In the Orbit of Love: Affection in Ancient Greece and Rome 0190887877, 9780190887872

Citation preview

In the Orbit of Love

In the Orbit o f   L ov e AFFECTION IN ANCIENT G R E E C E A N D   RO M E

David Konstan

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​088787–​2 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

I dedicate this book to my grandchildren, Ali, Zach, and Sadie Blue, who occupy the innermost orbit of my love.

CONTENTS

Preface  Acknowledgments 

ix xi

Introduction 

1

1. Love and Friendship 

33

2. Loyalty: The Missing Virtue 

61

3. Gratitude and Liberality 

95

4. Grief and the Self 

129

5. Love and the State 

159

Conclusion 

187

Bibliography  Index 

189 205

P R E FAC E

This book is about love in the classical world—​not erotic passion, which was a distinct sentiment in its own right, but the kind of love that binds together intimate members of a family and very close friends, but which may also be extended to include a wider range of individuals for whom we care deeply. I begin with friendship, which has been much studied, including in earlier work of my own, but which I hope to have considered from a new angle, that is, the sense that friendship is so powerful a bond that the identities of two friends all but merge into one. From there, I look at some ties and relationships that are generally not treated as functions of love, for example, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic solidarity. For the most part, these relations are analyzed in terms of reciprocity, involving in one or another way expectations of return. They thus appear to have a selfish or at least self-​centered dimension, as distinct from truly other-​regarding attitudes. Indeed, this is part of the way such relations are described in our sources.

x | Preface

But there is also a counter strand of genuinely altruistic feelings and behavior, which I seek to bring out in the chapters that follow. That other aspect, which is in tension with the role of reciprocity, finds expression not as a moral duty or a respect for human dignity generally (although there are elements of these notions), but rather as a consequence or manifestation of love, which plays a larger part than we might expect in classical ways of thinking. This limitation of altruism or identification to loved ones is not without problems of its own. Nevertheless, a close look at how love drew into its orbit the various relations examined in this book may shed light on some central features of not only ancient habits of thought but also, it is to be hoped, our own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have numerous debts to scholars who have, in comments and conversations, offered insights that have helped me to see the essential lineaments of the argument of this book. I would first of all like to thank Stavroula Kiritsi, Mark Kulikovsky, and Guy Schuh, who read the entire manuscript and made valuable suggestions, most of which I adopted. I thank also the three anonymous readers for the press, as well as the editor, Stefan Vranka, for his encouragement and his customary critical acumen. It is pleasure also to acknowledge the ideal working conditions provided by two research institutes at which I had the honor of being a fellow during the academic year 2016–​2017. This book benefited enormously from my fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study during the period 1 September to 16 December 2016, and from my fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies (France), with the financial support of the French State managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche,

xii | Acknowledgments

programme “Investissements d’avenir” (ANR-​11-​LABX-​0027-​01 Labex RFIEA+), during the period 1 February to 30 June 2017. I am also grateful to New York University for the leave granted me during that same year, and the constant exchanges with my colleagues in the Classics and Philosophy Departments. The chapters of the book were delivered in one form or another as talks on many occasions, and I derived great benefit from comments on these occasions. Chapter 1, on friendship, was inspired in part by a talk I presented at a conference on distributed cognition held at the University of Edinburgh (Konstan 2018). Chapter 2, on loyalty, was born at a conference on loyalty at the Ohio State University (Konstan 2016a). Chapter 3, on gratitude and liberality, was inspired by a request to contribute to a volume on gratitude, and versions of the part on liberality were delivered at the Universities of Uppsala and the Sorbonne (Konstan 2016d, 2017). Chapter 4, on grief, was the result of an invitation to contribute a special essay to the journal ClassicalWorld (Konstan 2016c). Finally, ­chapter 5, on solidarity, first came to life at conferences at the Universities of Freiburg and Leiden (Konstan 2010). I am aware of having omitted several other venues where aspects of the arguments in this book were presented or discussed, and I offer my sincere apologies to all whom I have accidentally failed to acknowledge. They can be sure that I was and remain deeply appreciative of their help.

In the Orbit of Love

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The ancient Greek city-​states in the classical period were a remarkable social formation. They were small, independent polities in a world dominated by large kingdoms. They made large use of slavery in production, to such an extent that they can, along with Rome, be properly described as slave societies, which were otherwise rare or nonexistent in antiquity.1 By contrast, there emerged a strong conception of freedom, and along with it of citizenship. Citizenship formed in turn the basis for forms of participatory government, sometimes restricted to the heads of wealthier or aristocratic households but giving rise also to the classical democracy that, in Athens of the fifth and most of the fourth centuries bc, rendered all freeborn adult male members of the polis political equals. Women and children were excluded from full participation in civic decision-​making, and remained under the authority of a male citizen, normally the head of his oikos or household. As the Greeks conceived it, the city was composed not of individuals so much as families. Ideally, a household was   See Ste. Croix (1989, 53–​58, 209) for the description of classical Greece and Rome as “slave societies,” in which the majority of surplus product (not total product) was the result of slave labor; this situation was unparalleled in the ancient world. 1

2 | In the Orbit of Love

self-​sufficient, which implied ownership of a certain amount of land; this is why there were frequently minimum property conditions for full citizen rights, and why, even in democratic Athens, resident foreigners were not permitted to own land. Aristotle considered the oikos to be prior to the polis, at least analytically, although of course households never existed independently of the community that was constituted out of them. But the well-​being of the city-​state required a high degree of solidarity among these potentially autarkic units. This was especially the case inasmuch as the poleis (plural of polis) were under the constant threat of war, and wars demanded huge sacrifices on the part of the citizen body.2 The cohesion of the citizen class was also required, as Plato observed, for defense against the numerous slave population, which, it was supposed, might rebel at any sign of disunity or weakness.3 There thus emerged a powerful ideology, or ideologies, of cooperation and unity among citizens, involving a variety of elements such as myths of kinship and autochthony, civic rituals and festivals, and ideals of military valor, to bind the entire group. The success of such strategies was only partial, as a great many examples of ruthless class warfare or stasis within the several cities make clear. The need for social stability, combined with the variety of regimes in well over a thousand independent city-​states, which offered models of alternative government, and the opportunity to design constitutions for the colonies that were planted in newly settled territories, provided the impetus for reflection on the best kind of state and ultimately gave rise to systematic political theory. Rather than develop abstract doctrines about rights or fantasies of pre-​social contracts, the classical thinkers focused on   See Meineck and Konstan (2014).   See Price (2001); Shear (2011; with Simonton 2012).

2 3

Introduction | 3

the character traits that would best promote and sustain solidarity among the citizens, as well as the types of education and forms of government in which such values might flourish. Ethics was thus central to political thought, and with it came a strong emphasis on the notion of virtue. In both Greek and Latin, the idea of virtue was originally associated with courage in war (“virtue” derives from the Latin virtus, the quality of being a man or vir). The term was generalized, however, to signify excellence in general, and endowed with a moral sense to represent those qualities best suited to a fulfilled life. Although virtues were understood to pertain to individuals, their role in enabling social cohesion was always paramount. Thus, although wisdom (sophia) was generally counted as one of the four or five primary virtues, the others included courage, moderation, and justice (and sometimes piety and prudence), which looked to communal interests. In this connection, personal affection too took on a crucial role, in the form of friendship and wider civic bonding. This is why fully one fifth of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics deals with love or philia, and also why justice, which deals with fairness in exchange, occupies a similarly central role. For Aristotle as well as for other classical philosophers, reciprocity and affection constituted the two fundamental grounds of interpersonal relations within the city and, to a more limited extent, between citizens and foreigners as well. Over the past few decades, the idea of reciprocity has received a good deal of attention, and has come to occupy a dominant position in contemporary approaches to social life in the classical world. Many studies have also been devoted to love or philia (this term in Greek generally excluded strictly erotic relations, which were represented by the term erōs); however, its role as a complement to reciprocity in social relations has been largely neglected. Indeed, many scholars have treated philia as essentially a form of

4 | In the Orbit of Love

mutual obligation rather than as an affect, and so have subsumed it under reciprocity.4 No doubt, love and friendship (the latter in Greek was called by the same term, philia) are not exempt from expectations of return: signs of affection that are not reciprocated may damage a relationship. Nevertheless, love was commonly understood to be a selfless desire for a dear one’s well-​being and constituted a bond among people that was not based solely on exchange. Of course, love normally obtained among intimates rather than among the populace as a whole, and so had a narrower extension than apparently more objective ties based on commerce and other prestations. The intense camaraderie of small groups of friends might even pose a danger to the larger community in the form of factionalism, and such politically motivated clubs in Athens were known as hetairiai, derived from the word hetairos or “companion.” Political thinkers were alert to the threat, although Plato and Aristotle pay it relatively little attention (it loomed larger in the treatises on friendship composed by Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum, and by Cicero, under the very different circumstances of the death throes of the Roman Republic). But philia could also be treated, as is done by Aristotle, as the basis of civic harmony or homonoia. Love, then, was a major element in classical conceptions of social relations, and yet there remain substantial disagreements over the way it was conceived. More particularly, a number of scholars have denied that philia was understood to be a wholly altruistic sentiment, and have argued that what we translate as “love” or “friendship” had little or no affective quality at all, but was predicated precisely on reciprocity and hence, in the last   See, e.g., Heath (1987, 73–​74); Goldhill (1986, 82), quoted in ­chapter 1, n. 16. 4

Introduction | 5

analysis, was reducible to a kind of egoism. We shall have occasion to examine the basis of these claims and to see to what extent love and reciprocity were conceived of as complementary dimensions of social life. In the process, we shall see that philia was also implicated in the classical conception of other values or sentiments where its role has not been fully acknowledged by modern scholars. The examples that are treated in the present book include loyalty, gratitude, grief, and (as noted above) civic concord. It is philia, then, that binds the chapters of this book together. One obstacle to the analysis of philia is the fact that the very idea of altruism has come under suspicion in modern times. In popular awareness, the distinction between doing things for others and for oneself is clear, even if there reigns a certain skepticism concerning the possibility of altruism. As Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson put it in their recent book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, if common sense is what people commonly believe, then it would seem that “egoism has made large inroads” into it and “is now a worldview endorsed by large numbers of people.”5 Three distinct lines of thought, however, have contributed to the marginalization of altruism in social scientific discussions. The first of these is the preeminence of rational choice theory in economics, which takes it for granted that people invest or make purchases, and in general conduct social operations of exchange, on the basis of their individual interests.6 In this respect, there is a convergence with Marxist economic theory: both traditions are heir to a conception of interest that is in fact modern   Sober and Wilson (1998, 287).   As Badwahr (1993, 93) observes, “many social scientists (especially economists), evidently unimpressed by (or unaware of) philosophical arguments against psychological egoism, continue to reflect another common belief, namely, that all human motives reduce to self-​interest.” 5 6

6 | In the Orbit of Love

in origin, whether one dates its emergence to the Enlightenment or as far back as the early Renaissance.7 Thus, although self-​interest appears today to be so self-​evident and basic a concept as to be universal, it is only recently (from the point of view of a classicist) that “interests came to be seen as a realistic basis for politics and as a more stable and reliable motive than the passions” (Heilbron 1998, 77). To be sure, the ancient Greeks understood the notion of advantage, for example (their term was sumpheron), and the word “interest” itself derives from Latin (where it is an impersonal verb meaning “to be of concern,” “to make a difference,” “to be of interest”); but the idea of advantage is not identical with “self-​ interested,” as the notion is employed today in social theory. A second current of thought that has tended to discredit the notion of altruism derives from evolutionary biology and more particularly the strain that has been popularized under the phrase “the selfish gene.” Mathematical models have been invoked to demonstrate that self-​sacrifice for the sake of others cannot have emerged as a dominant trait by means of natural selection, save possibly in the case of one’s own descendants and near blood relations, which might help to preserve the genetic inheritance.8 The theory has recently come under criticism from various quarters, but its influence remains robust. The third prong of the attack on altruism has its origins in anthropology and sociology, and going back above all to the work of Marcel Mauss on the nature of the gift. Mauss held that exchange in premodern economies took the subjective form of   Enlightenment: Hirschman (1977); Renaissance: Heilbron (1998).   Hamilton (1964a; 1964b). For further studies of the evolution of altruism, see Boehm (1999); Hawkes (2001); Noë (2001); Roughgarden, Oishi, and Akçay (2006); Woodburn (1998). I am indebted to Douglas Galbi for these references. 7 8

Introduction | 7

freely bestowed gifts without expectation of return, but that this was a socially sanctioned misrecognition or méconaissance; in fact, the underlying principle or unspoken condition of such prestations was reciprocity. Mauss’s slim volume, translated into English and published as The Gift, had a profound impact on structuralist anthropology, and led postmodern critics like Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida to question the very possibility of a gift as a genuinely unselfish gesture, with no anticipation, however disguised, of compensation.9 Recent investigations, however, have called into question the idea of a primitive gift economy that preceded the emergence of commerce, and maintain that gift-​ giving from the beginning was complementary to exchange, in much the way the concept of liberty emerged in tandem with the institution of servitude.10 Classical thinkers were fully aware of the role of benefactions as a medium of exchange, in which a favor or service created a debt   See Derrida (1997, 128): “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift”; this is the ground of “the impossibility or double bind of the gift” (131). Cf. Bourdieu (1997, 231): “The major characteristic of the experience of the gift is, without doubt, its ambiguity. On the one hand, it is experienced (or intended) as a refusal of self-​interest and egoistic calculation, and an exaltation of generosity—​a gratuitous, unrequited gift. On the other hand, it never entirely excludes awareness of the logic of exchange or even confession of the repressed impulses or, intermittently, the denunciation of another, denied, truth of generous exchange—​its constraining and costly character.” Also Miller (1993, 5): “The official view is that gifts are free, that they are windfalls to receive and kindnesses to confer. They are contrasted with mercantile exchanges, in which everything is calculated and cash is the only tie that binds.” 10   See, for example, Osteen (2002); Mirowski (2004); Carlà and Gori (2014). For discussion, see ­chapter 3. 9

8 | In the Orbit of Love

of obligation on the part of the beneficiary, even as they recognized clearly the difference between a free grant and a loan. The system of patronage in Rome and the tradition of public services of a less formal nature on the part of the wealthy in classical Athens were the impetus for sophisticated studies of this mode of exchange.11 But the major role of the exchange of benefits in classical culture did not erase the idea of a true gift, bestowed without any desire for recompense. The two practices existed side by side, and the nature of favors and gratitude received elaborate discussion by classical writers. One of the arguments put forward in this book is that gifts of the altruistic kind, given wholly for the sake of the recipient without any self-​interested consideration on the part of the donor, may be understood as a manifestation of love rather than of generalized liberality. Aristotle insisted on the selfless nature of love. In his treatise on the art of rhetoric, he defined love (philia) as “wishing for someone the things that he deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one’s ability” (2.4, 1380b36–​81a1). He famously described a friend, that is, someone bound by mutual love or philia, as “another self ” (or “another oneself ”), and we are told by another ancient author that when Aristotle was asked, “What is a friend?” he replied: “One soul dwelling in two bodies” (Diogenes Laertius 5.1.20). We will return to Aristotle’s conception of love in the following chapter, where we will consider to what extent these apparently extravagant statements might deserve to be   The very wealthy were expected to perform “liturgies,” that is, endowments for outfitting a dramatic chorus and equipping a naval vessel, but they also performed a great variety of services to the community, which they proudly enumerated when they found themselves hauled into court over some delict or other. 11

Introduction | 9

taken literally rather than as sentimental metaphors. But even these expressions have sometimes been interpreted as evidence of egoism, insofar as performing services for someone who is, in effect, oneself can be construed as a selfish act. Other passages in Aristotle’s treatment of philia (love or friendship) do, however, discuss the kinds of debt that favors may incur, and there is thus a tension within Aristotle’s analysis between altruism and reciprocity that demands an explanation. This tension, moreover, reappears in classical treatments of other values as well, such as gratitude, loyalty, and even grief, and constitutes a strain (in both senses of the word) in the ideology of ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, the idea that love may transcend the boundaries that separate two individuals is a persistent theme in classical accounts, and one that differentiates it from modern conceptions of friendship. We shall pursue this theme further in ­chapter 1. The notion of a human bond so intimate as to collapse the distance between two people raises the question of loyalty. We do not usually speak of people as being loyal to themselves (except when we mean to their principles or, perhaps, to their higher nature). The ultimate test of friendship was a willingness to die for one’s friend. The Stoic Seneca writes: “ ‘To what end do you make a friend?’ So that I may have someone for whom I can die, so that I may have someone whom I may follow into exile, against whose death I may pledge and devote myself. What you describe,” Seneca replies to his imagined interlocutor, “is commerce, not friendship, for it resembles convenience and looks to what it may obtain” (Epistles 9.10).12 Even the Epicureans maintained that a   “In quid amicum paras?” Ut habeam pro quo mori possim, ut habeam quem in exsilium sequar, cuius me morti et opponam et impendam: ista quam tu describis negotiatio est, non amicitia, quae ad commodum accedit, quae quid consecutura sit spectat. 12

10 | In the Orbit of Love

wise person will never betray a friend and may on occasion die for one (Diogenes Laertius 10.120–​1). One is reminded of the saying in the Gospel of John (15:13), “No one has greater love [agapē] than this, to lay down one’s life on behalf of one’s friends,” which is more in conformity with pagan ideals than is sometimes acknowledged. Conceiving of the identities of friends as merged provides a reason why a person would make such an extreme sacrifice: the other’s death is tantamount to one’s own. But taking the idea of a friend as another self in this literal way runs the risk of eliminating the very possibility of sacrifice for another. One needs some distance between two selves just in order to be able to perform a service for another.13 When Aristotle mentions the willingness of friends to give up their lives for one another, he introduces an oddly self-​regarding rationalization: Every mind chooses what is best for itself, and the virtuous person obeys his mind. And it is true about a serious person that he does many things for the sake of his friends and his country, and even die if need be. For he will give away money and honors and in general the goods that are fought over, while keeping for himself what is noble [kalon]. For he would choose to have enjoyment intensely for a short time rather than mildly for a long time, and to live nobly for a year rather than to live in an ordinary way for many years, and one great and noble action rather than many small ones. And this is perhaps what happens for those who die for another: they choose a great noble thing for themselves. And they may give away money so that their friends may receive more, for

  Cf. Kierkegaard (1998, 57): “it is self-​love to love the other I, who is the beloved or the friend.” 13

Introduction | 11

the friend gets money but he gets what is noble. The greater good, indeed, he assigns to himself. (Nicomachean Ethics 1169a17–​29)14

Aristotle is attempting to take into account the evident imbalance that results when one friend provides such an extraordinary service for another that it cannot possibly be repaid, such as dying for someone else. The qualifying “perhaps” suggests that Aristotle himself is not entirely sure about this explanation: it would seem that any pleasure deriving from the noble deed will be posthumous, and this scarcely seems an adequate motive; however, imagining it in advance might also be a source of pleasure, just as, according to Aristotle, anticipating revenge for an insult lends a certain pleasure to the otherwise painful emotion of anger. But the extreme gesture of self-​sacrifice seems to be overdetermined. In the first place, the deed is motivated

  Lear (2006, 130) observes that in this passage, Aristotle “even suggests that the pleasure and benefit of fine action so far surpass the pleasure of keeping external goods for oneself that the virtuous person will be willing to risk death for its sake”; there is a calculus of pleasure at work rather than a primary concern with the well-​being of another. Irwin (1985, 128) cites Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Achilles’ sacrifice of his own life to avenge the death of Patroclus: “For him such a death was finer, while being alive was expedient” (1359a1–​5). Here indeed, Aristotle contrasts the desire to perform a noble act (kalon) with self-​interest, behavior that is, Aristotle says, typical of the young who are moved more by virtue than by reasoning. Irwin notes, however, that in the Ethics “we find nothing as explicit as we find in the Rhetoric about the connexion between the fine and the good of others” (129), and he argues that this is because the Ethics “refuses to separate it [i.e., the fine] from the agent’s interest” (132). Aristotle thus rejects the apparent tension between the fine and self-​interest that he intimated in the Rhetoric: “Common sense assumes the existence of a conflict that Aristotle wants to deny” (133). 14

