibid. LE Vigilantius 27: 676.
10. Immanuel Kant The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals,
trans. H. J. Paton, London: Hutchinson, 1948.
11. Ibid. 6: 470.
12. Ibid. 6: 471.
13. Ibid.
14. Kant’s moral philosophy is set out in The Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals (1785), The Critique of Practical Reason
(1788) and The Metaphysics of Morals (1796).
15. David Hume. See Book II of A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)
‘Of the Passions’ passim, and An Enquiry into the Principles of
Morals (1751). A source of this sceptical view about the moti-
vating efficacy of reason is Pyrrhonian scepticism.
16. This is a loose rendering of the ‘categorical imperative’
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 30.
17. See Antonio R. Damasio Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and
the Human Brain, New York, NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1994.
18. The brilliant Emilie marquise du Châtelet was a mathematician
and physicist famous among other things for translating Newton’s
Principia into French, a translation that is still in use today.
19. Adam Smith; the relevant texts are The Wealth of Nations (1776)
and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
20. Smith Moral Sentiments VI 12–13, 222–3.
21. Smith Wealth of Nations I.ii.1, 25.
22. David Hume Essays Moral, Political and Literary 1777: ‘Of the
Jealousy of Trade’.
23. See A. Silver ‘Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-
Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology’, European Journal
of Sociology 95: 1474–504.
24. Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1977, p. 747.
25. Smith Moral Sentiments II.3.
26. Hume Treatise of Human Nature (1740).
27. Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, 242.
28. Ibid. 779.
29. William Hazlitt The Spirit of the Age ‘William Godwin’, 1825.
30. William Godwin Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions and
Discoveries, Interspersed with some Particulares respecting the
Author, London: ‘Essay XV Of Love and Friendship’, 1831. All

209

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 Notes to pp. 107–19

references are to an unpaginated ebook provided by the University

of Adelaide, Australia, at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/
godwin/william/thoughts/chapter15.html.
31. Ibid.
32. inid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. The assumption of unstated but undying loyalty to a friend which
is the premise of the sidekick theme is what makes the following
joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto so funny: the two suddenly
find themselves surrounded by hostile Sioux or Cheyenne; the
Lone Ranger says, ‘Tonto! We’re surrounded by Indians!’ where-
upon Tonto replies, ‘We, Kemo Sabe?’.Tonto was an Indian.
41. Some of the information here comes very helpfully from inter-
esting work by LaMont L. Egle ‘Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds
in Early Nineteenth-­Century British Fiction’, PhD dissertation
University of Michigan, 2009. It directed me to some reading I
would not otherwise have done.
42. Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays 1857, p. 182.
43. Thomas Hughes Tom Brown at Oxford 1861, p. 73.
44. Quoted in C. Oulton Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p. 39.
45. Some speaking nineteenth-­century photographs of the subject
can be viewed at http://artofmanliness.com/2008/08/24/the-­
history-­and-­nature-­of-­man-­friendships/
46. Stendhal De L’Amour tells of the ‘Salzburg bough’, the little twig
dangled down the salt mine until glittering with crystals, and
presented to the object of one’s infatuation as a love token; the
idea is that we cover the other in a disguise of brilliancies, which
only melt away when the quiet of the marriage-­bed has replaced
the hurly-­burly of the chaise longue (to use Mrs Patrick Campbell’s
immortal phrase).
47. Since Edvard Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage (1903;
quite what ‘human’ is doing in the title is obscure) and most
particularly since the liberalisation of divorce laws, the not exclu-
sively anthropological literature on marriage has burgeoned

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 Notes to pp. 119–34

exponentially; most of it is of the exhortatory or self-­help type,

and comprehensive studies are relatively few because of the
complexity and diversity of the subject. Studies of family life,
being wider in focus, are more helpful in general to understanding
the importance of the bonds that lie at the heart of our social lives.
48. At the time of writing, the movement for the gay right to marry,
not merely to enter ‘civil partnerships’, is in full flow in the UK
and the US, marking a desire for integration into social normality.

