Amicitia

Abstract

The question of what constitutes friendship—a true friend—is one that has been asked in many societies and historically contingent periods, and from a number of different vantage points. Just as the Romans interrogated themselves as to the precise nature of their amicitiae, so, too, have ancient historians and classicists investigated the vast field of that relationship. They have asked widely divergent questions: What was the philosophical or emotional basis of Roman friendship? How did Roman authors, from the comedies of the middle republic to later imperial works, discuss friendship? What role did it play in society, in economic or political contexts? How was the traditional notion of amicitia changed by the changing circumstances first of the imperial period and, more profoundly, by the advent of Christendom? Ancient historians and classicists have been attempting to answer these questions for a long time. Scholarly discourse can be broadly divided into two large fields, the first of which was (and is) concerned with the development of Roman philosophical thought on amicitia and, particularly, with Cicero’s famous treatise Laelius de amicitia. As the study of Roman amicitiae is rendered exceedingly complicated by the intentionally vague semantics of Roman terminology, which employs amicitia for a variety of social relationships, not all of which a majority of people would now term “friendships,” little consensus has been reached beyond strictly philological questions. In addition to these philological and philosophical enquiries, however, a second field emerged in the early 1980s, which emphasized the importance of Roman institutions of personal relationships for the study of Roman history, particularly in the field of politics. This perspective has been enlarged in recent years by a renewed interest in the role of amicitia in, e.g., the Roman economy and in the communicative and affiliative strategies that were essential in creating and maintaining amicitiae. Additionally, there appeared what might be called a “democratization” of friendship studies, with amicitia no longer seen as an exclusive phenomenon between elite Roman males. The advent of Christianity (but also of new philosophical schools) in Late Antiquity was accompanied by a distinct rethinking of amicitia from a Neoplatonic and Christian perspective. Schramm 2013 and White 1992 (both cited under General Overviews) offer exemplary approaches and further references, but the changing interpretations of amicitia in the later Roman world make this a distinctly different subject and consequently this period is excluded from this bibliography.