12 | In the Orbit of Love

by a desire to perform a noble action; nobility in this context is parsed as a property that one can acquire, in exchange for valuable goods, including life itself. This is in the nature of virtue, which, as Aristotle observes, aims at what is noble, in contrast to petty or crass purposes such as avarice or political ambition. “A courageous person endures and acts as he does for the sake of what is noble,” Aristotle affirms (Nicomachean Ethics 1115b23), and insofar as giving up one’s life for another is an act of courage, it is performed for nobility’s sake. In the present context, however, the supremely generous act is performed not just for anyone but specifically for the sake of a friend (or, incidentally, for one’s country), in which case philia alone, as Aristotle conceives it, should suffice as a motive. The desire to perform a noble action seems supererogatory. Now, the two reasons for self-​sacrifice may be said to complement each other insofar as the nobility of the action depends precisely on the fact that it is done on a friend’s behalf: the gesture is grand because it is motivated by philia, and is a sign of the sincerity of one’s love for one’s friend. To do something for a friend is noble (kalon), and this quality of the deed accrues to the benefactor. It is odd, nevertheless, to represent the motive of a virtuous act as repayment for the act itself. Aristotle has appealed to the language of reciprocity in a context where it is not wholly appropriate, or at least not necessary, and in doing so makes the supreme sacrifice for a friend sound calculating and egoistic, as opposed to the altruistic consideration of the other’s welfare and nothing more (to be sure, acting for the sake of one’s own virtue may be viewed as self-​interested, but Aristotle is careful to specify that virtuous actions are undertaken for the sake of what is kalon and so are presumably disinterested). There is an overlap of semantic fields that obscures the role of philia, and in fact Aristotle

Introduction | 13

waffles to a certain extent between noble actions in general and those performed specifically for a friend.15 I have suggested that the worthiness or nobility associated with sacrifice for a friend (which may be said to accrue to the benefactor) resides in the manifestation of the love or philia that the one friend bears for the other. Aristotle himself opines that philia either is itself a virtue or is accompanied by virtue (Nicomachean Ethics 8.1, 1155a1–​2). But another candidate for the virtue in question suggests itself, and that is loyalty. It is remarkable, however, that Aristotle does not include loyalty among the many virtues he tabulates and analyzes in his ethical treatises. To be sure, Aristotle and other classical thinkers regard steadfastness as a quality of genuine friendship and affection, but that is a result of the stable character of one’s friends, which is the original basis of affection. One is loyal because one loves; loyalty as such is not a distinct motive. In reality, love varies in intensity and may diminish over time, so that it no longer suffices to motivate exceptional sacrifices. Loyalty would seem to be just the value   Roger Crisp (2014, 240) notes that “There is . . . evidence against the ascription to Aristotle of a purely egoistic or self-​regarding account of motivation. In complete friendships, the friends wish goods for each other ‘for the sake of’ the other (ἐκείνων ἕνεκα) (8.3, 1156b9–​10). The virtuous person will certainly care about his own happiness, and its components. But since the noble is the most significant such component and the noble is constituted by virtuous activity, and virtuous activity consists at least in large part in advancing the good of others, there is no reason to think that he will not care, perhaps deeply, about how others are faring, and be motivated by that concern to act virtuously.” But friends are “another self,” and the wish to help them is not motivated primarily by regard for the kalon. One cannot conclude from points made about philia that a virtuous person will “care, perhaps deeply, about how others are faring” in general. 15

14 | In the Orbit of Love

or sentiment necessary to supplement the motive of love. In the second chapter, I examine the reasons why loyalty is absent from classical treatments of friendship, whether it is regarded as a virtue, as some modern theorists maintain, or as an emotion, as others have argued.16 Gratitude, as I have already suggested, poses a similar problem to friendship in regard to reciprocity. Are we obliged to feel grateful upon receipt of a gift? If so, do all gifts come with strings attached, and is there any possibility of doing something truly altruistic for another person, or is there always an implicit expectation of a payback? A fundamental aspect of the question resides in the distinction between the presents or services we provide to friends and intimates, that is, those whom we love, and those bestowed out of principled generosity or some other moral motive, and hence taken to be marks of virtue. Do benefactions of either of these kinds put the recipient under debt, so that the gift assumes the character of a loan or investment? Ancient moral thinkers like to cite the saying ascribed to Pythagoras, to the effect that the possessions of friends are in common, and Seneca, at least, goes so far as to question whether a gift is indeed possible between friends, given that all goods are shared between them. We may take as a modern analogue the case in which children save money out of their allowances in order to buy their parents a birthday present, or when gifts are exchanged between spouses who share bank accounts and other property: if I draw on our joint checking account to purchase a present for my wife, in what sense am I actually giving her something? In such situations, we are likely to say that it is the intention that counts.   As a virtue, Felten (2011); as an emotion, Connor (2007, 9): “loyalty is an emotion and operates like all other emotions.” 16

Introduction | 15

But what is the content of such intentions, and in what way can good intentions be repaid? If one bestows a gift out of a sense of debt or duty, perhaps what is owed in return is a comparable feeling of obligation. If the motive is generalized benevolence, as in an act of charity, then humility on the part of the recipient may be the appropriate sentiment. When the intention is motivated by affection, then the equivalent might be not an awareness of one’s indebtedness but a comparable feeling of love, which can hardly be demanded as a duty. Judgments in antiquity differed on whether to classify gratitude as a virtue or an emotion (a similar ambiguity, as we have seen, beset Aristotle’s treatment of philia, and has arisen in modern interpretations of loyalty). Aristotle, as we shall see, included it in his discussion of the pathē, and while he taught, in the Ethics, that a properly educated person will experience emotions in the proper degree and on the proper occasion, they do not have the same regulatory character as the virtues. In many contexts, nevertheless, the classical thinkers did treat gratitude as involving a sense of debt, with the concomitant intention to repay the benefaction as soon as possible. The tension between gratitude as a free response to a gesture of affection and a debt owed to one’s benefactor replays the vacillation between altruism and reciprocity that we have seen in discussions of love and loyalty. Because the exchange of benefactions, as well as friendship, played a major role in the social life of ancient Athens and Rome, classical thinkers devoted considerable energy to exploring the nature of these relations, and their insights, and even their confusions, have something to contribute to an understanding of their ideology and our own. As with friendship and gratitude, there was some doubt among classical thinkers as to the classification of grief. As an instinctive response to loss, something that human beings share with other animals, it was regarded as analogous to physical

16 | In the Orbit of Love

pain, and indeed the words for grief in Greek and Latin (lupē and dolor, respectively) were ambiguous in this respect. Alternatively, grief might be regarded as an emotion, and hence subject to some control and rational persuasion, insofar as emotions were understood to have a considerable cognitive dimension. As Seneca puts it, “no animal has a lengthy sorrow for its offspring except man, who adheres to his grief and is stirred not to the extent that he feels it but to the extent that he has decided to be” (Consolatio ad Marciam 7.2). The classical genre known as the consolation, addressed to those who have lost a dear one, tends to strike the modern reader as oddly cold and impersonal. The objective is therapeutic, but the method relies on words of counsel that can sound patronizing and insensitive. Reminding a grieving father or widow that everyone is destined to die hardly seems like the most effective cure for the feeling of loss, and rhetorical elaborations on the theme may well seem false (a judgment applied to rhetoric in general these days), if not wholly fatuous. In fact, consolations generally addressed long-​term mourning, when the initial pang of separation had metamorphosed into habitual sorrow. Still, consolers sometimes adopted a hectoring tone that treats bereavement as though it were willful and, even worse, selfish. Comparisons were drawn to the moderation, for example, with which animals respond to loss. Legislation sought to control excessive displays of grief and prescribed periods for mourning that varied with the status of the deceased: time was most limited for the deaths of very young children, which is perhaps understandable in societies where infant mortality is high. But if one grieves above all for those whom one loves dearly, and if a loved one, as Aristotle and others affirmed, is another self or indeed the very same self or soul distributed over two bodies, then such a loss exceeds that of any relation, however close, and approximates one’s own death. And yet, just

Introduction | 17

here one encounters again the problem of egoism, if indeed we are mourning for ourselves; for the pain to have its source in love for another, there must exist some space between the two. And indeed, the pain of mourning often has just such a self-​centered quality, and can lead to resentment of the deceased for having hurt and abandoned us. Here again, then, as with friendship, loyalty, and gratitude, questions concerning emotion, the self, and altruism seem to come down in one way or another to the nature of philia. In his discussion of philia, Aristotle extends the idea to cover concord among fellow citizens, which he thus regards as based at least to some degree on affection. He clearly means a more moderate kind of sentiment than that which unites intimate friends: members of the same city-​state are not conceived of as other selves, or as sharing all possessions, although Aristophanes, in his comedy Assemblywomen, could imagine a utopian society in which private property, and indeed the family as such, was abolished and all goods really were held in common. Aristotle, however, maintains that a person can only have a small number of friends in the narrow sense in which the very boundaries of the self are in some sense blurred. The Latin language, like English, distinguished between amicitia, “friendship” and amor, “love,” the latter term covering not only the range of feeling embraced by the Greek philia but also erotic passion, which in Greek was labeled erōs. It seems that the Romans were not in the habit of speaking of civic concord (concordia, corresponding to the Greek homonoia or “likemindedness”) as amicitia. Friendship both in Greece and Rome was ideally regarded as a relation between equals, and it may be that the highly stratified class divisions at Rome, formalized in the census denominations as senatorial, equestrian, and common orders, discouraged such an extension of the term’s normal use, even if Cicero, for example,

18 | In the Orbit of Love

like Aristotle, recognizes the usage by which political figures speak of their supporters as friends. The democratic ideology that prevailed in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bc, by contrast, projected an ideal of equality of all citizens. Besides, the very vagueness of the term philia might have been conducive to its appropriation as a basis for civic solidarity. But the conditions of social life in a city-​state like Athens may also have favored the appeal to an affective bond among its citizens, in addition to whatever conception of common interests and formal commitment to the community (by way of oaths, for example) that they may have shared. At the greater Dionysian festival, at which tragedies and comedies were performed, citizens danced and sang in choruses together. In addition, there were choral competitions in a style of music and verse called dithyrambs, in which each of the ten Athenian tribes (an artificial political construction dating to the beginning of the democracy) was represented by fifty youths and fifty adult males—​a total of one thousand performers, which would have represented a substantial fraction of the entire population. These same citizens fought arm to arm in the hoplite or heavy-​armed phalanx formations; participated in various ritual events and festivals; voted collectively in the assembly, which was circular so as to permit a maximum of eye contact and exchange (see Ober 2010, 199–​203; cf. 192–​93); and sat in judgment in the courts (from the age of thirty onwards) where jurors might number as many as five hundred, as in the trial of Socrates, or on occasion still more. Whatever the ties of reciprocity among them, in the form of commerce or mutual help, such intense cooperation, often under conditions of great stress (above all in war), both enabled and in turn required an exceptional degree of attachment. Love, and the generosity and self-​sacrifice that love inspired, up to the point of dying, at times, for the sake of one’s comrade, were so consistently

Introduction | 19

cultivated among citizens because they were necessary for the survival of the city. Three principal themes run through the present study. First, there is the tension between altruism and reciprocity—​selfless generosity toward dear ones on the one hand versus a sense of debt and mutual exchange on the other. Second, there is the nature of the self and its boundaries. These two issues are clearly related, as the term “selflessness” itself suggests. Third, there is the question of emotion and its relation to ideas such as reason, duty, and morality. We have seen that friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and social solidarity have sometimes been understood in antiquity or today as emotions, and sometimes not. Friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic concord seem, like certain other sentiments, to lie at the margins of emotions proper. They involve affect, to all appearances, but do not share all the properties that are said (by the ancients, at least) to be constitutive of emotions proper. Loyalty seems to be a feeling of some sort, and in this respect to be like an emotion, and yet it carries a sense of obligation or duty that we usually regard as non-​emotional or at all events as distinct from emotions. Gratitude and generosity or kindness too seem like quasi-​emotions: one can perform a kindness without sentimentality, it would appear, and gratitude in turn has something of the character of a debt or state of indebtedness, which does not seem to be an emotion at all. Friendship too has an ambiguous status: if it means no more than liking someone, it seems too weak to count as an emotion; if it refers to the bond or commitment that unites two people, then it seems too objective, too much like a formal relationship, to count as a sentiment, and indeed some scholars have sought to reduce Greek philia and Roman amicitia to a semi-​contractual kind of reciprocal obligation. Even grief, as we have remarked, comes

20 | In the Orbit of Love

under suspicion as an emotion. If it is a kind of pain, it is more like a sensation than an emotion, and if it is more than raw pain, it is not clear that it is comparable to emotions such as anger, or pity, or shame, and in fact Aristotle does not discuss grief in his analysis of the pathē in the Rhetoric. So too, concord or civic solidarity seems to be a matter of common beliefs rather than feelings; the Greek word homonoia, literally “similar thinking,” suggests as much. In this study, I argue that the emotion of love is implicated, in one way or another, in all the above concepts as they were understood in classical Greece. The ancient emotional vocabulary differs in important respects from the modern, and only a close analysis of the uses of the relevant terms allows us to avoid projecting our own notions onto theirs. This is the approach I adopted in my book The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006), and it guides the present investigation as well. But whereas in the earlier book I was concerned to identify as precisely as I could the sense of the classical emotion terms and contrast them, where appropriate, with their ostensible modern equivalents, the present enterprise has a somewhat larger scope. For here I sometimes go beyond what the classical writers indicated, filling in their arguments or supplementing them when I think they were on the right track but did not follow it to the end. We have already seen cases where Aristotle and others seem to offer more than one account of motivation, as with gratitude, or leave paths unexplored, as with loyalty. To investigate loyalty at all is to import a notion that, I believe, is not developed in the classical moral vocabulary, but the reasons for this absence themselves may shed light on the modern concept as well as on ancient values. This procedure may seem to risk collapsing those very distinctions and determinations of the precise sense of Greek and Latin emotion terms that are essential to any historical investigation.

Introduction | 21

But that need not be the case: as long as we respect each culture’s range and register of emotions, we may examine critically their values and the dilemmas they pose without betraying their native meanings. There is one pair of terms in particular, however, that deserve closer consideration here, since they are central to the present discussion and have been called into question as transhistorical categories: the terms are egoism and altruism.17 We have observed that the notion of “interest” may well be modern, at least in one of its common acceptations, and both egoism and altruism are modern coinages. “Altruism” first appears in English in 1852, modeled on the French altruisme, coined in 1830 by French philosopher Auguste Comte (Dixon 2008, 1), whereas “egoism” is first attested in the late eighteenth century, adapted from the French égoïsme. “Egoism” bears a semi-​technical meaning in reference to theories of self-​interest as the foundation of ethics, but it is today most often used in the sense of “egotism,” which denotes conceitedness or self-​absorption (so the Oxford English Dictionary). Kelly Rogers (1994, 293–​94) observes that “altruism, like egoism, is grounded in a conflict model of ethics, which would have been quite alien to most Greeks,” and she suggests that a better term to describe Aristotle’s account of service to friends is “disinterestedness.” She writes: “The virtuous person pursues his friend’s good disinterestedly . . . only in the restricted sense that he does not pursue it as a means to further benefits to himself. But this does not mean that he does not pursue it as a good for himself, indeed, ‘in loving their friend, they love the good for themselves, for the good man, in becoming a friend, becomes a good for his friend’ ” (citing Nicomachean Ethics 1157b33–​34).   I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers for the press for insisting on a clearer discussion of this issue. 17

22 | In the Orbit of Love

But Aristotle’s efforts to neutralize the negative valence of self-​love, which, as he recognizes, is condemned in popular opinion precisely for being selfish, testify to the clear contrast between self-​interested and other-​regarding motives. Helping friends for their own sakes is a special case for Aristotle, since friends are practically merged into a single self. As Rogers notes, “if the friend’s good is so intimately bound up with the agent’s, how can the latter ever really be said to pursue his friend’s good for itself?” (1994, 301). Rogers replies that Aristotle is not concerned to “show that there is an element of friendship devoid of any connection to the agent’s personal interests and values” (ibid.), since he is not operating with the binary opposition between egoism and altruism that has dominated modern ethical discussions.18 But I would argue that, on the contrary, Aristotle is very much concerned precisely to demonstrate that no such conflict exists. I agree entirely with Rogers that “we can benefit ourselves while we benefit others,” and as she remarks, “the lengths to which philosophers have gone to exclude self-​interest from moral motivation seem quite extreme” (1997, 10). She   Cf. MacIntyre (2006, 170): “In neither Plato nor Aristotle does altruistic benevolence appear in the list of the virtues, and consequently the problem of how human nature, constituted as it is, can possibly exhibit this virtue cannot arise. In the Republic the question of the justification of justice is indeed raised in such a way as to show that if Thrasymachus’s account of human nature were correct, men would find no point in limiting themselves to what justice prescribes, provided that they could be unjust successfully—​and Thrasymachus’s account of human nature is certainly egoistic. But Plato’s rejoinder to Thrasymachus is a statement of a different view of human nature in which the pursuit of ‘good as such’ and the pursuit of ‘my good’ necessarily coincide.” MacIntyre remarks that the problems of egoism vs. altruism “do not appear fully fledged until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” 18

Introduction | 23

is right to ask, “why is concern with self-​interest considered so inimical to moral concern for others? Why the stress on motivational ‘purity’?” We make no such demands in everyday life, and do not necessarily inquire whether a generous gesture was accompanied by some self-​regarding concern, even assuming that our motives commonly rise to a level of self-​awareness that would allow for such a distinction to make sense. But even if the English word “egoism” is modern and there is no exact equivalent in classical Greek or Latin, the sense of a sharp contrast between generous and selfish motives was certainly familiar. One of the aphorisms ascribed to Democritus (or Democrates, as the manuscripts have it) by John Stobaeus runs: “The generous person [kharistikos] is not he who looks to a return, but rather he who treats another well by choice [proēirēmenos]” (fr.6 8B 96 Diels-​Kranz). I do not doubt that Democritus perceived that this stark opposition was often blurred in practice, but there do arise occasions when one feels confronted with a decision, and ancient like modern ethicists sought to provide guidance for such times. Democritus does not specify assisting friends in this extract, but the reason may be that he takes it for granted that friends, along with immediate family, constitute an intimate circle with whom one identifies wholly. Even the most cynical of the sophists, like Callicles, who may well have been invented by Plato to represent the most unabashed will to power with no respect for convention or justice, rejects Socrates’ defense of justice on the grounds that such a view renders a person unable to protect “either himself or anyone else” (Gorgias 486b6–​7), or “to grant more to his friends than to his enemies” (Gorgias 492c2; cf. 508c4–​7). It is assumed that a man will wish to aid his friends; Aristotle’s arguments for conceiving of a friend as another self provide reasons for what was a common intuition or habit of thought. Aristotle’s theory is in many ways brilliant and