7 Excursus: Friendship Illustrated

1. Plutarch tells us in his life of Pericles that Pericles kissed Aspasia
every day, both on leaving home and on returning to it. This was
regarded as extraordinary behaviour between a man and a woman
at that time, and hence worth remarking.
2. Homer The Iliad Book IX.
3. Aeschylus fragments 135, 136, Plato Symposium 179e–180b;
Aeschines Timarchus 133, 141 et seq.
4. The Iliad Book XI.
5. Ibid. Book XV.
6. Ibid. Book XVI.
7. Ibid. Book XVII.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid. Book XVIII.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. Book XXII.
16. Ibid. Book XXIII.
17. Ibid. Book XXIV.
18. 1 Samuel 15.
19. 1 Samuel 16.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid. 18. Either Saul was particularly forgetful or the Bible’s
frequent editorial problems are evident here: this chapter has Saul
and David meeting for the first time despite David’s soothing of
Saul with the lyre in the previous chapter.
22. Ibid. 18.
23. Ibid.

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 Notes to pp. 134–51

24. Ibid. 19.

25. Ibid. 20.
26. Ibid.
27. 2 Samuel 1.
28. It is instructive to look at the missionary literature on these
matters on the internet: http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2012/were-­
david-­and-­jonathan-­homosexual-­lovers/
29. See W. R. Childs (ed.) Vita Edwardi Secundi, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
30. Roger of Hoveden Annals, trans. H. T. Riley, London, 1853 Vol.
II, pp. 63–4.
31. Ibid. p. 356.
32. Ruth 1:8–9.
33. Ibid. 1:16–17.
34. See A. Brenner (ed.) Ruth and Esther: A Feminist Companion to
the Bible, Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1999; M. D.
Coogan, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
35. See Genesis 2:24, Ruth 1:14. This point is asserted in campaigns for
equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian people; see, for example,
http://www.wouldjesusdiscriminate.org/biblical_evidence/ruth_
naomi.html.
36. Iliad Book IV.
37. Themistius, Private Orations, trans. R. J. Penella, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2000, p. 95.
38. Ibid. pp. 89–90.
39. Ibid. pp. 91–3.
40. Ibid. pp. 93–4.
41. Ibid. p. 94.
42. Ibid. p. 95.
43. Ibid. pp. 97–9.
44. Ibid. pp. 99–100.
45. Virgil The Aeneid Book IX.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid. Book V.
50. Lucian Amores, trans. W. J. Baylis.
51. Ibid., slightly adapted for style.
52. S. Guy-­Bray Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006 p. 51.

212

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 Notes to pp. 151–95

53. See the entry in James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence A

Dictionary of Medieval Romance Writers, London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1913.
54. Guy-­Bray Loving p. 52.
55. The Book of Good Counsels (from the Hitopadesa) trans. Sir
Edwin Arnold Smith, London, Edler & Co., 1861, ‘Story of the
Vulture, the Cat, and the Birds’.
56. For a depiction of how this works see an image of the Attic red-­
figure vase in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showing Zephyros
and Hyakinthos c. 480 bce, at http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/
T29.1.html.
57. Genesis 38: 9–10.
58. Leviticus 20: 13.
59. Adam Sisman The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge,
London: Harperpress, 2006.
60. David Bodanis Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love
Affair, London: Little, Brown, 2006.
61. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (eds) The Company They
Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, New York, NY: New
York Review of Books, 2011.
62. C. Ricks Tennyson, London: Macmillan, 1972.

9 Friendship Examined
1. Anthony Price makes play of those in relation to his own twin
brother in connection with Aristotle’s remark. See Love and
Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, Acknowledgements, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994.

10 The Two Claims

1. Luke 10:25–37.
2. Some historical contrasts are stark. Public nudity or exposure of
genitals is regarded as ‘indecent’. In ancient Sparta boys and girls
exercised naked together in the gymnasium; gymnos means ‘naked’.
In England it is still illegal to show an image of an erect male penis.
In ancient Rome depictions of erect male penises were placed over
every front door, and worn as amulets on the arms of girls, to ward
off the evil eye. Such is the way with customs and time.
3. These were respectively characters in Richmal Crompton’s Just
William stories, and the Famous Five of Enid Blyton.

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Abélard and Héloïse 65 love of all and ‘cool’

abundance of friends friendship 105
57–60, 143 and love between friends 8–9,
Achilles and Patroclus 27, 111, 62, 71–2, 173
123, 124–32, 142, 154 and love of enemies 72
acquaintanceship age
commerce and ‘cool’ and intensity of love and
friendships 103–5 friendship 165, 166
Montaigne on casual and paederastia roles 124–5,
acquaintanceship 82, 83 153–4
action and emotion 100, 108 Ainsworth, William Harrison:
advice and admonition 50, 88, Jack Sheppard 113
92–3, 128, 178 Alypius 65
Aelred of Rievaulx 8, 9 Ambrose of Milan 65
Aeschines: Timarchus 124, 125 Amys and Amylion 147, 150–1
Aeschylus 14 ancient Greece and Rome see
The Myrmidons 124, 125 classical antiquity
Oresteia trilogy 147 ‘another self’ representation
affection 45, 46, 51, 56–7, 173 182–4
dilution of plurality of Aristotle’s claim 34–5, 40–1,
friends 58 54, 58, 73
see also love and friendship Augustine 65
agape (Christian love) 188–9 Bacon on inadequacy of 93–4

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Cicero on ‘second self’ 47, 54 Bacon, Francis 10

Mancius and Eastern thought ‘On Friendship’ 81–2,
170 91–4
Montaigne 82, 87, 90, 182 bad friends 58–9, 81, 180–1
as Renaissance trope 78, 79–81 see also false friendships
see also likeness and Barnes, Djuna 161
congeniality Beauty and love in Plato’s
antiquity see classical antiquity Symposium 27, 28
apatheia and Stoicism 7 Bell, Clive 161
Aquinas, St Thomas 8, 9, 69–73, Bell, Vanessa 161
74–5 Bellow, Saul 160
Summa theologiae 70 benevolence see generosity;
Aristotle 14, 43, 99, 177, 186, goodwill and friendship;
201–2 mutual benefit
kinds of friendship 33, 70–1 ‘best’ friends
‘middle way’ and friendship Montaigne’s special friendship
181 82, 87–8, 90–1
Nicomachean Ethics 6, 11, 20, Plutarch on 58
25, 31–41, 42–3, 79 Bible
Protrepticus philosophiae 61 David and Jonathan 123,
society and friendship 31–2, 132–8
36–7, 40, 88 Ruth and Naomi 138–40
virtue and true friendship sexual prohibitions 156
33–4, 35, 36–8, 72 Bloomsbury Group 161
and Voltaire’s view 102–3 boarding schools and ‘virtuous’
see also ‘another self’ male friendship 114–16
representation Boccaccio, Giovanni 10
art Decameron 77–8
medieval religious art 77 Book of Good Counsels, The
Renaissance celebration of (Hindu text) 152
humanity 77 Boswell, James 162–3
Aspasia and Pericles 123–4 Breme, Thomas: The mirror of
ataraxia (tranquility, peace of friendship 80
mind) 6–7, 51 Brittain, Vera: Testament of
Augustine of Hippo, St 8–9, Youth 12–13
74–5, 94 Brontë, Charlotte 13
Confessions 61–9, 73 Brontë sisters 117
Austen, Jane 117–19, 155 Buchan, John 113
autonomy in friendship Bulwer-Lytton, Edward: Paul
182–3 Clifford 113

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care: friendship and freedom and sharing with friends 178