24 | In the Orbit of Love

admirable, but it betrays, perhaps inevitably, signs of the fractious ideology he set out to systematize. It is not my purpose in this book to charge Aristotle with inconsistency, but rather to set his and other conceptions of loving altruism over against the still reigning conception of ancient social relations as predicated on self-​interested or egoistic reciprocity. By limiting the coincidence of self-​ and other-​regarding actions to the case of friends, that is, loved ones, Rogers has been faithful to Aristotle, indeed, but fallen short of the claim advanced by proponents of virtue ethics (or virtue eudaemonism, as it is sometimes called). For these philosophers maintain that the virtues as such are simultaneously good for the virtuous and for those with whom they interact, or for society as a whole, and so no conflict between egoism and altruism can arise. Aristotle certainly holds that the virtues are socially beneficial, although he affirms at one point that only justice is in and of itself another’s good as well as one’s own; as he puts it: “Justice alone among the virtues seems to be another person’s good, because it is in relation to another, for it does what benefits another, whether a ruler or a fellow member of the community” (EN 1130a2–​8); Aristotle adds that “the worst person, then, is one who uses wickedness both toward himself and toward his friends, and best is the one who uses virtue not for himself but rather toward another; for this is the hard task. Justice, then, is not a part of virtue but rather virtue as a whole, nor is its opposite, injustice, a part of vice but is vice as a whole.”19   διὰ δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο καὶ ἀλλότριον ἀγαθὸν δοκεῖ εἶναι ἡ δικαιοσύνη μόνη τῶν ἀρετῶν, ὅτι πρὸς ἕτερόν ἐστιν: ἄλλῳ γὰρ τὰ συμφέροντα πράττει, ἢ ἄρχοντι ἢ κοινωνῷ. κάκιστος μὲν οὖν ὁ καὶ πρὸς αὑτὸν καὶ πρὸς τοὺς φίλους χρώμενος τῇ μοχθηρίᾳ, ἄριστος δ᾽ οὐχ ὁ πρὸς αὑτὸν τῇ ἀρετῇ ἀλλὰ πρὸς ἕτερον: τοῦτο γὰρ ἔργον χαλεπόν. αὕτη μὲν οὖν ἡ δικαιοσύνη οὐ μέρος ἀρετῆς ἀλλ᾽ ὅλη ἀρετή ἐστιν, οὐδ᾽ ἡ ἐναντία ἀδικία μέρος κακίας ἀλλ᾽ ὅλη κακία. 19

Introduction | 25

Cicero in turn maintains that there are two principles that sustain social solidarity and communal life (societas hominum inter ipsos et vitae quasi communitas), namely justice (iustitia) and liberality (beneficentia, also called benignitas and liberalitas, De officiis 7.20). Cicero adds that there are two kinds of injustice: one consists in wronging others, the other in not warding off wrongs that are done to others (7.23).20 Both are the result, Cicero affirms, of an excess of self-​love (nosmet ipsos valde amabimus, 8.30). As he explains, “concern [cura] for the affairs of others is difficult.” To be sure, as Cicero observes, Chremes, in Terence’s comedy The Self-​Punisher, affirms that as a human being, he regards nothing human as foreign to himself (homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, v. 77); nevertheless, since we are more conscious of those things that are favorable or adverse to ourselves than we are in the case of others, which seem remote to us, “we judge differently concerning them than we do concerning ourselves” (aliter de illis ac de nobis iudicamus). As Rosa Rita Marchese remarks (2016, 72), “it is clear to Cicero that the real obstacles to the realization of justice emerge, in communal life, from the conflict that arises between the natural tendency among human beings to love themselves and the other commandment that nature imposes, the cura rerum alienarum [concern for the affairs of others]. The two commandments, both innate to the human condition, are

  Contrast the distinction drawn by Jean Hampton (1993, 140) between two views of morality: (1) “A perfectly moral person is one who actively seeks out ways of benefiting others, and offers her services and/​or her resources in order to meet others’ needs”; (2) “A perfectly moral person does not do anything to interfere with or injure other people or their (noninjurious) activities.” Non-​interference is a far weaker condition than failure to assist another who is being wronged. 20

26 | In the Orbit of Love

destined to come into collision, without the possibility of a solution.”21 It may be argued that a commitment to others is a value so deeply rooted in the self as to preclude the possibility of drawing a contrast between self-​interest and selfless behavior. As Neera Kapur Badhwar (1993, 106) observes in connection with those who risked their lives to rescue Jews under the Nazi regime: “Given the nature of their deepest interests, then, rescuers could not have betrayed their moral selves out of rational self-​interest. An act of self-​betrayal would have been an irrational act of weakness, not of rational self-​interest, and refusing to extend any help to Jews would have been an act of self-​betrayal.” As Badhwar states, “if a person identifies with values she regards as more important—​if these values are embodied in her central dispositions of thought, emotion, and action—​then her greatest interests will be identical with these values” (105). Acting virtuously is thus in the interest of virtuous people, even at the risk of their lives; it is for them a form of self-​affirmation. But this is not to say that the rescuers’ objective was the affirmation or manifestation of their virtue; on the contrary, they invariably indicated that they helped the Jews because they needed help, not because it redounded to their personal credit; had others been in a better position to give assistance, they would readily have given way, even though they took pride in the service they performed   è chiaro a Cicerone che i veri ostacoli alla realizzazione della giustizia nascono, nella vita communitaria, dal conflitto che insorge tra la tendenza naturale degli uomini ad amare se stessi e l’altro comandamento che la natura impone, la cura rerum alienarum. I due comandamenti, insiti entrambi nella condizione umana, sono destinati a venire in contrasto, senza possibilità di soluzione. For the complex notion of cura or “concern” in Roman thought, see Vogt-​Spira (2015, esp. 25–​32 on Cicero). 21

Introduction | 27

(113–​14). This is a sound intuition, and I agree that ascribing extreme acts of self-​sacrifice to mere egoism, on the grounds that people who so act take pleasure in the thought of their virtue and possible future acclaim, is a desperate move to defend the thesis that people are motivated only by self-​interest. Aristotle too, no doubt, was untroubled by such conundrums. As James Bernard Murphy notes (1997, 192), “Plato and Aristotle were familiar with ethical egoists, such as Callicles and Thrasymachus, who taught that everyone does and should act to benefit themselves at the expense of all others. The egoist believes that by harming others he helps himself, that lying might be advantageous. . . . For Plato and Aristotle, by contrast, the principal evil of such egoism is not that it harms others but that it harms the egoist. The egoist is censored not so much because he is not altruistic, but because he has stunted his own capacity to participate in the goods of human life: he suffers from arrested self-​realization.” Murphy remarks that modern critics tend to reproach Aristotle’s ethics as being “unduly egoistic,” although “even those who criticize Aristotle’s ethics for being egoistic often commend the altruism of his insistence that in friendship we love our friend for his own sake, and that loving is better than being loved” (192). But even if some commentators argue that “Aristotle’s analysis of friendship cannot be captured by our categories of altruism and egoism,” such views “remain unsatisfactory because they still portray benevolent actions for the sake of a friend as, in the end, a refined self-​love.” Murphy adds that “Aristotle himself is partially to blame because his dialectic of self and other in the analysis of friendship generates numerous puzzles, conundrums, and antinomies” (193). As we have seen, Aristotle does avail himself of the language of reciprocity, which may give the impression that even in acting for the sake of a friend one is in some sense looking to one’s own good. For

28 | In the Orbit of Love

Murphy, however, “true friendship is neither reciprocal egoism nor reciprocal altruism”; rather, it “instantiates its own unique good, a good genuinely common to the partners and not reducible to my good, to your good, or even to the sum of our individual goods” (195). Aristotle’s conception of friends as sharing a single soul supports such a view of a common good; but again, this is true of relations among loved ones, not of human relations generally and the virtues that sustain them. In a similar way, Jean Hampton subjects a moral ideal of self-​sacrifice to the criticism that it may compromise the integrity and proper care of the self: “service to others is only morally acceptable when it arises from an authentically defined preference, interest, or project undertaken by one who pursues her legitimate needs as a human being” (1993, 156; cf. Hampton 1997). But she adds that we may nevertheless commend the attitude of such selfless behavior, “as long as that sacrifice is authentic and done out of love” (157). According to Aristotle, it is universally agreed that people seek first and foremost their own well-​being or eudaimonia. The problem is, as David Brink notes (1997, 125), that “eudaimonism poses a clear threat to the recognition of moral or other-​regarding virtues; insofar as virtues are traits of character whose exercise contributes to the agent’s own eudaimonia, it may appear doubtful that other-​regarding traits that are conventionally regarded as virtues are genuine virtues.” Brink finds a solution to the dilemma in Plato’s conception of love: “when A loves B, Plato concludes, A will aim to make B virtuous (Symposium 209a, 212a). Such love benefits the beloved, because one benefits by becoming virtuous precisely insofar as one is better off being regulated by a correct conception of one’s overall good. Plato also believes, however, that the lover benefits from loving another (Phaedrus 245b), as he must if he is to reconcile love of another with his eudaimonism” (127).

Introduction | 29

The equation between love of another and self-​love depends, however, on Plato’s rather mystical and confusing notion that “reproducing one’s virtuous traits in another is an approximation to immortality” (citing Symposium 206c–​208b). For Aristotle, too, according to Brink, the tension between acting for one’s own good and for that of others is resolved by way of his doctrine of love or affection, even in the case of justice, that paradigm instance of an other-​regarding virtue: “Aristotle’s insistence on the connection between justice and a common good suggests that we look to his account of friendship for help in constructing a eudaimonist defense of justice, because friendship is the virtue appropriate to communities or associations in general and includes the perfection of justice (1155a22–​28, 1159b25–​ 1160a8)” (130). An example of disinterested love is, Brink argues, the love of a parent for a child; the parent is concerned for the child for its own sake “because the parent can regard the child as ‘another-​self’ ” (130). For Aristotle, the love of parents for offspring depends on their sharing the same matter, and so it is a trait that human beings share with other animals. This kind of fusion, however, is different from the way that friends constitute other selves. Be that as it may, Brink concludes: “Insofar as distinct individuals are psychologically connected and continuous, each can and should view the other as one who extends her own interests in the same sort of way that her own future self extends her interests” (142). Perhaps so, but once again, the solution to the eudaemonist dilemma is limited to the special case of philia, in the very strong sense that Aristotle assumes in his ethical treatises.22   I leave aside here Brink’s attempt to widen Aristotle’s conception of interpersonal fusion so as to include all of humanity: “There are good eudaimonist reasons for recognizing a more inclusive common good than Aristotle does” (150). 22

30 | In the Orbit of Love

Mark LeBar argues that we have good reasons to adopt a second-​ person viewpoint in our relations with others, and that as a result our own well-​being is bound up with theirs; “we should see others as having the standing to make claims upon us just because seeing them thus is good for us, or necessary for living well” (2009, 662). Whatever the merits of LeBar’s thesis, Aristotle’s case for the necessity of virtue to our well-​being takes a special form with respect to friendship, which “rests explicitly on the claim that friendship is ‘most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods’ ” (653, citing Nicomachean Ethics AE 8.1, 1155a3–​5). As LeBar observes in his book, TheValue of LivingWell (2013, 91), “When I choose to love my friend, I make his good my end.”23 LeBar is well aware that friendship is a special kind of bond for Aristotle: “The ‘second self’ relation is perhaps the most striking exemplification of the sociality of human beings” (92). What is more, LeBar too privileges friendship in his own theory of “virtue eudaimonism” (or VE, as he dubs it): “On VE . . ., the apex of caring is found in the best forms of ‘friendship,’ in which . . . Aristotle sees the cared-​for friend as a ‘second self’ ” (94). The tendency of modern virtue ethics to resort to love as the condition for the coincidence of self-​ and other-​regarding behavior, or more conventionally, egoism and altruism, is not, I think, accidental. There are and were other arguments in the arsenal of philosophers, then and now, designed to overcome the potential conflict between selfishness and generosity. But love was particularly prominent in the classical treatments, from the intimate relation between the dearest of friends to the broad ties   LeBar cites Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 8.5, 1157b32: “In loving their friend they love their own good, for the good man in becoming dear to another becomes that other’s good” (trans. Rackham). 23

Introduction | 31

that bound an entire community together. Not that love answered every question or resolved every difficulty; it remained a locus of contrary values and impulses. This book seeks to address some of the ways in which these tensions were played out in the ideological landscape of ancient Greece and Rome. Love is a motive: it causes us to think and do things. It is not the only thing that motivates behavior. I may wish to do something, or need to do it, or feel obliged to do it (“it’s the law”), or feel duty-​bound or morally obligated, or be forced, or think it’s the right thing to do (because it is just or fair). Love differs from these other motives in that it necessarily involves another person: however egoistic our ultimate intentions (conscious or not), love inspires us to do something for another person’s sake. This is why it engages us with issues of altruism and the boundaries of the self. Societies develop different ways of explaining behavior, which are abstracted and codified in their philosophy and literature. Some thinkers account for actions largely by reference to duty or obligation, others appeal to fear of the law or of the opinions of others (shame as a motive), while still others reduce motives to personal preference. In our own culture, moral theory rarely adduces disinterested love as a cause of action, except in romantic or sometimes familial contexts. Duty and obligation, on the contrary, are often given as reasons. One of the premises of this book is that, in classical antiquity, love was deemed to play a larger role in the way people accounted for motivation in a number of domains, including friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic harmony. Needless to say, there was no single view of these matters in ancient Greece and Rome, any more than there is today. I have concentrated on those aspects that best capture what is specific to the classical view. I hope that the results may offer insights into our conceptions as well as theirs.

1 LOV E A N D F R I E N D S H I P

Love is an elastic concept. It varies greatly in intensity and in extension, as it is applied to the most intimate relations and to wider circles of acquaintances and to entities as abstract as countries or as concrete as wine. The closest ancient Greek and Latin equivalents to “love” were also flexible, but in their own ways. For example, where English “love” can be applied to amorous as well as familial relations, Greek distinguished between erōs, which designated passionate and sexually motivated desire, and philia, which applied to affection more generally and was also the term for friendship as the mutual love between two people who are not kin. Latin, on the contrary, had a distinct word for friendship (amicitia) but used amor to mean erotic passion as well as familial attachment and, though less frequently, the affection between friends. The classical terms too signified different degrees of intensity, employing expressions that captured the quality of the bond. Here too, divergence from modern accounts of friendship and love are evident. Most striking are affirmations, such as those cited in the Introduction, to the effect that friends are two souls in a single body, which echoes across classical and

34 | In the Orbit of Love

early Christian literature, and that a friend is another self.1 On the one hand, such claims seem to elevate friendship above other relationships that we might place higher on the scale of affection, such as family ties or romantic attachments; on the other hand, even if we take it that by friendship the classical Greek writers mean love generally (given the ambiguity of the word philia, as indicated in the Introduction), such descriptions still seem extravagant and are typically understood as metaphors. Cicero, at least, with Roman practicality, preferred to qualify such bald statements. Thus, in his essay On Friendship (81), he remarks that a human being naturally “both loves himself and seeks out another whose mind [animus] he may so mingle with his own as almost [paene] to make one mind out of two.” Similarly, whereas Aristotle describes a friend as “another self ” at least half a dozen times in his treatises, Cicero writes: “as though the friend is both another and the same” (tamquam alter idem, 80). Even so, the language indicates that even though friends are distinct (hence “another”), they are also in some sense one and the same person (this is the meaning of idem). In his letters, moreover, Cicero does not hesitate to employ the unqualified formula. In a letter in which he commends Gaius Trebatius Testa (who bears the letter) to Julius Caesar, Cicero affirms: “See how convinced I am that you are another I [te me esse alterum], not only in those matters that pertain to myself but also in those that pertain to my people [ad meos]” (To His Family 7.5.1, dated April 54 bc).2   Cf. Horace’s description of Virgil as animae dimidium meae or “half of my soul” (Odes 1.3.8); the so-​called Second Clement epistle, ascribed to the second-​century Christian Clement of Rome but probably not by him and in any case more like a sermon than a proper letter, too speaks of “one soul honestly [anupokritōs] in two bodies” (2Clement 12:3b). 2   With the qualifier, cf. Ad Brutum 23.2, ad te tamquam ad alterum me. 1

Love and Friendship | 35

In this chapter, I begin by taking these statements to mean what they say: in some sense love, at least the kind that obtains between friends, is perceived as a merging of identities. But what motive might there be for such an interpretation? I begin by offering some examples of the ostensible collapse of identities in contexts other than friendship and where it is not a function of love, and then proceed to a closer examination of how Aristotle conceived of friendship. In the twenty-​seventh epistle in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius (sometimes entitled Epistulae morales), Seneca encourages his young addressee to turn away from guilty pleasures and pursue a life devoted to philosophy. This kind of effort, moreover, “cannot be delegated to someone else” (27.4). In this respect, it differs, according to Seneca, from other kinds of literary activity, which do allow for external aids. Seneca cites the example of a contemporary of his, a wealthy man by the name of Calvisius Sabinus, who had, Seneca writes with haughty disdain, “the bank-​ account and the brains of a freedman.” This Sabinus was plagued by so poor a memory that he might forget even such household names as Ulysses, Achilles, and Priam, names that, Seneca says, “we know as well as we know those of our own attendants.” Sabinus availed himself of a remedy, however, to compensate for his shortcoming: he purchased at inordinate prices slaves who had mastered the entire texts of Homer and Hesiod, as well as the other major poets, and if he could not find appropriately trained individuals he had them educated to the task himself. He kept these slaves near his couch at dinner parties, and whenever he faltered in recalling a verse of poetry, it was their task to prompt him so that he might complete the citation—​a routine that Seneca says made life intolerable for his guests (27.6). Up to this point, Sabinus’ slaves functioned as little more than notecards, and formed no part of his own mental apparatus. But

36 | In the Orbit of Love

Sabinus himself regarded the matter differently. As it happened, a certain Satellius Quadratus, a clever and witty chap in attendance on Sabinus, remarked that Sabinus could have bought himself a library full of books for far less than the cost of all those slaves. “But,” writes Seneca, “Sabinus held to the opinion that what any member of his household knew, he himself knew also” (27.7). The slaves function as living props, in constant interaction with the master. They are his external hard drive, as it were, storing information that he can tap into at any moment. They are extensions of Sabinus’ own mind. Seneca does not let the matter rest here. Satellius goes on to suggest that Sabinus take lessons in wrestling. When Sabinus demurs on the grounds that he is sickly and unfit, Satellius retorts: “Don’t say that, I implore you; consider how many perfectly healthy slaves you have!” (27.8). The point is witty, but it misses the mark: Sabinus is, after all, physically better off to the extent that his slaves perform labor for him, in much the way a person with a prosthetic limb or denture is physically enhanced; this does not mean that he can lift weights at the gym, any more than he can recite poems by heart. But in any case, Satellius’ jibe does not reflect Seneca’s own position. Seneca adduced the example of Sabinus to show that one can avail oneself of another’s learning in literary matters; it is only in philosophy, Seneca avers, that one is required to do all the work oneself. As Seneca concludes: “No man is able to borrow or buy a sound mind; in fact, as it seems to me, even if sound minds were for sale, they would not find buyers. Depraved minds, however, are bought and sold every day.” William Fitzgerald (2000, 13) speaks of “the symbiosis of master and slave” in ancient Rome, “a paradoxical symbiosis between the master and his ‘separate part’ that expresses itself in complementarities, reversals and appropriations.” Fitzgerald

Love and Friendship | 37

illustrates this interdependency by way of two poems. The first is an epitaph for a certain Xanthias, a descendant of Cicero’s famous scribe Tiro, who invented the technique of stenography in order to record the great orator’s words. Xanthias died prematurely, and the commemorative inscription (CIL 13.8355) notes that he had already mastered shorthand and could read expertly; it concludes: Already he had begun to be summoned to be his master’s closest ear, flying to every dictate of his master’s voice. Alas, he succumbed to hasty death, he who alone would have known his master’s intimate thoughts.3

The second is a brief lyric by the fourth-​century ad poet Ausonius, addressed to his secretary (notarius). Ausonius affirms that the boy (or slave: puer) knows his thoughts and transcribes them onto the wax tablet even before they have been uttered (Ephemeris 7.16–​ 17); God and nature, Ausonius concludes, must have granted him the gift to know in advance what he was going to say and to wish just what he wished (idemque velles quod volo, 33–​36; cf. Fitzgerald [2000, 16–​17]). Sabinus’ conviction that what his slaves know counts as his own knowledge reflects the tendency on the part of Roman masters to treat as instrumental possessions not just the bodies of their slaves but their minds as well. I have cited these anecdotes to indicate that thinking of another person as an extension of one’s own mind or self was not foreign to the mentality of the classical world. Of course, however interdependent the master and slave might be, the power relation was unequal, and it was the master who absorbed the intellect of   Translated Courtney (1995); cited in Fitzgerald (2000, 14).