from 50–1 types of love 108
caring and feminist philosophy see also Aristotle; Cicero;
11–12 Plato; Plutarch
charity see agape (Christian Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and
love) Wordsworth 157–8
Châtelet, Emilie du 101–2, 158–9 comfort 177
Cheever, John 160 commercial society and
childhood friendships 195–7, 202 friendships 103–5
choosing friends common features see likeness
Cicero’s advice 52–3 and congeniality
Plutarch’s advice 58–60 constancy 52, 53, 59, 116–17
Smith on release from see also loyalty
traditional ties 104 contemplative philosophical life
Themistius’ advice 142–3 38, 39–40
Christian thought 8–9, 40, conversation amongst friends
61–75, 180 Bacon and wisdom from 92
see also Bible Montaigne on 84
Churchyard, Thomas: A Sparke ‘cool’ friendships
of Friendship 80 and commercial society 103–5
Cicero see also acquaintanceship
Enlightenment admirers 102, cosmopolitanism and ‘cool’
105 friendships 103–5
Hortensius 61–2 ‘cowboy’ novels 113
Laelius: De amicitia 8, 42–57, Craft, Robert 161
79 creativity: support and
classical antiquity 5–9 inspiration of friends 161–6
Achilles and Patroclus 27, 111, cross-sex friendships 89, 101–2,
123, 124–32, 142, 154 123–4, 158–9, 173–4,
Diomedes and Sthenelus 140–4 190–4
and Enlightenment thought Crowther, Prudence 160
102–3, 105
homosexual love 3, 5, 20–1, Dante 49
27–30, 124–6 David and Jonathan 123, 132–8
and inequality in friendship de La Boétie, Etienne 11, 82, 83,
109–10, 126–7 85–7, 90, 151
Nisus and Euryalus 144–7 Discourse on the Voluntary
Roman Republic as Servitude (The Protest)
nineteenth-century role 85–6
model 111–17 death see loss of friends

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desire Bacon on fruits of friendship

friendship and love in Plato’s 91–2
Symposium 26–7, 28–9 Cicero on affection and
sex and heterosexual friendship 46, 51, 56–7
friendships 101–2, 123–4, and Hume’s philosophy 100–1
173–4, 179, 190–4 Kant’s objections 10, 99–100,
see also homosexual love in 101
history role in life and reasoning 101
Diana: Virgin Mary as successor Stoics and reason 7–8
to 206–7n see also affection; love and
Dickens, Charles 113, 117 friendship
Diderot, René 95 Empire and classical role models
Diomedes and Sthenelus 140–4 111–17
Disraeli, Benjamin: Coningsby empiricism 95–6
113 ending of friendship 157–9,
divorce 2 179, 197
dogs 196 see also loss of friends
Dorke, Walter: A Tipe or Figure enemies and Christian doctrine
of Friendship 80 68–9, 72
durability of friendship Enlightenment friendship
157–8 95–119
duty and Kant’s limits on Epicureans 6–7
friendship 99–100, 101 Epicurus 7
Epstein, Barbara 159
education Epstein, Jason 160
boarding schools and equality between friends 53, 98–9
‘virtuous’ male friendship classical antiquity and
114–16 inequality in friendship
Empire and classical role 109–10, 126–7, 132
models 112–17 problem of friendship with
Edward II, king of England 137 God 9, 70
Egan, Pierce: Life in London and value and nature of
sequel 113 inequalities in friendship
Einstein, Albert 160 51–2, 99, 107, 108–11
Eliot, George 117, 162 see also mutual benefit;
Eliot, T. S. 162 utilitarianism
Elyot, Thomas: The Boke Erasmus, Desiderius 42, 79–80
Named the Governor 80 erotic attraction see desire;
emotion 3–5 homosexual love in
and action 100, 108 history; sex

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ethics and friendship 96–101, see also advice and

187–8, 192 admonition
eudaimon life and Aristotelean Frazer, Sir James: The Golden
philosophy 6, 36–8, 39–40 Bough 206–7n
eupathic responses and Stoicism freedom of thought in
7–8 Enlightenment 96–7
Euripides 147–8 ‘friend’ as term of address 200–1
Euryalus and Nisus 144–7, 183 Fry, Roger 161
excellence and true friendship
33–4, 36, 37 Gaskell, Mrs 117
experience Life of Charlotte Brontë 13
and choice of friends 53 Gaveston, Piers 137
see also subjective experience gender differences
and Godwin on equality 110
Facebook and plurality of and homosexual element to
friends 57–60 male friendships 152–3
Falconer, William 44 Montaigne on friendship and
falling out with friends 157–9, sex 89
179 stereotypes 14, 153, 154–5
false friendships 4, 36, 66, 176–7 see also women’s friendships
failed friendship in Timon of generosity in obituary
Athens 81, 180–1 reminiscences 160–1
see also bad friends God
family relations 14, 36, 46, 88–9 Aquinas and friendship with
Godwin on parental love 108 God 69–70, 72
importance in pastoral society friendship and love of 8–9,
103, 104 64–5, 65–7
parent–child relationship 1, as Old Testament deity 133
12, 88, 90, 100, 108, 172 Godwin, William 106–11
women’s lives and friendships ‘Of Love and Friendship’
13 107–11, 132
Fannius, Gaius 44 Goldsmith, Oliver 5
feminist philosophy and caring Goliath 133–4
11–12 good life in classical antiquity
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones 106 6–7, 185–6
forgiveness 56 eudaimon life and
formative nature of friendship Aristotelean philosophy 6,
170–1 36–8, 39–40
Forster, E. M. 49 good and eros in Plato’s
frankness 50, 53 Symposium 28–9

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good of friendship in Plato’s Nisus and Euryalus 144–5,

Lysis 24–5 146–7
Goodman, Paul 161 Orestes and Pylades 149
goodness see virtue and and Plato’s Symposium 20–1,
friendship 27–30
goodwill and friendship suppression in hostile societies
Aristotle‘s view as component 156–7
33, 34 honour and loyalty to friends
Cicero on 45, 46–7, 48, 51, 49–50, 52, 55, 180
54–5, 56–7 Hughes, Thomas: Tom Brown
Fielding’s esteem of good- novels 113, 115–16
heartedness 106 Huguenots and religious conflict
Kant on value of unequal 85–6
well-wishing 99 humanism
Greece see Aristotle; classical and Enlightenment views of
antiquity; Plato friendship 105–6
grief see loss of friends and Renaissance thought 78,
Grimald, Nicholas 80 83
groups of friends 161–2 Hume, David 42, 95, 100–1,
Guy-Bray, Stephen 150–1 103–4, 105, 162

Hallam, Arthur Henry 163–6 infatuation 118–19, 173

Hazlitt, William 81, 107 instrumentalism 7, 24, 25, 39,
Héloïse and Abélard 65 187, 201
Henty, George Alfred 113 and false friendship 3–4, 36,
Homer: Iliad 124–32, 66, 176–7
140–1, 142 and Plutarch’s advice 58, 59
homosexual love in history 3, 5 see also utilitarianism
Achilles and Patroclus intellectual exercise
124–5, 154 Montaigne on conversation
age and paederastia roles amongst friends 84
124–5, 153–4 Voltaire and Emilie
David and Jonathan 136–8 du Châtelet 101–2, 158–9
as element in friendship 123, Wordsworth and Coleridge
138, 147, 152–7, 165 157–8
Montaigne on friendship intimacy
and 89 Kant’s limitations on 99–100
nineteenth-century fiction and and women’s friendships 14
virtuous male friendship Iphigenia 147–9
114–16 irrationality 182

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Johnson, Samuel 162–3 Montaigne’s ‘On Friendship’

Jonathan and David 123, 134–8 5, 11, 82
justice and indifferent concern obituary accounts and
for others 11 reminiscences 159–61
subjective experience 197–8
Kant, Immanuel 10, 95, 96–100, Tennyson’s In Memoriam
101, 103, 177 163–6
Metaphysic of Morals 99–100 see also falling out with
keeping friends: Themistius’ friends
advice 143–4 love and friendship 2, 5, 48,
Keynes, John Maynard 161 172–3
kin see family relations Aquinas’ anatomy of 70–1
Krauze, Enrique 160 Austen’s view of marriage as
friendship 118–19
Laelius, Gaius: in Cicero’s De Godwin on 107–8
amicitia 44–57 Kant’s limitations 99
Lewes, G. H. 162 and Plato’s Lysis and
likeness and congeniality Symposium 20–1, 26–30
Augustine 63–4 Tennyson’s love and loss in In
Cicero 46, 53, 54 Memoriam 163–6
Erasmus 80 see also affection; homosexual
Montaigne 86–7 love in history; marriage
Plato 23–4, 25–6 and friendship
see also ‘another self’ Lowell, Robert 160
representation loyalty 52, 116–17
liking and honour 49–50, 52, 55, 180
childhood friendships 195–7 Lucian 149
as natural propensity 5, 80,
87, 136 male friendship
reasons for 4–5, 26 activity as basis of 14, 153,
literature and analysis of 154–5
friendship 14 in classical antiquity 6, 109–10
loneliness: Bacon on 91, 92 and nineteenth-century
loss of friends 2 popular fiction 112–13
Achilles and Patroclus 129–32 see also homosexual love in
Augustine on 63, 64 history
grief as consequence of Marian iconography in medieval
friendship 179 art 77
Laelius’ loss of Scipio Marlow, Christopher 79
Amaelianus 45 marriage and friendship