3

38 | In the Orbit of Love

his amanuensis, not vice versa (though Ausonius’ poem suggests a certain anxiety about the slave pilfering his master’s thoughts: cf. furta, “thefts,” 25). Friends, on the contrary, were equals, and shared cognition could not take the one-​sided, incorporative form of the master-​slave relation. But above all, the identity of minds was predicated not on ownership but on love. The idea that friendship in some sense constitutes a union of selves finds expression in a variety of rituals that are intended to confirm and at the same time symbolize the relationship. One such practice was described by the Greek historian Herodotus (3.8): The Arabs respect a pledge of good faith [pistis, Ionic plural] like those who do so to the greatest degree. They make these pledges in the following way. When two men wish to make a loyal bond [ta pista], another man standing between the two cuts with a sharp stone the part inside the hand by the thumbs of those who are making the pledge, and then, taking a patch from the cloak of each, smears with the blood seven stones that are lying in the middle, and while he is doing this he summons Dionysus and Urania. When he has finished doing these things, the man who has made the pledge commends the foreigner [xeinos] or townsman [astos], if he is making it with a townsman, to his friends [philoi], and the friends themselves think it right that the pledges be respected. (my translation)

Rituals of this type are familiar from many societies, and friends who pledge themselves in this way are sometimes referred to as “blood brothers,” perhaps with the idea that the exchange of blood renders them kinsmen. But if we step back from the language of sacraments, we may see in this performance an intimation of shared mentality, in which friendship is understood as involving not just the minds or intentions of the individual partners but is

Love and Friendship | 39

expressed also as an act that includes human witnesses, the gods, bodily fluid, and inanimate material. I do not believe that Greeks in the classical period inaugurated or signified friendships by means of such rituals (contra Herman [1987]; but see Konstan [1997, 36–​37, 83–​87]). But they did regard friendship as an intense and indeed transpersonal relation, as suggested by the language of a single soul in two bodies and a friend as another self.4 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers a preliminary definition of friendship as follows: They say that one must wish good things for a friend for his sake, and they call those who wish good things in this way well-​ disposed [eunous], even if the same does not arise on the part of the other; for goodwill [eunoia] in those who feel it mutually is philia. We must add that it must not escape notice, for many are well-​disposed toward people they have not seen, but believe that they are decent and worthy, and one of them might feel the same thing toward him. These then would seem to be well-​disposed toward each other, but how might one call them friends if they escaped [the other’s] notice of how they were disposed toward one another? It is necessary, then, that they be well-​disposed toward one another and wish good things, not escaping [the other’s] notice, in regard to some one of the abovementioned kinds [i.e., usefulness, pleasure, or goodness, which are the qualities that are lovable in themselves]. (EN 8.2, 1155b31–​56a5, my translation)

  Aristotle applies the language of identity also to those related by blood, and especially the connection between fathers and offspring; fathers, he avers, love their children because they are part of themselves: they are somehow, Aristotle says, one, even though they are separate individuals (Nicomachean Ethics 8.12, 1161b16–​33). See Gill (above, n. 3), 340–​44, on the ideal of a shared life in Aristotle and classical culture generally. 4

40 | In the Orbit of Love

Now, emotions generally involve an object, and often another human being, and in this sense the emotion may be said to extend beyond the mental functions of a single individual: we pity or envy others, and cannot imagine either sentiment in a wholly asocial context. But we can nevertheless describe these emotions as interior processes in which the other person is represented in one’s own consciousness. Friendship or reciprocal love is a different matter. We may see why by examining the relationship between love, which Aristotle treats as an emotion in his treatise on rhetoric, and friendship. As we have seen in the introduction, care is required, since the Greek word for friendship, philia, is the same as that for love more generally (though it is distinct from erōs or erotic passion), and it is only the context that disambiguates it. When pressed to make the distinction clear, Aristotle resorts to an expression which, translated literally, means ‘the “to love” ’ (to philein), the Greek way of creating a verbal noun equivalent to the English “loving.” Aristotle defines “loving” as “wishing for someone the things that he deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one’s ability” (1380b36–​81a1).5 There is perhaps an acknowledgment of the irreducibly transpersonal nature of love in the stipulation that we must take into account the friend’s values, and not just our own, in our desire to serve him or her in the way that love requires, but this awareness can be construed as   Cope, in his great commentary (1877, 42), translates “whatever we think good,” but the singular οἴεται goes better with the antecedent τινι; those who love, according to Aristotle, do not necessarily impose upon their friends their own idea of what is good. Cf. Cicero On Invention 2.166: amicitia voluntas erga aliquem rerum bonarum illius ipsius causa, quem diligit (“friendship is a wish for good things for someone for the sake of that person of whom one is fond”). 5

Love and Friendship | 41

a representation within our own mind of the other’s preferences, as opposed to the coalescence of two minds. Indeed, the very stipulation that we consider the friend’s own values suggests that they may differ from ours. Having defined “loving,” Aristotle then offers a second definition (2.4, 1381a1–​2): “A philos [that is, a friend] is a person who is both loving [philōn] and loved in return [antiphiloumenos],” and he adds: “Those who believe that they are so disposed toward one another believe that they are philoi [that is, friends].” This account of friends is plainly similar to the one Aristotle gives in the Nicomachean Ethics, and shows that, within the category of loving, friends are a special case in which the sentiment is mutual; nevertheless, there is a subtle but, I think, significant difference between the two accounts, to which no one, so far as I know (myself included), has called attention. In the Ethics, as we have seen, Aristotle defines philia or friendship, and insists that friends must not be unaware of one another’s goodwill; in the Rhetoric, however, he defines not friendship but a friend, and is content with the epistemologically more limited stipulation that people who believe that their love is reciprocated believe that they are friends. Why this hint of subjectivity? I am inclined to think now that it is because Aristotle is concentrating here on love as an emotion rather than on friendship as a relationship: to believe that one is your friend, it suffices that you have a mental representation or belief in the other’s attitude toward you; but for friendship actually to exist, it is necessary that both parties in fact feel the same way and that both know this to be the case. The latter is a state of affairs that extends to two minds, not just one.6   When Aristotle treats philia as a virtue, that is, as a disposition rather than an emotion, he defines it as the mean between two extremes: flattery, which is the excess, and enmity or hostility (ekhthra), which is the 6

42 | In the Orbit of Love

When Aristotle wishes to distinguish one-​way affection from philia in the Nicomachean Ethics, he coins the term philēsis (8.2, 1155b27–​34), at least in regard to inanimate things such as wine (as when we say, “I really love wine”), since in this case there is neither reciprocal affection (antiphilēsis) nor even the wish for the thing’s good for its own sake. When it comes to liking people who do not like us in return, Aristotle provisionally adopts the term eunous, “well-​disposed” or “bearing goodwill,” since in this case we do wish good things for the other’s sake, even if our sentiment is not reciprocated. As such, it corresponds to to philein or “loving” as Aristotle defines it in the Rhetoric. Eunous is a stopgap term, designed to distinguish unilateral affection from friendship proper, for which Aristotle here reserves the word philia.7 The reason Aristotle bothers to invent or employ various expressions (including to philein) to signify one-​way affection is that classical deficiency. Here philia pertains to an individual philos—​that is, one who behaves as a philos ought (Magna Moralia 1.31.1–​2); cf. 2.11.6–​7, where Aristotle argues that philia is used of our feelings toward god or inanimate things, such as wine, but adds that he is investigating not this type, but rather “that toward animate things, and moreover those capable of feeling philia in return [antiphilein].” Aristotle may also, however, have used the language of belief in the Rhetoric because an orator needs to plant in the audience the conviction that the speaker is disposed to them in a friendly way, whatever the reality, whereas in the ethical treatises what matters is whether people in fact reciprocate friendship.   Aristotle could have employed here the participle ho philōn (or rather the plural, hoi philountes), as he did in the Rhetoric; compare Eudemian Ethics 7, 1236b3–​5: philon men gar to philoumenon tōi philounti, philos de tōi philoumenōi kai antiphilōn (“What is loved is dear to the one who loves it, but a friend is dear to the one who is loved and loves in return”). Later in the Nicomachean Ethics (9.5, 1166b30–​67a21), Aristotle contrasts eunoia with both philia and philēsis as rather a dispassionate form of affection (cf. Eudemian Ethics 7, 1241a3–​14). 7

Love and Friendship | 43

Greek lacked, as I have said, a noun that uniquely designated friendship. So if he wants philia here to mean the relation we call “friendship,” he needs other terms for love as an emotion. All this has been said to show that Aristotle thinks of friendship as a phenomenon involving two minds—​I say “phenomenon” rather than “relationship” because the latter suggests a self-​ subsisting entity beyond what the individuals think and feel, what we might call a status, as in the case of kinship. Martha Nussbaum has argued that for Aristotle, “love, while an emotion, is also a relationship.” As she explains: “I may feel love for someone, or be in love with someone, and that love is itself an emotion . . .; but there is another sense in which love is present only if there is a mutual relationship.” What is meant by love being “present” is not entirely clear, but Nussbaum further observes that Aristotle uses the term “love” or philia equivocally, “to name both an emotion and a more complex form of life” (Nussbaum 2001: 473–​74). This is on the right track, I think, and points toward the kind of participatory interaction that subtends a certain form of distributed cognition. But when Nussbaum goes on to affirm that “lovers will have emotions toward their relationship itself, and the activities it involves,” it appears that philia in the sense of friendship is assuming the status of an entity in its own right, however abstract (474). Aristotle, however, does not speak of friendship in this way, and for good reason. In the Categories, Aristotle speaks of relations such as half and double, or greater and smaller; things can also stand in a spatial relation to one another. As he puts it, “Those things are called relative, which, being either said to be of something else or related to something else, are explained by reference to that other thing. For instance, the word ‘superior’ is explained by reference to something else, for it is superiority over something else that is meant” (7, trans. Edghill 2009). But

44 | In the Orbit of Love

relations are not substances, which are characterized by the fact that they have no contrary and do not admit of degree (5). Friendship, however, does have a contrary, namely enmity, and friendship itself admits of degree, since it can be more or less intimate. It is hard to imagine experiencing love for a relation, as Aristotle understands the term. I myself once wrote that “the mutual love that obtains between philoi is better described, I believe, as a state of affairs, consisting simply in the fact that each loves the other. As a name for simple love, that is, the altruistic wish for the good of another, philia, like to philein, is a pathos [i.e., an emotion]; as a state of affairs obtaining between friends, it consists of two pathē, one for each philos” (Konstan 2006, 178). But I now think that this is inadequate as an account of Aristotle’s view. For Aristotle, friendship is primarily an activity, not just a state. It is true, perhaps, that people can in a sense be friends while asleep, just as one can be virtuous while asleep, as Aristotle remarks in the Nicomachean Ethics (1.5, 1095b30–​1096a1): “possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity” (Aristotle adds that it is also compatible “with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was living so no one would call happy”; trans. Ross 1925). But as Aristotle notes soon afterwards, virtue finds its expression in action (1.8, 1098b31–​99b2): “to virtue belongs virtuous activity.” What is more, it matters greatly, Aristotle affirms, “whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well” (trans. Ross 1925). In the Eudemian Ethics (2.1, 1219a24–​ 36), Aristotle states:

Love and Friendship | 45

the function of the soul [is] to make a thing be alive, and . . . the function of being alive [is] a using and a being awake—​sleep is a kind of idleness and rest. Hence, given that the function of the soul and of its virtue must be one and the same thing, its virtue’s function would be an excellent life. This, then, is the complete good, which is what happiness is. This conclusion is clear from what we have laid down, namely that happiness is the best thing, the ends are in the soul and the best of goods, and the things in the soul are either a state or an activity. So since the activity is better than the disposition, and the best activity belongs to the best state, it is clear from what has been laid down that the activity of the soul’s virtue is the best thing. And the best thing is also happiness. Happiness, then, is the activity of the good soul. (trans. Inwood and Woolf 2013)

Friendship, according to Aristotle, is either a virtue or is accompanied by virtue (Nicomachean Ethics 8.1, 1155a3–​4), and in this respect is also actualized only in activity or performance. For Aristotle, friendship is something that one does—​“to be a friend” is not simply equivalent to the English “I am a friend” or “we are friends”; rather, it is more like “I am being your friend,” which sounds odd in English but captures more precisely Aristotle’s meaning.8 Thus, Aristotle assumes that friends wish to spend the day together (sunēmereuein), and he regards living together (suzēn)   One might say that in ordinary English, being a friend is perfective in aspect, describing an achieved condition; in this respect, it is like the verb “to know”: one cannot say “I am knowing,” which is continuative (the same is true for the Greek verb meaning “to know,” which is in fact a perfect form, oida). Gilles Tiberghien coined the word amitier, a verb based on the homonymous amitié, as “un verbe qui soit à l’amitié ce que le verbe aimer est à l’amour,” so as to express an idea of friendship not as a state but rather as “une action” that would give “une image dynamique” of the concept (2002, 8

46 | In the Orbit of Love

precisely as the actualization or activity (energeia) of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics 9.12, 1171b35).9 This seems like an inordinately demanding condition for being friends, but what Aristotle means is that we are only truly being friends when we are in one another’s company, and this is what friends most want to do. This kind of shared life is what sustains the mutual awareness of affection that is the ground of friendship. In turn, the shared sense of love manifests itself in the desire to do all one can to realize for the other all that he (or she) may wish or think good. There is a constant back and forth, a continual reinforcement or expression of the friendship in which the relation in fact consists. Friendship does not reside in the consciousness or awareness of one of the friends, or even of both individually; it is rather a matter of joint awareness manifested through the flow of acts of affection that continually reaffirm and sustain the love. It is just for this reason that philia cannot survive long periods of separation. As Aristotle puts it: As in regard to the virtues some men are called good in respect of a state of character, others in respect of an activity, so too in the case of friendship; for those who live together delight in each other and confer benefits on each other, but those who are asleep or locally separated are not performing, but are disposed to perform, the activities of friendship; distance does not break off the friendship absolutely, but only the activity of it. But if 17). But the notion of friendship as an activity is not followed up, at least not in the sense that I ascribe to Aristotle.   In a letter to Atticus (8.9.3), Cicero uses the Greek term (sundiēmereuomen, “we spend the entire day together”) to express his daily contact with Lepidus, which, he affirms, pleases Lepidus immensely (quod gratissimum illi est). 9

Love and Friendship | 47

the absence is lasting, it seems actually to make men forget their friendship; hence the saying “out of sight, out of mind”. (Nicomachean Ethics 8.5, 1157b6–​14)

The interpretation I am advancing here is similar to that proposed by Zena Hitz, who writes: “By calling the friend another self, Aristotle is not appealing to a general, implausible analogy between oneself and one’s friend. Rather, he understands friendship to involve collaborative activity, and so the friend is another self in the sense of being a helper rather than a mirror” (Hitz 2001, 10). As Hitz explains, Aristotle “understands friendship to involve collaborative activity,” that is, “collaborative thinking and perceiving” (10–​11). Thus, “Living together means shared activity” (12). This, in turn, is the basis of the shared sense of self; as Hitz puts it, “This is not to say that our selves are conflated in some woolly pseudo-​mystical way; our friends are us in a concrete sense, in that they share the activities that constitute what we are and help us with them. So Aristotle emphasises repeatedly by connecting friends with what it is to be or to einai [i.e., ‘the very being’] for a person” (17). Aristotle argues further that friends also provide an essential means of acquiring self-​knowledge, based precisely on the fact that a friend is another self. Thus, in the Magna Moralia, Aristotle affirms that it is “a most difficult thing . . . to attain a knowledge of oneself,” and yet, “we are not able to see what we are from ourselves (and that we cannot do so is plain from the way in which we blame others without being aware that we do the same things ourselves).” Aristotle continues: “as then when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is, as we assert, a second self ” (2.15, 1213a13–​24, trans. Stock 1925).

48 | In the Orbit of Love

Aristotle does not make clear here just why we require a mirror in order to know ourselves, but in the Eudemian Ethics he seems to address this question, albeit in terms that are exceedingly obscure and variously interpreted by modern commentators. To begin with, Aristotle asserts: “It is manifest that life is perception and knowledge, and that consequently social life is perception and knowledge in common” (trans. Rackham 1991).10 Aristotle goes on to claim that “the known and the perceived are generally speaking constituted by their participation in the ‘determined’ nature, so that to wish to perceive oneself is to wish oneself to be of a certain character.” This explanation is far from perspicuous, but Aristotle attempts to clarify it by stating that “when perceiving one becomes perceived by means of what one previously perceives, in the manner and in the respect in which one perceives it, and when knowing one becomes known.” He then specifies that “ ‘friend’ really denotes, in the language of the proverb, ‘another Hercules’—​another self,” and he adds: “a friend really means as it were a separate self. To perceive and to know a friend, therefore, is necessarily in a manner to perceive and in a manner to know oneself ” (7.12, 1244b24–​26, 1245a2–​4, 7–​10, 29–​31).11   For the textual problems, and an alternative reading to Rackham’s, see Stern-​Gillet (1995, 54–​57). Stern-​Gillet concludes that for Aristotle, “the formation of primary friendship involves the joint becoming of each other’s self, while its continuing practice ensures a form of noetic communion” (58). 11   For analysis of this passage, and its relationship to similar (but not identical) arguments in the Magna Moralia and the Nicomachean Ethics, see McCabe (2012), who concludes that in the Eudemian Ethics “the self is a composite entity, made up of the two of us, engaged on the joint enterprise of self-​perception and self-​knowledge” (79). Whiting (2012) provides a detailed reading of the passage, and speaks of the “epistemic intimacy” (as well as “hedonic intimacy”) that obtains among friends (136–​37). See also Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, 1170a13–​b19, on which Anthony Price (1989, 10

Love and Friendship | 49

It is impossible to enter into the issues raised by this aspect of Aristotle’s thought here, but the passages cited above offer an idea of how his understanding of thinking is related to his idea of friendship. Catherine Osborne, for example, rejects what she calls “the fashionable view that Aristotle thinks that the good man gains self-​knowledge from having friends,” and argues rather that “the value of friends lies in looking out together at a shared world of experience. A friend, I suggest, is an extended self, because he stands alongside me and together we become enlarged by appreciating what is good and suffering what is bad” (Osborne 2009, 1). As a result, “ ‘living together’ is going to be a matter of shared feeling and shared observation” (7). Osborne suggests further that “Aristotle does not think that there is a determinate but hidden self there to be discovered by some means”; rather, “the self becomes actual and determinate only when the agent or subject actualises their agency or subjectivity” (10). We might say that the self is itself an emergent property of human interaction. The idea that cognition might extend beyond the boundary of our minds or brains would not have seemed as strange to thinkers in the classical world as it may to us. Many philosophers, including Aristotle himself, thought of perception, for example, as a two-​ way process (both intromission and extramission), in which the perceived object was as much affected as the perceiver.12 This 123–​24) comments that friends “articulate [one’s] own thoughts,” just as by their actions they “realize [one’s] own preferences”; the result is that “each reveals the mind of the other” in a way that they could not have achieved on their own.   Aristotle himself wavered on the matter of extramission, that is, the projection of visual rays in vision, but he endorses the view at Meteorologica 3.4, 373a35–​b15 and various other places (e.g. De caelo 2.8., 290a17–​24 and De generatione animalium 5.2, 780b 33–​781a13; see Rudolph (2016). 12