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Austen’s view 118–19 value and nature of

challenges of 119, 191–2 inequalities in friendship
shared experience with other 51–2, 99, 107, 108–11
couples 198–9 see also equality between
medieval period friends; reciprocity;
bleakness in art and life 76–7 utilitarianism
homosexual subtext to Amys mutual respect 8, 35, 53, 99–100
and Amylion 150–1
Mencius 170 Naomi and Ruth 138–40
merging of two selves 11 natural propensity 136
see also ‘another self’ Erasmus on 80
representation Montaigne on 5, 87
military and classical role Nebridius 65
models 111–12 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 10
moderation in friendship 181 Nisus and Euryalus 144–7, 183
Modern Family (TV series) 153 ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy 55
modern society and influences number of friends
2–3 Plutarch on 57–60
modernity 9–10 Themistius on 143
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de
81–91, 151, 182 obituary accounts and
‘On Friendship’ 5, 10, 11, reminiscences 159–61
81–2, 85–91 Oppenheimer, Robert 160
‘On Three Kinds of opposites: attraction and
Relationships’ 82–5 complementarity of 25, 28,
Moore, G. E. 161 32, 143
morality oppositional nature of
Hume on human nature and friendship 10
morality 100–1 Orestes and Pylades 147–9
and Kantian friendship 10,
97–8, 99–100 paederastia custom in ancient
traditional ties and moral Greece 124–6
behaviour 104–5 age and definition of roles
muscular Christianity 115 124–5, 153–4
mutual benefit 3–4, 25, 35, 36, pairs of friends 57–8
39, 48, 177, 187, 188 parent–child relationship 1, 12,
inequality of caring 88, 90, 100, 172
relationship 11–12 Godwin on parental love 108
and Kant’s ideal 97–8 patriotism
and love of God 9, 70 and loyalty to friends 49–50

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and nineteenth-century qualities required in friends:

classical role models 112 Cicero on 53
Patroclus see Achilles and
Patroclus reason 181–2
Paz, Octavio 160 and Aristotle’s virtuous life
Perelman, S. J. 160 37–8
Pericles and Aspasia 123–4 and Enlightenment
Petrarch 76 empiricism 95–6
philia and Enlightenment ethics 10,
and friendship in Plato’s Lysis 100–1
31 eupathic responses and
phileta (‘lovables’) in Stoicism 7–8
Aristotle’s Nicomachean as inimical to love 107–8
Ethics 31, 32–3 instrumentalism and false
Philip II, king of France 137 friendship 3–4
philosophical contemplation 38, reciprocity 36, 81, 98
39–40 and child–parent relationship
philosophy and friendship 5 88, 172
photographs: attitudes of male and love of God 9, 70
friends 116 as prerequisite of friendship
Pinckney, Darryl 160–1 151, 172
Plato 14, 19–30, 40, 43, see also equality between
83, 115 friends; mutual benefit
Lysis 6, 9, 19–27, 79 religious art in medieval period
Symposium 6, 9, 20–1, 26–30, 77
124, 125 religious beliefs
‘Platonic love’ 29–30 attitudes to homosexuality 155
pleasure and friendship 33, 36, and conflict in Renaissance
58, 59 period 85–6
plurality of friends 57–60, 143 and friendship 67–8
Plutarch 62, 83 see also Christian thought
Moral Essays 57–60 Renaissance 9–10, 76–94
politics 201 respect
Aristotle on society and self-respect 73
friendship 31–2, 36–7, 40, see also mutual respect
88 Richard I, king of England 137
Polybius 45 Roger of Hoveden 137
Pound, Ezra 162 Romanticism 106–7
Pylades and Orestes 147–9 Rome see Cicero; classical
Pythagoras 204n antiquity

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Russell, Bertrand 73 Smith, Adam 103–5

Ruth and Naomi 138–40 social status of friends
Achilles and Patroclus 126–7,
Saul 133, 134–5 132
Scaevola, Quintus Mucius 44–5 David and Jonathan 136
science: Enlightenment sociality: friendship as human
application 95–6 necessity 170–1, 178–9
Scipio Amaelianus 44, 45 society and friendship
second self see ‘another self’ Aristotle on 31–2, 36–7,
representation 40, 88
self-interest and friendship 10, historical imposition of
180, 183–4 social and sexual roles
self-love 155–7
mutual benefit and Kant’s sex and constraints on
ideal 97–8 friendship 191–2
and treatment of friends as Socrates 44
self 54, 73, 183–4 in Plato’s Lysis 19, 20, 21–5,
and virtue 6, 35, 73 26–7
self-respect 73 in Plato’s Symposium 27–30
self-sufficiency of good people solace 177
24–5, 70 solitude: Bacon on 91
sex Sontag, Susan 161
and man–woman friendships Sophocles 14, 147
101–2, 123–4, 173–4, 179, special friendships: Montaigne
190–4 on 82, 87–8, 90–1
see also homosexual love in Spenser, Edmund: The Squire of
history Low Degree 151
Shakespeare, William: Timon of Stendhal 118
Athens 81, 180–1 Sthenelus and Diomedes 140–4
sharing with friends 177–8 Stoics 6–8, 47, 56
sibling bonds 88–9, 90 Strachey, Lytton 161
Silvers, Robert 159 Stravinsky, Igor 161
sin subjective experience 15,
Augustine’s ‘unfriendly 194–9
friendship’ 67 sympathy 177
and loyalty to friends 49–50,
52, 164, 180 talk see conversation amongst
Sinclair, May 13 friends
‘situational’ homosexuality Taverner, Richard: The Garden
114–16 of Wysdom 80

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Tennyson, Alfred: In Memoriam and true friendship in

A. H. H. 163–6 Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Tennyson, Emily 163, 165 Ethics 33–4, 35, 36–8, 72
Themistius 141–4 and Voltaire’s definition
theology see Christian thought 102–3
Theophrastus 44 Voltaire 95, 101–3
Tiptoft, John 79 Candide 101
trade and ‘cool’ friendships definition of friendship
103–5 102–3
traditional ties and moral and Emilie du Châtelet 101–2,
behaviour 104–5 158–9
Trollope, Anthony 113 ‘The Temple of Friendship’
trust 87, 109, 110–11 102
see also false friendships
twins and ‘another self’ trope 183 Walcott, Derek 160
Western novels 113
understanding 189–90 Wilde, Oscar 10, 165
urbanisation and ‘cool’ Wilson, Edmund 160
friendships 103–5 wisdom through friendship 28,
usefulness see instrumentalism; 29, 89, 92
mutual benefit; women’s friendships 12–14, 110,
utilitarianism 117–19
utilitarianism 11, 33, 36` constraints of marriage on
see also instrumentalism; 191–2
mutual benefit historical imposition of social
roles 155
variety of human needs and lack of voice and lack of
friendship 174–5, 186 evidence in history 12
Virgil: The Aeneid 144–7 with men 89, 101–2, 123–4,
virtue and friendship 158–9, 173–4, 191–4
Cicero’s Laelius: De amicitia Ruth and Naomi 138–40
46, 55–6 Woolf, Virginia 161
God’s love bestows virtue 72 Wordsworth, William and
nineteenth-century fiction and Coleridge 157–8
virtuous male friendship
114–16 Xenophon
self-sufficiency of good Memorabilia 44
people 24–5, 70 Symposium 125

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