50 | In the Orbit of Love

is why Aristotle could seriously entertain the seemingly absurd notion that when a menstruating woman looked in a mirror, the mirror acquired a reddish tinge (On Dreams 2, 459b24–​28 and 460a 24–​27). As Aristotle reports: “The cause is . . . that the eye is not only affected by the air but also has an effect upon it and moves it. . . . The air . . . has a certain effect on the air on the surface of the mirror . . . and the air on the mirror affects the surface of the mirror” (trans. Beare 1931).13 Similarly, we may suppose that friends are reciprocally aware of loving and being loved. As an activity, loving has an effect upon its object, which is in turn perceived by the one who loves; the exchange is continual. Aristotle’s reasoning in the Eudemian Ethics becomes, if not wholly intelligible, at least more pertinent if we take his ideas on perception into account. For Aristotle, love is not simply a feeling, as modern definitions suggest, as in the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary (1959), which defines “love” as “a feeling of strong personal attachment” and “ardent affection” (cf. the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.: “A feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone”). Aristotle says nothing of the sort, but mentions instead benevolent intentions and, to the extent possible, acts in accord with those intentions. Rather than frame friendship as an interior sentiment, or even one that is experienced simultaneously by two discrete individuals, Aristotle sees it as a function of two reciprocally aware people who are constantly engaged in manifesting their love through actions.14 Alcmaeon, Empedocles, and Plato (Timaeus 45B–​C, 67D–​E) subscribed to one or another version of extramission as well.   For further discussion, see Preus (1968); Kent Sprague (1985); Van der Eijk (1994, 167–​93). 14   Farenga (2006, 347) speaks of the intersubjective identity that constitutes the citizen self in ancient Athens, bound by ties of love: the 13

Love and Friendship | 51

A crucial element in friendship is trust, and this too had a wide and, one might say, transpersonal sense in classical Greek. Consider the procedure by which the Arabs pledged trust and friendship, according to Herodotus. The Greek word pistis, rendered above as “a pledge of good faith,” has a variety of connotations: it can designate the trust or confidence we place in others, or, contrariwise, it may signify trustworthiness in the sense of the honesty or reliability that inspires others to trust in us. It can also refer to a pledge or guarantee, or to the thing that is given in trust or entrusted to another. In a slightly extended sense, it can refer to a logical or mathematical proof or confirmation (all these senses pertain also to the Latin fides).15 Rather than register surprise at the breadth of its usages, or treat the word as polysemous, subdividing its senses under various subheadings as dictionaries do, it may be preferable to see a semantic dispersion of the term pistis that corresponds to the amplitude of the idea of friendship, of which trust is the hallmark. The connotative penumbra of the word is really more a matter of perspective or focalization: just as a friend is one who loves and is loved in return, so trust is embodied in both parties to a friendship, and in the loving acts that they continually perform as the active manifestation of their affection. Seen this way, it may seem less strange that when people pledge friendship a third party should anoint stones with their blood, and that each of the avowers (as I take Herodotus to mean) should include the other among his group of friends. The practice citizen subject is “not a corporeal individual but an intersubjective creature who is plural and decorporealized.”  On pistis in classical Greek social and economic relations, see Johnstone (2011); for the early Roman Empire, see Morgan (2015, esp. 55–​ 59 on fidelity between friends). 15

52 | In the Orbit of Love

acknowledges the social character of friendship, to be sure, but it also implicitly recognizes that friendship does not take place in the mind of an individual but in a collective awareness of the bond. This interpretation is preferable, I think, to older tendencies to view such rituals as establishing a fictive kinship or symbolizing objective reciprocal obligations, irrespective of the feelings of the parties pledging their good faith.16 At the same time, the association between trust and trade, and the idea of a pledge or surety, introduces a note of reciprocal exchange and lends to friendship or love the sense of a pact or bargain. We have seen in the Introduction that Aristotle himself speaks on occasion of philia as a self-​regarding negotiation of benefits, by virtue of which the person who performs a service for a friend, even to the point of sacrificing one’s life, nevertheless comes out ahead, thanks to repayment in the form of honor or the kalon. We shall return shortly to this quasi-​commercial aspect of love, by which friends,

  Thus, Malcolm Heath (1987, 73–​74) affirms that philia in classical Greece “is not, at root, a subjective bond of affection and emotional warmth, but the entirely objective bond of reciprocal obligation; one’s philos [friend] is the man one is obliged to help, and on whom one can (or ought to be able to) rely for help when oneself is in need.” Simon Goldhill (1986, 82) states: “The appellation or categorization philos is used to mark not just affection but overridingly a series of complex obligations, duties and claims.” More recently, Tazuko Angela van Berkel (2012) writes in a more nuanced vein: “Although φιλία is not principally incompatible with affection and emotions, the term in itself does not refer to introspective phenomena: it is first and foremost a relational term. It primarily refers to the bond that persists between two φίλοι. This is not to say that emotions and affection are altogether absent or irrelevant in φιλία-​relations; it only indicates that their presence is not a decisive criterion for calling a relation one of φιλία.” The debate is far from over, though I believe that the tide has turned somewhat in my direction. 16

Love and Friendship | 53

far from sharing a single soul, seem to calculate advantages in acting for each other’s sake. That love may be understood as uniting people in a common sensibility that seems to transcend individual identity has always been a theme of literature and religion. In the modern world, the idea has found expression in various ways. Axel Honneth, professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and research director of the Institute for Social Research (the center of activity of the so-​ called Frankfurt School), notes that the American philosopher John Dewey “employed the term ‘interaction’ to indicate that our everyday activity is not characterized by a self-​centred, egocentric stance but by the effort to involve ourselves with given circumstances in the most frictionless, harmonious way possible,” and adds that “human behavior is distinguished by the communicative stance achieved through taking over a second person’s perspective” (Honneth 2005, 111, 114). So too, Angelika Krebs surveys a variety of theories concerning love and concludes that it is best understood as a dialogue (along the lines of Martin Buber’s “I and thou”): “A person loves another when he shares feelings and actions with her in her entire particularity as an end in herself.”17 Krebs concludes her paper with a citation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Liebeslied” (“Love Song”): And yet everything which touches us, you and me, takes us together like a single bow, drawing out from two strings but one voice. On which instrument are we strung? And which violinist holds us in his hand? O sweetest of songs. (trans. Crego 1999)18   Krebs (2009, 741): “Eine Person liebt eine andere, wenn sie Gefühle und Handlungen mit ihr in ihrer ganzen Besonderheit selbstzweckhaft teilt.” 18   Vv. 8–​13: 17

54 | In the Orbit of Love

But these images still fall short of proposing an actual merging of selves. It may seem ungenerous, not to say misguided, to ascribe to Aristotle a doctrine so bizarre as that of a literal unity of minds between friends.Yet there is a serious current of thought today among philosophers, anthropologists, and social scientists that posits just such a transpersonal identity. The tendency goes under the name of distributed cognition, and strong arguments, along with experimental evidence, have been adduced in its defense, however counterintuitive it may seem to those of us who are accustomed to think of the mind as located uniquely in a single brain or body and as the locus of individual identity. In its most elementary form, a tool may be considered an extension of the self, in the way that a mathematician may use pen and paper or a calculator (or today, a supercomputer), and affirm in all sincerity that there was no way that the solution to a problem could have been reached by unaided thought alone.19 This kind of prosthetic amplification of cognition is analogous to the way in which Calvisius Sabinus, as reported by Seneca, considered his slaves’ minds or memories to be as good as his own: he thought through and with them, reciting lines of poetry at their prompting, while they were ever at the ready to provide the relevant verses. Again, Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich, nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich, der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht. Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt? Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand? O süßes Lied.   Rogers (1997) provides a crisp summary of cases like the use of external props in making calculations, which allow us to externalize our thought processes and without which the relevant conclusions could not have been reached. 19

Love and Friendship | 55

Ausonius’ conceit that his slave boy knows his thoughts before he has spoken and that his wishes are identical with those of his master suggests a similar type of annex to one’s own cognitive activity. But the theory of distributed cognition goes beyond the use and, as it were, the absorption into the self of devices (sometimes living) by which we calculate. An example of such group cognition, which indeed gave rise to the theory, is the cooperative interaction of multiple members of a crew as they pilot a ship or airplane. As Edwin Hutchins, who proposed the illustration, writes: I have selected for analysis about ten seconds of interaction in which two navigators (a bearing recorder and a plotter on the bridge of a navy ship) choose landmarks to use in the next position fix. . . . Position is determined by measuring the bearing of landmarks and plotting these bearings on a chart. A plotted bearing defines a line of position (LOP). Three lines of position define a position fix. . . . This is a clear case of distributed cognition. The individual and institutional knowledge of ship’s position is produced by the activity of a complex system involving interaction among persons and complex cultural organized material media.20

Each operator or specialist has a partial view of the whole, but collectively they achieve their goal. A still closer analogy to the way that friends, according to Aristotle, share tasks and achieve goals together is Andy Clark’s image of “glue and trust”   This example, along with cooperation in the cockpit of an airplane, was proposed by Edwin Hutchins (1995, chap. 3), and in various articles; the quotation is from Hutchins (2006, 380). 20

56 | In the Orbit of Love

as characterizing the bonds that obtain between people who are reliably available to one another and have full confidence in each other; these are the conditions, Clark argues, under which an external agent may be conceived of as part and parcel of one’s extended cognition.21 Where Clark points to a long-​term marriage as the example of such a relationship, Aristotle would have thought first and foremost of friends, that is, one’s most intimate companions: they are always there (they spend their days together) and each trusts the other implicitly. The theory of distributed cognition seeks to provide a framework for understanding cognition as “an emergent property of interaction,” where interaction takes the form of “coordination and cognitive coupling.”22 As Yvonne Rogers, in “A Brief Introduction to Distributed Cognition” (1997), explains: “A general assumption of the distributed cognition approach is that cognitive systems consisting of more than one individual have cognitive properties that differ from those individuals that participate in those systems.” Aristotle’s idea of friendship falls neatly under that branch of distributed cognition that Thomas Fuchs and Hanne De Jaegher call “enactive intersubjectivity,”   See Clark (2014); cf. Clark and Chalmers (2008, 231): “In an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner’s beliefs will play the same sort of role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto [Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s and enters information in a notebook that he always carries with him]. What is central is a high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility.” 22   Liu, Nersessian, and Stasko (2008, 1177); cf. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, 493) on social interaction as “the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved.” 21

Love and Friendship | 57

which in one respect, they observe, may be understood as the “interaction and coordination of two embodied agents,” while on the “phenomenological” level it takes the form of “a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality” (Fuchs and Jaegher 2009, 465).23 This radical formula explicitly calls into question the idea of an entirely autonomous self and the concomitant assumption that it is impossible to bridge the gap between one’s own consciousness and that of another—​premises that have been central to philosophical and social scientific analysis ever since Descartes (the view is sometimes identified as “Cartesian”), and which have only recently come to be challenged by various currents of thought loosely grouped under the label “postmodern” (cf. Hermans and Hermans-​Konopka 2010; Rudder Baker 2011). But Aristotle and his contemporaries were in an important respect “premodern,” and they did not necessarily subscribe to neo-​Cartesian dualism. As Christopher Gill has argued, the thought-​world of classical Greece promoted an intersubjective or collectivist approach to mind and understanding that is very different from modern intuitions.24 Gill writes: “I suggest that Greek thought on these questions centres on the idea of a human being as someone whose psychological, ethical, and political life is naturally shaped by a   Distributed cognition differs crucially from internal representation; as Rogers (1997) explains, “the distributed cognition approach aims to show how intelligent processes in human activity transcend the boundaries of the individual actor. Hence, instead of focusing on human activity in terms of processes acting upon representations inside an individual actor’s head[s]‌ the method seeks to apply the same cognitive concepts, but this time, to the interactions among a number of human actors and technological devices for a given activity.” 24   See Gill (1996). 23

58 | In the Orbit of Love

nexus of interpersonal and communal relationships. I also suggest that intellectual life (both inside and outside philosophical groups) is conceived as an extension of this process, that is, as shared debate about common truths.”25 But if Aristotle’s treatment of friendship can plausibly count as an early case study in distributed cognition, we must nevertheless account for the alternative description of friendship, predicated on reciprocity, that he seems simultaneously to endorse, even to the extent of affirming that philia underpins not just gifts and services but also loans (Nicomachean Ethics 9.1).26 The same social context and philosophical tradition that enabled Aristotle to see beyond the conception of thought as a property of isolated minds that operate on nothing more than mental representations, also provided him with the notion of exchange as the foundation of social bonds. As he writes of the virtuous, “they may give away money so that their friends may receive more, for the friend gets money but he gets what is noble. The greater good, indeed, he assigns to himself ” (Nicomachean Ethics 1169a27–​29, quoted more fully in the Introduction). Aristotle may be using the term “friend” in a looser sense in this context; he remarks elsewhere, for example, that politicians employ philos or “friend” widely, to include their supporters generally (Nicomachean Ethics 9.10.1171a15–​19).27   Gill (1995, 4).   Here too we may see tensions within the Peripatetic tradition; in the so-​called Problems, ascribed to Aristotle and evidently a product of his school, we read: “Now he who robs another of a deposit does wrong to a friend; for no one places a deposit with another unless he trusts him. A creditor, on the other hand, is not a friend; for, if a man is a friend, he gives and does not lend” (29.2, 950a27–​29, trans. W. D. Ross). 27   The same point is made in the so-​called Commentariolum Petitionis (16), an electioneering manual ascribed to Cicero’s brother Quintus; cf. Seneca Letters to Lucilius 3.1. 25 26

Love and Friendship | 59

There remains, nevertheless, Aristotle’s extraordinary emphasis on love in the strongest sense as an actual unity of souls, and I suggest that with this analysis Aristotle was capturing a sentiment familiar to his world. As noted in the Introduction, social bonds at every degree, from the most intimate to the concord that united the entire city, were necessarily conceived of, and no doubt experienced, with an exceptional intensity, reinforced by the comradery of almost continual war, the participation in religious and social rituals that punctuated the calendar, and the solidarity resulting from shared political activity in the sovereign assembly and the courts, especially at Athens. Examples of such extreme affection, along with the willingness to sacrifice all, including life itself, for one’s intimate companions, are found throughout Greek literature, from the epic tale of Achilles’ love for his friend Patroclus and symposiastic lyrics about friendship to representation in tragedy of Pylades’ devotion to Orestes and Polycharmus’ to Chaereas in Chariton’s novel, Callirhoe. Nor are historical accounts or forensic and political orations wanting in such episodes. The ethical codes expounded by classical philosophers reflected the ambient ideology and social circumstances, which conditioned the way the Greeks and Romans thought about and experienced their commitment to their peers (and their view of inferiors, such as slaves), the conferral of favors, the loss of dear ones, and their sense of their place in the larger community. It is to these values and sentiments, and their relation to the emotion of love, that we now turn in the chapters that follow.

2 L O YA L T Y : T H E M I S S I N G   V I RT U E

Given the intensity of affection among friends in classical Greece, as Aristotle stipulates and as much literature illustrates as well, one would have supposed that loyalty would have been a prime feature of love and friendship, and hardly require demonstration. Friends were imagined, at least ideally, as being willing to lay down their lives for one another: what greater manifestation of loyalty could there be? Affirmations of the importance of fidelity or constancy in friendship abound. In Euripides’ tragedy Orestes, Orestes declares: “friends [philoi] should aid friends in trouble; when fortune is generous, what need is there of friends?” (655–​57); and his faithful friend Pylades asks: “where else shall I show myself a friend if I do not defend you in dire misfortune?” (802–​3). A skolion or drinking song of the type sung at Athenian symposia, those gatherings of men devoted to food, drink, and more (or less) refined pleasures, affirms: “He who does not betray a man who is his friend has great honor among mortals and gods, in my judgment” (908), and another runs: “If only it were possible to know without being deceived about each man who is a friend what he is like, cutting open his chest, looking into his heart, and locking it up again” (889). In a

62 | In the Orbit of Love

fictional contest between Menander and a comic playwright called Philistion, the section subtitled “On a Friend” records the aphorism: “Gold can be put to the proof by fire, but goodwill among friends is tested by circumstances” (83–​84 Jaekel; cf. Democritus fragments 101, 106 D–​K); and among the sentences attributed to the Pythagorean Clitarchus we find: “reversals test friends.” The unspoken premise of these apophthegms is that people are inclined to put their own interests ahead of others’, and so become scarce when they are called upon to make sacrifices. Constancy was as prized as it was scarce. But we may turn the argument around: if the love that obtained among friends was so selfless as to motivate every kind of sacrifice, and consisted, as Aristotle asserted, in the wish to provide all good things to the other and do all in one’s power to realize the intention, what need was there for loyalty—​that is, loyalty conceived of as a distinct and separate motivation, apart from what love itself mandated? Trustworthiness was an attribute or consequence of philia; where philia obtained, trust was not a separate and distinct value of its own.1 Of course, there were many contexts in which constancy or fidelity was valued. If one swore an oath, one was expected to   Cf. Woodruff (2013, 39): “The ancient Greeks who invented democracy had no concept that matches our concept of loyalty. No word in their language can be reliably translated by the English word. Nothing like loyalty occurs on any list of virtues that has come down to us from classical Greece; the nearest virtue is reverence (to hosion), which requires, among many other things, the keeping of oaths but does not bind a political community together.” Woodruff goes on to state: “Friendship (philia) has the place in ancient Greek culture that loyalty has in ours.” I fully agree. However, Woodruff worries that the absence of a notion of loyalty in classical Greece made it easier for individuals to justify partisanship in civil 1

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 63

respect it; if one borrowed money, one was duty-​bound to pay it back, if at all possible; when at war, a citizen soldier had to maintain formation with his comrades in the phalanx. Although keeping one’s word or respecting one’s civic obligations may be described as faithfulness or solidarity, these are not examples of fidelity to loved ones. This latter type of good faith is based precisely on love itself, and in this respect differs from other types of commitment. In what follows, I explore the relationship between love and loyalty as it is understood today (broadly speaking), and contrast it with the way it was perceived in classical antiquity. For all that loyalty is prized today, it has only rarely been a subject of serious investigation, and many questions remain concerning its nature: there is a division of opinion, for example, about so basic a matter as whether it is to be classified as a virtue, an emotion, or something else again.2 If it is a virtue, it is especially problematic in comparison with other ethical values. To begin with, loyalties may be divided. What if loyalty to one’s country, for example, comes into conflict with loyalty to one’s family or friends, or if loyalty to one friend results in disloyalty to another? If we are supposed to be consistent in practicing the war and outright treason, like that of Alcibiades when he went over to the Spartan side after having been condemned at Athens for defacing the herms: “Steadfastness in personal relationships, by itself, does not support the stability of a state and may weaken it”; Woodruff concludes that “philia is a poor substitute for loyalty” (40). Woodruff defines loyalty as “the virtue consisting in willingness to support legitimate authority steadfastly, at risk to life and limb—​a virtue that may be held to prevail over duties to family and friends” (ibid.); in what follows, I take a broader view of loyalty, according to which it pertains to private as well as political relations.   Cf. Connor (2007, vii): “It was therefore with some shock that I discovered so little academic engagement with the concept.” 2

64 | In the Orbit of Love

virtues, it is odd that one of them should inevitably put us in the position of having to violate it in the very act of respecting it, compromising loyalty to one party precisely for the sake of another. Should we be loyal to someone, or something, that does not deserve our support, for example, to an oppressive political regime, to a friend who has become a criminal, to a spouse who has cheated?3 Unlike virtues such as wisdom or justice or courage, which are presumably admirable in all situations, loyalty does not have a comparable universality but is conditional upon the nature of its object. Cicero was particularly alert to this danger. He notes that one of the motives for ending a friendship is “disagreement over sides [partes] in respect to the republic” (De amicitia 21.77), and he states categorically that friendship can never justify rebelling against the state. Cicero cites the case of the Stoic Gaius Blossius Cumanus, who said that he would have set fire to the Capitol, if his friend Tiberius Gracchus had asked him to (11.37). Laelius, Cicero’s spokesman in the dialogue, says of this: “it does not excuse a crime that you committed it for the sake of a friend.”4 Aristotle had already affirmed more generally that one must never demand that a friend do something bad (Nicomachean Ethics 8.8, 1159b5), and Cicero too endorsed this principle (De amicitia 13.44). If friends are united by their regard for virtue—​and if virtue is single and univocal—​then the dilemma posed by Cicero would not arise.   Cf. Jollimore (2013, 100): “Loyalty is dangerous because it can make immoral actions—​persecuting ethnic minorities, killing in the name of one’s country, concealing war crimes committed by one’s comrades-​in-​ arms—​appear to wear the mantle of virtue.” 4   On the tension between commitment to friends and commitment to the state, see Lundgreen (2013). 3

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 65

But of course, things are not so simple. According to Aulus Gellius’ compendium of miscelleaneous learning (Attic Nights 1.3.9), Theophrastus, in the first book of his essay On Friendship, treated in detail the question of “whether one ought to assist a friend contrary to what is just and to what extent and in what ways,” and he allowed that it was acceptable in certain contexts. Cicero too, Gellius points out, granted that one may support even an unjust ambition on the part of a friend, so long as it does not lead to acute disgrace (Cicero De amicitia 17.61, cit. Gellius 1.3.13). Gellius worries that this advice is too vague to be helpful in practice, unless one were to bear arms for a friend’s sake against one’s country (contra patriam: Cicero De amicitia 11.36, cited by Gellius 1.3.19), which is indubitably wrong.5 Indeed, Cicero himself was capable of contradicting, to all appearances, his own stricture when he affirmed of his relation to Pompey, for whom he repeatedly expressed the greatest love to the point of being willing to die for him (To His Friends 2.15.3; To Atticus 8.2.4, 7.23.2), that “to such a degree does the inclination of my mind and indeed my love for Pompey matter to me that everything that is useful to him and that he wishes seems correct and true to me” (tantum enim animi inductio et mehercule amor erga Pompeium apud me valet ut, quae illi utilia sunt et quae ille vult, ea mihi omnia iam et recta et vera videantur,To His Friends 1.8.2 [to Lentulus]).6 The dilemma is not just an ancient one. In his play Loyalties, produced in 1922, the Nobel Prize–​winning novelist and   For further discussion of the tension between loyalty to friends and the state, see Konstan (2016a). 6   But contrast Cicero’s statement in an earlier letter to Lentulus: “And therefore, though according to your own assertion and testimony I was under very great obligation to Pompey, and though I loved him not only for his kindness, but also from my own feelings, and, so to speak, from my unbroken admiration of him, nevertheless, without taking any account 5

66 | In the Orbit of Love

dramatist John Galsworthy staged a drama that exhibited a similar question of problematic solidarity.7 Several guests are staying at the home of the aristocratic Charles Winsor and his wife Lady Adela; they include Ferdinand De Levis, a wealthy young Jew; General Canynge; Margaret Orme; described in the list of characters as “a society girl”; Captain Ronald Dancy, a decorated of his wishes, I abode by all my old opinions in politics” (itaque, quamquam et Pompeio plurimum, te quidem ipso praedicatore ac teste, debebam et eum non solum beneficio, sed amore etiam et perpetuo quodam iudicio meo diligebam, tamen non reputans, quid ille vellet, in omnibus meis sententiis de re publica pristinis permanebam,To His Friends 1.9.6, trans. E. S. Shuckburgh). Cicero writes to his brother Quintus (To His Brother Quintus 3.1.18) that his affection for Caesar is practically equal to that for Quintus and their children: “I believe that I feel it on the basis of judgment (for so I should), yet I am also fired by love” (videor id iudicio facere [iam enim debeo], sed tamen amore sum incensus).Yet after Caesar’s death, Cicero reproaches his friend Gaius Matius Calvena for placing his loyalty to Caesar’s memory ahead of the freedom of his country (in utramque partem de tuo officio disputari posse, vel in eam, qua ego soleo uti, laudandam esse fidem et humanitatem tuam qui amicum etiam mortuum diligas, vel in eam qua nonnulli utuntur, libertatem patriae vitae amici anteponendam, To His Friends 11.27.8). As Sandra Citroni Marchetti (2017: 250), observes: “Nell’amicizia romana l’ambiguità era comunemente presente; ma con essa poteva coesistere, come si vede dalle lettere di Cicerone, una riflessione sul proprio comportamento. L’ambiguità è ampiamente dovuta al fatto che le amicizie romane—​quelle che conosciamo—​hanno un carattere politico: eppure, proprio nel loro aspetto politico le amicizie sono capaci di mobilitare il sentimento, dando spazio così a entusiasmi come a delusioni. Quando gli avvenimenti politici cambiano, può cambiare con essi anche la percezione che si ha dell’altro.”   Galsworthy (1922); Galsworthy described it as “the only play of mine which I was able to say, when I finished it, no manager will refuse this.” It was indeed popular, though critics were divided. In 1933 it was made into a film, Loyalties, directed by Basil Dean and starring Basil Rathbone; in 1976, BBC Television broadcast a version as part of their “Play of the Month” series. 7

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 67

officer; and Dancy’s wife Mabel. De Levis had bought a horse from Dancy at a modest price and sold it for 1,000 pounds; hard up for cash, Dancy steals the money by leaping from the adjacent balcony to De Levis’s (it turns out that he had had a liaison with an Italian wine-​merchant’s daughter and had to pay just that sum as hush money, to keep it from his newlywed wife). Winsor wants to keep the whole matter secret to avoid scandal, but De Levis insists on discovering the thief, part of the characterization of him as a Jew and so indifferent to the code to which the others implicitly subscribe. Evidence slowly mounts against Dancy, and in the end, he is exposed as the thief. General Canynge is torn, but recognizes that the criminal must be punished. The first scene of the second act is set in a club, to which Winsor, Canynge, Dancy, and De Levis belong, as does a young army major named Colford who has seen service with Dancy. Winsor is troubled, because Dancy, contrary to his story, had evidently been outside his room at the moment of the theft: WINSOR: Colford! [A slight pause] The General felt his coat sleeve that night, and it was wet. COLFORD: Well! What proof’s that? No, by George! An old school-​ fellow, a brother officer, and a pal. WINSOR: If he did do it—​ COLFORD: He didn’t. But if he did, I’d stick to him, and see him through it, if I could. WINSOR: walks over to the fire, stares into it, turns round and stares at COLFORD, who is standing motionless. COLFORD:Yes, by God!

At this point the curtain falls. There is an evident analogy to the case of Blossius, as reported by Cicero: loyalty to a friend trumps questions of right or wrong.

68 | In the Orbit of Love

But there is more to it than that. To clear his name, Dancy has hired Jacob Twisden, a well-​known barrister, to lodge a charge of defamation of character against De Levis, but when Twisden learns the truth, he decides to communicate it to De Levis’s lawyer. The first two scenes of the third act take place in Twisden’s offices, at which Colford and others arrive. Colford continues to defend his comrade in arms: COLFORD: Guilty or not, you ought to have stuck to him—​it’s not playing the game, Mr Twisden. TWISDEN:You must allow me to judge where my duty lay, in a very hard case. COLFORD: I thought a man was safe with his solicitor. CANYNGE: Colford, you don’t understand professional etiquette. COLFORD: No, thank God! TWISDEN: When you have been as long in your profession as I have been in mine, Major Colford, you will know that duty to your calling outweighs duty to friend or client. COLFORD: But I serve the Country. TWISDEN: And I serve the Law, sir. (Act 3, Scene 2)

Colford alleges as a higher principle of solidarity the bond between military men on which the safety of the nation depends. Here, unlike Cicero’s example, loyalty to state and friendship are aligned, and so the conflict is eliminated. Twisden likewise appeals to an overriding code of conduct, but the tension in his case is between two kinds of duty, not between duty and affection. What is more, even in the case of Colford, affection is only one element in his comportment, supported by school ties and soldierly comradeship. But Galsworthy also introduces other motives of

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 69

loyalty, including class and race. Earlier in the play, Margaret is in conversation with Lady Adela: MARGARET: . . . Don’t you feel you couldn’t, Adela? LADY A: Couldn’t—​what? MARGARET: Stand for De Levis against one of ourselves? LADY A: That’s very narrow, Meg. MARGARET: Oh! I know lots of splendid Jews, and I rather liked little Ferdy; but when it comes to the point—​! They all stick together; why shouldn’t we? It’s in the blood. Open your jugular, and see if you haven’t got it. LADY A: My dear, my great grandmother was a Jewess. I’m very proud of her. MARGARET: Inoculated. [Stretching herself] Prejudices, Adela—​or are they loyalties—​I don’t know—​cris-​cross—​we all cut each other’s throats from the best of motives.

Galsworthy illustrates and undercuts the narrow-​minded anti-​ Semitism of his time. In an amusing scene that takes place in Twisden’s offices between his junior partner, Edward Graviter, and Margaret, Galsworthy exposes the inadvertent one-​sidedness of such solidarity: WINSOR: [Suddenly] It’s becoming a sort of Dreyfus case—​people taking sides quite outside the evidence. MARGARET: There are more of the chosen in Court every day. Mr Graviter, have you noticed the two on the jury? GRAVITER: [With a smile] No; I can’t say—​ MARGARET: Oh! but quite distinctly. Don’t you think they ought to have been challenged?

70 | In the Orbit of Love

GRAVITER: De Levis might have challenged the other ten, Miss Orme. MARGARET: Dear me, now! I never thought of that.

Only Mabel, Dancy’s wife, remains at his side still, declaring that she will follow Dancy to the ends of the earth—​or till he’s out of prison. But she is characterized as naively innocent: MARGARET: [referring to General Canynge] Well, he’s all for esprit de corps and that. But he was awfully silent. MABEL: I hate half-​hearted friends. Loyalty comes before everything. MARGARET: Ye-​es; but loyalties cut up against each other sometimes, you know.

It takes the insouciant Margaret to enunciate the deeper problem of loyalty to Mabel. Once he has won his point, De Levis affirms that he no longer cares about the money or the crime, but since Dancy’s honor has been stained, he terminates the tension with a bullet through his heart. Galsworthy has staged the various ways in which loyalties can rub up against one another, but only Mabel seems finally to be motivated purely by love, and Dancy himself, although moved by his wife’s devotion, regards honor as the deeper value, and by killing himself aims to spare Mabel the shame she would otherwise incur. Even in her case, moreover, we cannot discount her sense of conjugal duty. Loyalty proves itself in a contest with obligation, not only with friendship or affection, which alone might not have sufficed to motivate fidelity to a friend. In each case, loyalty is a kind of supplement to love, a desire to remain true when the grounds of feeling have been undermined or enfeebled. Once loyalty has become a matter of principle, it exists on the same

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 71

level or terrain as other commitments, with which it can come into competition: it is one duty among others, and not an absolute dedication that does not admit of comparisons. Only Mabel, in Galsworthy’s play, exhibits such blind devotion, although Dancy’s suicide spares her from being put to the test. Galsworthy’s drama illustrates the problem of loyalty in respect to the moral character of its object, but loyalty is also subject to conflicting claims even on the grounds of sentiment. Loyalty to one friend may cause a person to neglect the interests of another. As Troy Jollimore puts it, “what makes us uncomfortable is not the possibility of dilemmas, but the possibility of unavoidable dilemmas. . . . It is precisely this possibility—​the possibility of unavoidable dilemmas—​that is opened up by loyalty.”8 It is odd that practicing a virtue should put us in the position of necessarily violating it, as we compromise loyalty to one friend precisely for the sake of another. Thus Eric Felten affirms (2011, 55): “The Greeks were sticklers for the loyalties that make family and friendship flourish. Maybe it was this very emphasis on loyalty as a core virtue that gave them such a heightened understanding of the moral catastrophes that can come from trying to navigate conflicting obligations.” The point is well taken, save that the Greeks would have spoken about being torn by love for two people rather than by loyalty. This is why Aristotle and Cicero insisted that one ought, and indeed can, have only a very limited number of friends. Even so, given the degree of commitment entailed by philia, as the Greeks conceived it, situations will inevitably arise in which one cannot serve the wishes of all. Mabel’s fidelity to Dancy illustrates the premise that loyalty, by virtue of being absolute, is indifferent to reasons or justifications. Loyalty is an end in itself, and once you start defending it and   Jollimore (2013, 35).

8

72 | In the Orbit of Love

explaining why you are loyal, you run the risk of providing excuses for disloyalty, when the other party fails to live up to the conditions you have set. This is why George Fletcher, in his book Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships, states: “Loyalties invariably entail commitments that cannot be grounded in reasons others share. There comes a point at which logic runs dry and one must plant one’s loyalty in the simple fact that it is my friend, my club, my alma mater, my nation. I could try to explain why I love her, why I adhere to this tradition rather than to that, but all these reasons will be partial. . . . In loyalty, as in love, there is not even an illusion of scientific neutrality and intellectual impartiality” (1993, 61). Fletcher goes on to remark: “This nonrational component of loyalty induces deep emotional attachments. The minimal condition of nonbetrayal slides readily into devotion, and the devotion comes to be demanded as a requirement of the relationship.” The ancient Greeks and Romans were in the habit of providing reasons for their behavior and even for their emotional responses (for discussion, see Konstan 2006). This was in part due to the importance of rhetoric in classical society: emotions were not simply automatic reflexes but were subject to being aroused, or else assuaged, by argument. When it came to love, for example, classical thinkers indicated the grounds for loving another person: Aristotle and Cicero were in agreement that the other person’s virtue was the most secure and legitimate basis for affection. But this entailed the consequence that if a friend began to behave badly, or else did not make adequate progress on the road to virtue, one might and even should let the friendship cool. Aristotle makes the point explicitly with respect to childhood friends, who may not keep pace with us as we ourselves mature (Nicomachean Ethics 9.3.1165b.13–​22; cf. Cicero On Friendship 21). Eric Felten, in the book cited above, puts the question

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 73

pointedly: “What happens to loyal friendship if the qualities that inspire loyalty in the first place prove to be fugitive?” (7). The danger of basing affection or commitment on specific attributes is clear, at least in regard to the ideal of unconditional loyalty. Perhaps to forestall such a threat to loyalty, Montaigne wrote concerning his devotion to his friend La Boétie: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I” (Montaigne 1991, 192). But no classical philosopher spoke this way, and that may in part explain why loyalty was not raised to the level of an independent virtue in antiquity. In Menander’s comedy Epitrepontes, Pamphile has been abandoned by her husband Charisios. The cause of the separation is that Pamphile gave birth to a child that was conceived prior to her marriage to Charisios, as a result of her having been raped during a festival. Charisios is deeply torn, since he loves his wife, but he moves in with a friend next door, who hires a courtesan to distract the forlorn husband; Charisios, however, refuses to touch her. It will eventually emerge, thanks in part to the sleuthing of the courtesan, that Charisios is the very man who violated Pamphile, and so the child is his; thus all ends well, by the lights of the genre. But when Charisios leaves home, his wife is naturally distraught, and to add to her confusion, her father, Smicrines, pressures her to divorce him. Pamphile, however, resists, and defends her decision to stand by her man in a speech that is, according to Antonis Petrides, “one of the most astonishing in the whole of the New Comedy” known to us, and constitutes “a veritable revolt on her part against paternal authority” (2014, 29). Her father, after all, has good reasons on his side: Charisios’ profligacy is ruining him, which is a legitimate concern on the part of the man who provided the dowry (702–​3, 720, 750); Charisios has in effect acquired a second household, which is to all intents and purposes bigamy

74 | In the Orbit of Love

(752–​55); and, finally, as he points out, the freeborn Pamphile does not stand a chance against the wiles and shamelessness of a seasoned whore (793–​96). The text of Pamphile’s reply is sadly lacunose, and I rely here on the recent edition by William Furley (2009), trimming away, however, the supplements introduced by modern scholars, however plausible they seem. I hope the reader will bear with me in what is of necessity a rather philological exercise. Pamphile begins: “I [can] state my view [of] everything, molded {pepla[smenēn} [to] whatever you think is useful” (801–​2); she then offers to speak frankly, or so it seems.9 She speaks next of her father being persuaded, then there is a reference to something painful, and Chance or Fortune is said to have wronged women who have erred.10 Pamphile then mentions a man who has previously suffered misfortune (atukhōn, 813), and asks whether she ought now to abandon him (phugein de dei touton [me, 814); the reference is clearly to Charisios. Then she inquires whether, “having shared the good fortune {suneutukhēsous’}” of her husband, she is now to betray him, and says that she came to him as his partner (koinōnos, 820; cf. 920), though he (that is, Charisios) has stumbled.11 But she will put up with his having two households, she affirms, and after some further argument, difficult to reconstruct, she appears to conclude that Charisios will not expel (ekbalei, 829) her from her home. Scrappy though it is, Pamphile’s speech has impressed critics. Furley comments: “The virtue which Menander gives Pamphile is her loyalty in adversity” (218), and he quotes (ibid.) the view   Thus Furley, but the supplement is uncertain.   The word in question is hamartousas, 808; but there is a hanging negative (mēden, 807) that is not easy to explain. 11   Eptaiken, 821; cf. 915, where Charisios confesses that he stumbled. 9

10

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 75

of Geoffrey Arnott: “By making her so fluent and polished, Menander has abandoned the crudity of realism in order to create one of the finest defences of marital loyalty in ancient Greek” (2004, 277). Petrides suggests that her emotional response “burns all bridges with social verisimilitude. Pamphile apparently . . . even vows to accept the social ignominy and the psychological aggravation of putting up with Charisios’ supposed double life (Epitr. 817ff.).” Petrides adds that “Pamphile’s stance is nothing short of self-​excommunication from the ranks of respectable women; it is again exactly the kind of unrealistic, magical event that commonly saves the day in the comedy of Menander” (31–​32). Pamphile is certainly different from her tragic antecedents, such as Medea, who did not submit passively to such ill treatment on the part of Jason; even Dejanira, who refrained from an open expression of anger when her husband Hercules installed a captive princess in their home in Sophocles’ play Women of Trachis, sought remedy in a love potion, which ended up killing the brute. These women, moreover, had no father to stand up for them. Pamphile, despite the backing of Smicrines, refuses to leave her wayward husband. This is comedy, of course, and a more idealistic representation of marriage is perhaps to be expected. Nevertheless, a woman whose husband took up with a courtesan might well object to his behavior and seek to flee the marriage, even in this more liberal genre. An example is the wife of Menaechmus in Plautus’ comedy Menaechmi, who summons her father and petitions for divorce when she discovers that her husband has been stealing her fine clothing and bestowing it upon his mistress next door. Although her father initially takes Menaechmus’ side and seeks to excuse his philandering, when he learns that the fellow is squandering his patrimony, he changes his view (as he says, male facit, si istuc facit, 805). This matrona, at all events, is not content to put up with her

76 | In the Orbit of Love

husband’s misbehavior. Pamphile’s reaction, by contrast, looks like the kind of unconditional devotion that we think of as pure loyalty. John Porter has shown elegantly how Menander exploited various tragic models in composing this act. Porter notes how unusual it is for Pamphile to have a speaking part at all, not to mention her declaration of independence in a direct confrontation with her father: “Unmarried and newly-​wed married citizen daughters do not appear on stage often; still less frequently are they assigned formal speeches.” Porter adds: “The obvious models for Pamphile belong not to the world of comedy but to that of tragedy—​more particularly, Euripidean tragedy” (1999–​ 2000, 160–​61), and more especially, the lost play, Melanippe the Wise. Porter too remarks of Pamphile’s speech (165): “Its most notable feature is not its artifice but the long-​suffering fidelity the speaker displays toward her errant husband, her determination to stand by Kharisios come what may.” But Porter betrays a certain uneasiness with Pamphile’s abject submission to her husband’s behavior: “Modern critics might cite her forgiving stance—​ particularly her reference to Kharisios’ plight as an ἀτύχημα [atukhēma, “misfortune”]—​as evidence of the degree to which Pamphile has assimilated the values of the patriarchy, which ranked unquestioning fidelity as one of the cardinal virtues of a wife.” But that discomfort is our problem, according to Porter, who continues: “Menander’s viewers were more likely to have been struck, however, by the emotional depth and complexity accorded Pamphile’s character in contrast to the stereotypical and rather two-​dimensional rôles that seem to have been associated with free-​ born women in fourth-​century comedy. The struggle of Pamphile to balance loyalty to her husband and her own remorse (however irrational the latter might be, on the modern view) against her duties toward her father is a serious one and contains within it

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 77

the seeds of tragedy. This being Menander, these seeds are never allowed to sprout.” Given the lamentable state of the text, it is impossible to be certain about just what the mention of a misfortune or atukhēma (implicit in the participle atukhōn, 813) refers to, and similarly for the mention of “stumbling” some lines further on (eptaiken, 821). Later, Charisios himself will use these same terms in his own great speech, in which he imagines some daimōn or spirit reproaching him for casting out his innocent wife: “You do not bear your wife’s involuntary misfortune [akousion gunaikos atukhēm’], but I will show that you stumbled [eptaikota] into the same situation” (914–​15), and he recalls his wife’s words, which he overheard, about how “it was wrong for her to flee some accidental misfortune [ou dein t’atukhēma autēn phugein to sumbebēkos]” (921–​22). Critics have been harsh on Charisios, noting that while his wife might well regard having been raped as a matter of bad luck, his own act in raping a woman can scarcely be characterized in this way. Now, Charisios has just learned that the woman he raped bore a child (he does not yet know that this woman was his wife), and I have argued elsewhere that the mention of his wife’s “involuntary misfortune” refers to her having borne a nothos or illegitimate child, not to her having been violated as such; in this respect, then, the consequences of his own assault, which have just been brought home to him—​that is, that the woman he violated gave birth to a baby—​strikes him as accidental, a misfortune rather than a crime.12

  See Konstan (1995, 145–​48); Furley( 2009, 234); the Greeks, and especially the Athenians at this period, were particularly anxious about illegitimacy, so that the birth of a baby as a result of rape might overshadow the issue of lost virginity. 12

78 | In the Orbit of Love

But whatever the case with Charisios, this cannot, I think, be Pamphile’s point. First of all, it is not clear that she knows that Charisios has fathered a child, though it seems her father may have got wind of it (cf. 646: paidari[on] ek pornēs). Furley remarks that “we must assume that Smikrines had told his daughter about her husband’s sins either in lost lines (756–​86) or inside, before they come out at the beginning of act IV to continue the argument” (222 on verse 821). This is possible, I suppose, but in defending the propriety of sticking with her husband in good times and bad (cf. suneutukhēsous’) and sharing his fate (cf. koinōnos) even though he has stumbled (eptaiken, 821), Pamphile is affirming her determination to stay with him even though he has moved out of the house and taken up with a courtesan, who may even, if we follow Furley, have borne his child; she is not making a statement about his having raped a courtesan prior to the marriage, or the fact—​if she knows it—​that a child resulted from the rape. Pamphile is excusing Charisios’ entire behavior toward her as mere accident or bad luck. And this is just what sticks in the craw of the modern reader, as Porter observes, when he treats “her forgiving stance” as a sign of her submission to a patriarchal ideology and her “remorse” as “irrational . . . on the modern view.” Pamphile seems to think that Charisios is unfortunate because she herself was violated and gave birth to an illegitimate child, and so he understandably—​poor chap—​left the house and took up with another woman. This is hard for us to swallow, but my point here is that Pamphile is not simply insisting that she will “stand by Kharisios come what may,” as Porter puts it, but is justifying her decision by casting Charisios as innocent of any offense, a victim of misfortune like herself who has merely “slipped up” or “stumbled.” She has other arguments to offer as well, though these are hard to decipher in the patchy papyrus. But whatever the details, Pamphile is defending her stance on the grounds that Charisios’

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 79

treatment of her is not culpable but a result of accident; if she sticks it out, then, it is not because she is loyal “come what may,” but because she has effectively exonerated him. Her fidelity is not unconditional, as we imagine that loyalty must be, but, contrary to what Fletcher stipulates, is “grounded in reasons others share,” and which Pamphile hopes will convince her father that she is acting appropriately. Indeed, that is the whole point of her delivering a speech at all: she reasons like a lawyer, as comic and tragic characters alike did in the agōn (that is, set speeches opposing one another) that was characteristic of Greek drama. It is just this quality of argument or rationalization that differentiates Pamphile’s defense of her commitment to Charisios from Mabel’s devotion to Dancy, or for that matter Major Colford’s stance toward his friend. Of course, neither Pamphile’s nor Mabel’s are real-​life stories, but both illustrate what great dramatists expected their audiences to understand and sympathize with: where Galsworthy had Mabel express her uncritical attachment to her miscreant husband, Menander’s heroine is cast in a situation in which she is—​exceptionally for a woman on stage, as we have seen—​obliged to explain her continued devotion to her wayward spouse. Pamphile’s case is not precisely one of conflicting loyalties, since what she owes her father is obedience, and to go contrary to his wishes is a sign not of disloyalty so much as willfulness; hence her desire to persuade him, and to insist that she has good reasons for her attitude toward her husband. In Plautus’ comedy Stichus, two sisters again find themselves in conflict with their father, who wants them to terminate their marriage with husbands who had been profligate with their resources and have now been away for three years, seeking to recoup their losses by means of a merchant venture; there has been no word of them in all this time, but the daughters prefer to stick with them, and so defy their father’s

80 | In the Orbit of Love

wishes. They make their case by pleading duty (officium), but, by a neat rhetorical twist, they claim it is precisely their responsibility to their father that obliges them to stay in their marriages, since it was he who gave them to their husbands originally; thus, they are obeying his earlier injunction (141–​42; see Krauss 2008, 30–​31, 35). There is a certain sleight of hand here, and critics have been divided over whether the girls are indeed sincere in proffering this argument. Clearly, they are trying to avoid direct defiance of their father; but they are also appealing to the idea that duty is a sufficient motive for remaining in a marriage, whether the obligation is to the father who bestowed them or the husbands who received them. One of the sisters, indeed, comes close to defending the kind of absolute dedication that is characteristic of modern loyalty, as she affirms: “In my opinion, it is just [aequom] for all wise people to respect and perform their proper duty [officium]. That is why, my sister, even though you are the older, I advise that you be mindful of your duty [tuom memineris officium]. Even if they are bad [improbi] and treat us unjustly [aliter nobis faciant quam aequomst], nevertheless so that we not be still more so . . ., it is right that we, with all our strength, be mindful of our duty [nostrum officium meminisse]” (39–​46). The language is that of duty or obligation (officium), which has not, as we have noted, quite the same emotional quality that we associate with loyalty. What is more, this same sister had earlier affirmed that their father is the one who is behaving badly, or more exactly, “is performing the function of a bad man” (eum nunc improbi viri officio uti, 14) in doing such great harm to their absent husbands, unfairly (immerito, 16), by trying to break up the marriage. But the deeper value to which the younger sister appeals as the motive for doing their duty to their husbands is pietas (8a), a form of respect that operates not only between parents and children but in all social relations, as Richard Saller

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 81

has shown (Saller 1988; cf. Krauss 2008, 38–​39). As she puts it: “it is just [aequom] for us to do our duty [officium], nor are we doing it more than pietas dictates” (7–​8a). It may be that the peculiarly Roman notion of pietas comes closer than anything else to loyalty, and informs the younger sister’s idealistic exclamation of fealty to the husbands, do what they might. Aristotle counseled, as we have seen, that we should do everything in our power to help a friend, even to the point of laying down one’s life. But under what circumstances ought friends to make so extreme a sacrifice? How does one balance the cost to oneself against the benefit to the other?13 Short of death, one may quibble about the cost involved in any particular effort on behalf of a friend. As a precaution, Aristotle advises that good friends not make excessive demands: since affection is mutual, those in need ought to avoid imposing on a friend in the same measure that the friend is ideally disposed to succor them. But here again there is room for disagreement, and a failure to come to the rescue of a friend may call one’s trustworthiness into question—​or rather, one’s love. For if loyalty is not a distinct virtue, in the sense of a duty, but rather an expression of love itself, and if love, according to the Greeks, was grounded in reasons, we must ask what happens when affection wanes. Aristotle addresses the question, as we have mentioned, in relation to childhood attachments: it often happens   Cf. Kleinig (2014, 128): “Although loyalty is sometimes demanded as though the obligations associated with it were absolute, most of us recognize that particular loyalties may conflict, that loyalty may compete with other virtues and norms, and that there may be limits to the costs a loyalist may reasonably be expected to bear. Unfortunately, there is no simple algorithm to tell us when loyalty is required or what limits should attach to a show of loyalty. Although that is, I believe, true of every other virtue, in the case of loyalty the absence of a normative measure seems particularly problematic.” 13

82 | In the Orbit of Love

that children develop differently, or that one outstrips another in virtue or some other capacity, and as a result the equality on which friendship is ideally founded is lost. As Aristotle puts it, “if one friend remained a child in intellect while the other became a fully developed man,” they could hardly remain friends. He then asks whether the superior friend should behave no differently toward the other “than he would if he had never been his friend,” and he replies: “Surely he should keep a remembrance of their former intimacy, and as we think we ought to oblige friends rather than strangers, so too, with those who have been our friends, we ought to make some allowance for our former friendship, at all events when the breach has not been due to excess of wickedness” (Nicomachean Ethics 9.3, 1065b23–​30). For, as Aristotle has just explained, “What is evil neither can nor should be loved; for it is not one’s duty to be a lover of evil.” Tell this to Mabel—​as for Pamphile, I think we can affirm that she already understands Aristotle’s point. Euripides’ Orestes is a proving ground for ancient Greek conceptions of friendship, and illustrates many of the points that Aristotle makes. The scene is Argos, where Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death for having murdered their mother, to avenge her murder of their father Agamemnon. In the nick of time their uncle Menelaus arrives on his way home from Troy, with at least one ship under his command (Electra declares in the prologue that his ships fill the harbor, 54). Menelaus is Orestes’ and Electra’s sole hope of safety, and Orestes appeals to him as a friend (cf. philoisi, 450) and as one obliged to Agamemnon (453), who launched the expedition to avenge the abduction of Menelaus’ wife Helen. When Menelaus hesitates, evidently intimidated by the threats of his father-​in-​law Tyndareus (622–​ 29), Orestes answers with a volley of arguments. First, he insists that Menelaus would simply be repaying his debt to Agamemnon,

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 83

who risked his life for his sake (642–​43; cf. 652–​54). The demand for reciprocation makes it clear that Orestes cannot count on Menelaus’ goodwill alone at this stage. Orestes goes on to concede that the murder of his mother was wrong: “I am in the wrong [adikō]. It is right that I receive some wrong [adikon ti] at your hands in return for this evil. And in fact my father Agamemnon wrongly [adikōs] mustered Greece and went to Troy: he did not go astray [exhamartōn] himself but was trying to put right the straying [hamartian] and wrongdoing [adikian] of your wife” (646–​50, trans. Kovacs, modified). At stake is the first constraint on the obligations entailed by friendship that we noted above: ought one to commit a wrong on behalf of a friend? In rescuing Orestes and Electra, Menelaus would be subverting the law of Argos, but the gain to his friends would be immense. As Aulus Gellius complained, the rules enunciated by authorities on friendship are too vague to allow for a clear judgment in such cases. In his rejoinder, Menelaus does not address the claims of justice directly but alleges that he lacks the power to take on the Argives in open combat (688–​92; cf. 710–​13). Instead, he will try persuasion. The debate implicitly raises the second issue mentioned above, that is, the degree of sacrifice that is warranted by friendship. If Menelaus is merely bowing to Tyndareus’ threat to banish him from his home territory of Sparta, he might seem to be placing ambition ahead of the life of his friends. If resistance is truly impossible, he might nevertheless consider making the attempt. At this point Orestes’ friend Pylades enters, having been banished from his home in Phocis. The friendship of Orestes and Pylades was legendary, and Orestes, upon catching sight of him, pronounces him a trustworthy (pistos) man and dearest (philtatos) of mortals (725–​28; cf. 1014–​15 [chorus]: “Pylades, most trustworthy of all men and like a brother”). Pylades in turn addresses Orestes as “dearest of agemates and friends and

84 | In the Orbit of Love

kinsmen,” and adds: “You are all that to me” (733), for Orestes was raised together with Pylades and they were cousins as well; Menelaus, by contrast, has not seen Orestes since he was a baby, and, as he observes, is not able to recognize him on sight (377–​ 79). Pylades affirms that “the things of friends are in common” (koina ta tōn philōn, 735), a saw quoted by Aristotle and said to go back to the Pythagoreans, and his first gesture is to accompany Orestes to the Argive assembly, where he will plead his case for exoneration: “Where else,” he says, “could I demonstrate that I am your friend if I do not come to your aid when you are in direst trouble?” To which Orestes replies: “This proves it: get comrades [hetairous], not just blood kin! An outsider whose character fuses with yours is a better friend [philos] to have than countless blood relations!” (802–​6, trans. Kovacs). Orestes’ appeal to the assembly is defeated, save that he and Electra are granted the privilege of doing away with their own lives rather than die by stoning. Pylades declares that he is prepared to die with them, but Orestes attempts to dissuade him: “Take yourself back to your father, don’t die with me. You have a city, while I have none, you have a father’s house and the great refuge wealth provides. To be sure, you have lost your marriage to my ill-​starred sister here, whom I gave you to keep in honor of our friendship [hetairian]. But take another wife and have children! Your marriage tie [kēdos] with me is over” (1075–​79, trans. Kovacs). Orestes is playing the part of a friend in refusing to implicate Pylades in his own misfortune. Pylades, in turn, rejects his arguments, as a good friend should, insisting that he is equally culpable since he participated in the slaying of Clytemnestra and that Electra is effectively his wife, since she had been betrothed to him. How, he asks, can he think of facing his countrymen, as one who “stood by you as a friend [philos] before your trouble but now that trouble visits you am your friend [philos] no longer?”

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 85

(1095–​96, trans. Kovacs). With this, Pylades proposes the plan to kill Helen as a way of taking vengeance on Menelaus, then burn down the palace and go out in a blaze of glory. The difference between Menelaus’ and Pylades’ reaction to Orestes’ plight resides in their view of the demands of friendship, and this in turn is treated in the play as a function of character: Orestes and Pylades regard Menelaus as self-​interested and pusillanimous, whereas Pylades is generous and brave (an ancient critic describes him as the only character in the drama who is not phaulos, that is, base or, perhaps, better suited to a comedy than a tragedy).14 We may assume that the long-​standing relationship between Orestes and Pylades, who were, as we have seen, reared together in Phocis, contributed to the intense affection they feel for one another; this again is a factor that Aristotle recognizes as formative of friendships. Plainly, too, the two young men share similar values: both are delighted with the daring and vindictive plan to kill Helen and later, at Electra’s suggestion, to hold Menelaus’ daughter Hermione as hostage. I am not sure that their qualities constitute a philosopher’s idea of virtue—​the question is debated by scholars—​but within the terms of the play, character is surely one basis for their mutual affection and solidarity. With respect to Menelaus, however, Euripides complicates the picture by bringing in the duties expected of kin. Now, Aristotle sees kinship too as a source of love or philia, and so the language of friendship, which is to say, of mutual affection, is not out of place in this connection. But Orestes concludes, and Aristotle would agree, that the affective bond between dear friends is more intense than that which derives merely from a relation of blood. The proof is that Menelaus fails to live up to the

  See the hypothesis of Aristophanes the Grammarian.

14

86 | In the Orbit of Love

ideal of true friendship, and is unresponsive even to an appeal to gratitude. To be trustworthy or loyal—​pistos in Greek—​is the quality of a friend; to fall short of it is simply not to be a friend at all, or not in the right degree. Trustworthiness and friendship are covariant: the one is the mark of the other, and when Menelaus fails to come to the aid of his nephew, he stands accused not of a want of loyalty but of being deficient as a friend as well as a kinsman. This is perhaps why loyalty is not mentioned by Aristotle as a distinct virtue. In his Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle quotes the saying that “a friendship that is not stable is not a friendship” (7.5, 1239b15–​16); there is no need to stipulate loyalty as a distinct attribute of friendship.15 Loyalty has a different status in modern attitudes toward friendship and other relationships predicated on affection. To see the difference, we may consider another drama that examines what is expected of friends, this one dating to the middle of the twentieth century. Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance premiered on Broadway in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize in the following year. It was revived on Broadway in 2014 and ran through the beginning of 2015, with John Lithgow and Glenn Close in the leading roles. The setting of the play is the home, or more precisely the living room, of Tobias and Agnes, a well-​to-​do elderly couple (they have a daughter in her forties), who are subject to the angst and self-​doubt typical of the contemporary theater. Agnes’s alcoholic sister, Claire, lives with them, and in the course of the play the daughter, Julia, now in the process of her fourth divorce, comes home. In the meantime, another couple, Harry and Edna, arrive unexpectedly; while they were at home, they were stricken with a sudden, intense attack of panic and they hope to stay indefinitely   Cf. Fürst (1996, 119).

15

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 87

with Tobias and Edna, who are their best friends. They are given Julia’s room, which irritates the infantile and self-​indulgent daughter immensely and forces Tobias and Edna to reconsider their invitation. Tobias in particular is torn between what he takes to be his obligation to so close a friend and the inconvenience that this new arrangement imposes on his family: deep down, he himself is ambivalent about the intrusion. Matters come to a head in the third and final act, which is the part relevant to the present discussion. Julia is adamant about expelling Harry and Edna: “These people have no right,” she says. To which Tobias replies: “No right? After all these years? We’ve known them since. . . . For God’s sake, Julia, those people are our friends!”16 To Agnes, Tobias wails: “For God’s sake, if . . . if that’s all Harry and Edna mean to us, then . . . then what about us?” To which Agnes replies: “blood binds us. Blood holds us together when we’ve no more . . . deep affection for ourselves than others” (114). Family ties are stronger than friendship precisely because they do not depend on something so precarious as love. In the morning, Harry and Edna come downstairs, and Harry, alone with Tobias, announces that they are leaving. When Tobias protests, Harry asks plaintively: “Do you want us here?” He explains: “I like you, and you like me, I think, and . . . you’re our best friends” (119). But during the night, he said to Edna that had Tobias and Agnes come to them, he would not have taken them in. Tobias loses his habitual cool and screams, “YES! OF COURSE! I WANT YOU HERE!” (120). In a calmer tone he says, “we’ve known you all these years and we love each other don’t we?” Then, excited again: “DON’T WE?! DON’T WE LOVE EACH OTHER?” And calm again, “Doesn’t friendship grow to that? To love?” But he soon retreats again: “I like you well   Quoted from Albee (2013, 112); originally published in 1966.

16

88 | In the Orbit of Love

enough, but not enough . . . that best friend in the world should be something else—​more” (121). And finally, hysterically: YOU STAY WITH US! I DON’T WANT YOU HERE! I DON’T LOVE YOU! BUT BY GOD . . . YOU STAY!!” Then, whimpering: “Stay? Please? Stay?” (122). And he exits with Harry to help him bring down his bags. Tobias experiences an emotional and moral conflict that is, I think, foreign to classical discourse (whatever the inner, unarticulated experience of ancient Greeks and Romans might have been). He ascribes his reluctance to welcome Harry into his home to a deficiency of love, which, were it strong or genuine enough, would override the discomfort of his family and his own hesitation, and so he determines to act as a friend should even though the feeling has waned (if indeed it had been more intense in their youth: they have been friends for forty years). Having another couple move in with them is a sacrifice for Tobias and Edna, no doubt about it. But Tobias is not content with Aristotle’s cool observation that when childhood friends grow apart, they “should keep a remembrance of their former intimacy,” even though a genuine friendship is no longer possible. Tobias wishes to compensate for the dwindling, or at all events the inadequacy, of his affection by giving proof of a commitment and willingness to sacrifice that is no longer based on love. And is not this the very essence of what we call loyalty? In a penetrating essay entitled “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” originally published in 1908 under the title “Treue und Dankbarkeit,” the German sociologist Georg Simmel observed: “Because of the supplementary character of faithfulness, such a term as ‘faithful love,’ for instance, is somewhat misleading. If love continues to exist in a relationship between persons, why does it need faithfulness? If the partners are not, from the beginning, connected by it but, rather, by the primary and

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 89

genuine psychological disposition of love, why must faithfulness, as the guardian of the relationship, be added after ten years if, by definition, love remains identical even then, and still on its own strength has its initial binding power?”17 In a touching phrase, Simmel remarks that “Faithfulness might be called the inertia of the soul. It keeps the soul on the path on which it started, even after the original occasion that led it onto it no longer exists.”18 Love is an internal state, an emotion: it may wax or wane, and is not readily subject to our control. Fidelity, by contrast, is more commonly regarded as an ethical imperative and hence a function of the will. As Simmel notes, “faithfulness, more than other feelings, is accessible to our moral intentions. Other feelings overcome us like sunshine or rain, and their coming and going cannot be controlled by our will. But unfaithfulness entails a more severe reproach than does absence of love or social responsibility, beyond their merely obligatory manifestations.”19   In Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950, 379–​95); quotation from 379–​80. The original German reads: “Wegen des Ergänzungscharakters, der der Treue zukommt, ist z. B. ein Ausdruck wie: treue Liebe—​einigermaßen irreführend. Wenn in einem Verhältnis zwischen Menschen die Liebe fortbesteht—​wozu bedarf es dann der Treue? Wenn die Individuen nicht schon im ersten Moment durch die Treue zusammengebunden sind, sondern durch die ganz primäre, genuine Seelendisposition der Liebe—​warum musste nach zehn Jahren noch die Treue als Hüterin des Verhältnisses hinzukommen, da doch, nach der Voraussetzung, jene Liebe nach zehn Jahren noch eben dieselbe ist und ganz allein von sich aus dieselbe zusammenbindende Kraft bewähren muss, wie in ihrem ersten Augenblick?” 18   Cf. 383: “faithfulness or loyalty is the emotional reflection of the autonomous life of the relation, unperturbed by the possible disappearance of the motives which originally engendered the relation.” 19   So too, Simmel writes: “faithfulness itself is a specific psychic state, which is directed toward the continuance of the relation as such, 17

90 | In the Orbit of Love

In ancient Greece, there was, I think, less of a disposition to separate out loyalty from love and friendship and to consider it as a distinct psychic state—​one that is, nevertheless, parasitical on affection, for it manifests itself in love’s wake, as it were, in the turbulence that love leaves as a trace of itself when the feeling has already passed. Rather, a friend who is not loyal or pistos simply is no friend at all. As Felten put it, friends who abandon you when your fortunes turn “were never really friends to begin with,” or, as Orestes affirms in Euripides’ tragedy, “friends who are not friends in a crisis are so in name, not in reality” (454–​55). There is no moral residue, no afterimage of friendship that demands our respect when philia has faded. It was understood that true friends would stand by one another, and if they failed to do so, it was not a case of friendship betrayed so much as evidence that the friendship had never existed in the first place. Perhaps this is why there seems to have been no Greek tragedy predicated on dissension among friends, as opposed to the very common theme of conflict among kin.20 Our everyday notions of loyalty conform to Simmel’s account. We speak, for example, of brand loyalty, which is a central issue in marketing. If I happen to buy a certain brand of yogurt because I have tried the others and found that I like this brand best, I would not describe myself as loyal to the product. Indeed, if I were to try a new variety available in the grocery store and discover that I preferred it to the other, I would have no hesitation in switching to it: loyalty does not enter into my considerations. What a manufacturer or an advertising agency wishes to achieve by instilling loyalty is that I continue to purchase their product, even independently of any particular affective or volitional elements that sustain the content of this relation” (381).   Cf. Konstan (2009).

20

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 91

if I no longer believe that it is the tastiest: I am a faithful customer because I do not alter my habits on the basis of taste alone, but stick with the same company in spite of it all. So too, when someone declares, “My country, right or wrong,” there is hardly need for such a protestation if one’s country is perceived to be in the right. The form of loyalty that is sometimes called patriotism comes into play precisely when it appears that one’s country is in the wrong. My love for my country persists and informs my commitment even when I have reason to question the grounds for it. I may feel conflicted, but Simmel’s “inertia of the soul” keeps me on the same path. We may return to the fact that the ancient Greek word for “friendship” was the same as that for “love.” Aristotle himself was puzzled by the tension between love as an emotion, which is the way he characterizes philia in the Rhetoric, and friendship as a kind of objective or social bond; this is perhaps why he can claim in the Nicomachean Ethics (8.1, 1155a1–​2) that friendship either is a virtue or is accompanied by virtue, which would not be true of emotions generally. But for Aristotle, and I think for the Greeks of his time generally, the emotions, and love among them, were not simply subjective states but were conceived first and foremost as responses to external impressions: the stimulus was thus part of the definition of the sentiment, as in the case, for example, of anger, which Aristotle defines as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight on the part of people who are not fit to slight one or one’s own” (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a31–​33). If love is the active desire for the well-​being of the other, it is elicited, as we have seen, by the perceived traits of another person. Accordingly, when a friend’s character or other qualities change, or are perceived to be no longer what one had taken them to be, the love dissolves and with it any commitment to the other that is entailed by the original affection.

92 | In the Orbit of Love

The difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of love and loyalty perhaps reflects a change in what we may call, following Michel Foucault, the construction of the subject. In the classical period, the subject was understood to be embedded in the social world, and what we think of as purely internal psychological states were imagined rather as relations, always positing, at least implicitly, something beyond what we today think of as the self. In Shakespeare’s famous avowal, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” (Sonnet 116), we may see the adumbration of our modern structure of feeling, in which love is liberated from the constitution of its object and exists as a feeling apart, ideally—​but perhaps impossibly—​consistent and unchanging.21 Such a conception places a great burden on the individual, and gives rise to the kind of guilt that Tobias experiences, in Albee’s play, when he fears that his love for Harry has diminished; he hopes that duty or loyalty can compensate for the insufficiency of love. Perhaps Pylades would have suffered a similar anguish, had he felt that his love for Orestes was not strong enough to sustain his determination to share all things with his friend, right up to death itself. But neither Euripides nor, so far as I know, any other   Tiberghien (2002, 45) quotes Baltasar Gracián, the seventeenth-​ century Spanish humanist, for the view that “the character of the lover is halfway to a diamond in its durability and indestructibility [La condición del amante tiene la mitad de diamante en el durar y en el resistir]” (Gracián 1647 maxim 173; note the wordplay on “amante” and “diamante”). Tiberghien comments: “Certes, mais qui aime ‘véritablement’? Un être mineral, sans doute, car l’amour dur et solide comme un diamant n’est pas l’amour d’un homme mais d’une pierre, si précieuse soit-​elle. Et une pierre ne peut aimer précisément parce qu’elle ne peut être brisée par le mouvement d’un esprit. C’est qui fait la mélancolie de l’amour comme celle de l’amitié: sa vulnérabilité.” We see here the response of a postmodern critic to the modern vision of love’s lastingness. 21

Loyalty: The Missing Virtue | 93

classical Greek writer raises the problem in quite these terms. True love or friendship—​that is, philia—​is by its nature loyal, and if it declines, it is that the motive for it has changed. Self-​interest, cowardice, and other vices may, of course, inhibit a person from acting on love, and Menelaus is perhaps an example of this kind of fault. But his love was suspect from the beginning, and Orestes falls back on kinship and debt to motivate his uncle to assist him. This is not loyalty in Simmel’s sense, a supplement that fills in the space that love has left vacant. As for Pylades, he simply exhibits the behavior that is part and parcel of friendship, when it is true and reliable. Perhaps he is the better for not being entangled in the quandaries, not to say impasse, that afflict the modern subject in the domain of love.

3 G R AT I T U D E A N D LIBERALITY

Only when we give first are we free, and this is the reason why, in the first gift, which is not occasioned by any gratitude, there lies a beauty, a spontaneous devotion to the other, an opening up and flowering from the “virgin soil” of the soul, as it were, which cannot be matched by any subsequent gift, no matter how superior its content. The difference involved here finds expression in the feeling (apparently often unjustified in regard to the concrete content of the gift) that we cannot return a gift; for it has a freedom which the return gift, because it is that, cannot possibly possess.1

In a seminal study of ethics entitled The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, published between 1906 and 1908, the Finnish philosopher Edvard Westermarck stated: “To requite a benefit, or to be grateful to him who bestows it, is probably everywhere, at least under certain circumstances, regarded as a duty” (1908, 154). Gratitude is here equated with repayment, a way of making good on a debt when one is not in a position to repay it in kind: the sentiment does duty for the lack of material compensation.   Simmel (1950, 392–​93).

1

96 | In the Orbit of Love

This is no doubt a common way of regarding gratitude, as something that is owed to one’s benefactor.2 Yet in turning gratitude into an obligation, this view seems to strip it of any element of generosity: it is merely a matter of paying off a loan. In turn, the benefit itself is rendered little more than an investment or commercial transaction, in which a return is expected, if not in the same coin, then in the form of a sentiment, which itself is understood as a kind of surety or promissory note for a more substantial reimbursement, whether in goods or services, whenever the opportunity should arise. What becomes of the dignity, even the nobility, of gratitude when conceived in this way? Gratitude, it is supposed, is elicited by a gift, which is categorically distinct from a sale. The latter commands a price, whereas a gift does not stipulate a return; quite the opposite, if compensation is required or expected, the gift loses its specific nature and ceases to be an act of pure liberality, which is precisely its distinguishing characteristic. If gratitude is comparable to a debt, then the paradox that Jacques Derrida (1997, 131) perceived in the very idea of a gift becomes inescapable. Derrida argues: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift.” It is on the basis of this strict condition that Derrida insists on “the impossibility or double bind of the gift.” Pierre Bourdieu (1997, 231) reasons in a similar spirit: “The major characteristic of the experience of the gift is, without doubt, its ambiguity. On the one hand, it is experienced (or intended) as a   That gratitude is a duty has its roots in Kant, for whom it also has the quality of a virtue; see Baxley (2010, 159): “Kant claims that gratitude is a duty of love we have toward others in return for their kindness or charity.” 2

Gratitude and Liberality | 97

refusal of self-​interest and egoistic calculation, and an exaltation of generosity—​a gratuitous, unrequited gift. On the other hand, it never entirely excludes awareness of the logic of exchange or even confession of the repressed impulses or, intermittently, the denunciation of another, denied, truth of generous exchange—​ its constraining and costly character.” The conception of gifts as a form of economic exchange goes back to the seminal work of Marcel Mauss (1923–​1924), who identified gift-​giving as a primitive form of economic exchange. A crisp formulation of Mauss’s principle, with special application to the issue of gratitude, is provided by Zygmunt Bauman (1993, 57): Gift-​giving . . . is quite often a form of non-​immediate reciprocity: reward is neither discussed nor consciously calculated at the moment the offering is made—​in the long run, however, one expects gifts to be reciprocated, and in quantities judged to be needed to maintain parity. The readiness of gift-​giving is not likely to survive indefinitely unless this expectation comes true. Unlike the case of the business transaction, profit is not the motive of the gift; more often than not it is benevolence that triggers the action. More importantly yet, gift-​giving is not an episodic, not a self-​contained act. On the contrary, it makes sense—​as Claude Lévi-​Strauss has shown—​elaborating on Marcel Mauss’s idea of le don—​when seen as a tool of establishing stable and peaceful relationships between otherwise mutually isolated and/​or hostile persons or groups. But similarly to business transactions, “fairness” and “equity” are the measures of propriety and success (whatever that may mean) of gift-​giving. As in the former case, reciprocity is assumed in gift-​giving from the start; accordingly, if a moral consideration is involved at all, it is focused on the recipient, not the giver. It is the recipient whom

98 | In the Orbit of Love

the gift-​giving renders the bearer of a “moral duty”: namely, the duty to reciprocate. . . . Whatever moral obligation appears in this context, arises at the far end of the gift-​giving act, as its consequence, not the beginning.

Bauman’s reference to the function of gifts in cementing bonds between groups alludes to the idea that gift exchange in primitive communities served as a primary mode of exchange, to be replaced in more developed societies by commerce proper. Now, that gift-​giving represents a primitive mode of economy, chronologically prior to more advanced forms such as barter and, still later, monetary systems, has come under heavy criticism in recent scholarship. Gift-​giving is now frequently seen, on the contrary, as coexisting with other forms of exchange in even the earliest societies, just as it continues to do in modern capitalism, although its significance and function may have undergone changes. As Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori put it in the introduction to their edited volume, Gift Giving and the “Embedded” Economy in the AncientWorld (2014, 10), “The idea that gift-​exchange should represent a ‘primitive’ form of exchange, which pre-​existed commerce and was in the end replaced by it in the long run must be finally rejected.” Philip Mirowski (2004, 397) affirms further that “the very category of ‘gift’ can only have meaning when contrasted to a prior payments system and an instituted value invariant. Thus, the great error of anthropologists from Mauss to Gregory, or feminists from Cixous to Strathern, or sociologists of science like Hagstrom, is to posit the existence of a ‘gift economy’ which is somehow prior to and counterpoised against an exchange economy.” This new perspective, however, poses a problem of its own; as Mark Osteen (2002, 229) notes: “One of the primary challenges for gift theory has been to distinguish gift exchanges

Gratitude and Liberality | 99

from market exchanges, and thereby to distinguish between gifts and commodities”; and he adds: “Usually, the distinction is presented historically.” The great advantage, at least in connection with the theme of gratitude, in abandoning the notion of economic stages in human history is that it becomes possible to view gifts not as a form of commerce, whether primitive or otherwise, but as an alternative to commercial exchange and indeed to the very idea of reciprocity, which has so dominated anthropological studies in the latter part of the twentieth century. Gifts are not a substitute for commodities but take their place within a system of social relations, in which trade of any kind is simply one form of human interaction: gifts may operate according to a logic entirely distinct from the economic equilibrium or give-​and-​take determined by the code of mutual obligation. In one effort to distinguish the two transactional fields, Renata Raccanelli (2009, 312) remarks: “We may conclude that a gift is the symbolic expression of a relationship: what occurs in an exchange of gifts, what is at stake, consists not so much in objects or contents (that is, the gift does not have exchange value), but rather in proposals for relationships, that is, in the final analysis, in the offer and negotiation of one’s own image and that of one’s partner, which each of the agents at one or another time aims to promote.”3 The notion of exchange is preserved, but sublated to a symbolic level. David Reinstein (2014, 88) notes that “a repeated ‘commercial’ exchange sustained   “Il dono, potremmo concludere, è l’espressione simbolica della relazione: ciò che passa in un interscambio di doni, la posta in gioco, non consiste tanto in oggetti o contenuti (il dono cioè non ha valore di scambio), ma piuttosto in proposte di legami, ovvero, in ultima analisi, nell’offerta e nella negoziazione dell’immagine di sé e del partner che ciascuno degli interagenti di volta in volta intende proporre.” 3

100 | In the Orbit of Love

by reputation and reciprocation concerns may not be terribly distinct from a repeated ‘gift exchange,’ ” but he adds: “One might alternatively imagine a gift economy, or gift-​giving relationship, in which altruism plays the dominant role; for example, within an immediate family. Other cases may be intermediate, as within a small tribe or between friendship groups.” This is promising, but Reinstein goes on to observe: “In ancient and modern times prestige and reputation are seen as valuable in themselves. . . . Gifts and donations may be an indirect way of buying reputation” (89).4 But might it be possible to eliminate even the intangible profit that accrues from a reputation for generosity or the like, and see in gifts a pure form of selflessness? What, then, would gratitude look like when it is conceived as a response to a benefaction that is construed not as self-​interested but as altruistic, bestowed out of concern for the beneficiary and for no egoistic gain at all, not even in respect to self-​image or “social capital”?

  It is tempting to cite the maxim of François de la Rochefoucauld: “Ce qui paraît générosité n’est souvent qu’une ambition déguisée qui méprise de petits intérêts pour aller à de plus grands” (maxim 254). Pierre Force interprets Rochefoucauld as unmasking the traditional aristocratic code, according to which “gratitude has no ulterior motives: I return a favor because I am sincerely grateful” (2003, 181). Correspondingly, “True generosity consists in giving without any expectation of return.” Rochefoucauld exposes this sentiment as disguised ambition, and “Once that fact is revealed, generosity and gratitude appear as hypocritical postures.” Force affirms that “In traditional aristocratic behavior, agents do have ‘interests’ too, but they must pursue them with the appearance of disinterestedness” (ibid.)—​in other words, with Mauss’ méconnaissance. Indeed, for La Rochefoucauld, “all human relations are contaminated by self-​interest” (182), a view that became increasingly widespread during the eighteenth century. 4

Gratitude and Liberality | 101

The world of classical Greece and Rome was substantially monetized, and although it was in no sense a capitalist economy, based fundamentally on commodity exchange, the distinction between a gift and a sale was clear. At the same time, mutual services were an established feature of social life, nowhere more so than among the political elite, which observed traditional codes of reciprocity in services and other prestations.5 As we observed in the Introduction and in ­chapter 1, there was also a high value placed on friendship, which in its most intimate form was conceived of as a total sharing of resources, in accord with the Pythagorean principle that “friends have things in common.” To such an extent was this principle embedded in classical expectations of friendship that Seneca could worry whether one might be able to bestow a gift at all upon a friend: for if possessions are jointly owned, what is there to give? Thus, in his treatise on favors (De beneficiis), after having analyzed exhaustively the nature of favors and the kinds of return one might properly expect, Seneca identifies a particular problem in regard to amicitia or friendship on just these grounds. His answer is illuminating: though we declare that friends have all things in common, it is nevertheless possible to give something to a friend: for I have not everything in common with a friend in the same manner as with a partner, where one part belongs to him, and another to me. . . . The knights’ seats in the theatre belong to all the Roman knights; yet of these the seat which I occupy becomes my own [proprius], and if I yield it up to any one, although I only yield him a thing which we own in common, still I appear to have given him something. . . . Suppose that the same thing takes place between   See, for example, the essays in Gill, Postlethwaite, and Seaford (1998); for gift-​giving as a form of “asymmetrical reciprocity,” see Malo (2012). 5

102 | In the Orbit of Love

friends; whatever our friend possesses, is common to us, but it is his own [proprium] who possesses it [tenet, sc. at the moment]; I cannot make use of it against his will. “You are laughing at me,” say you; “if what belongs to my friend is mine, I am able to sell it.” You are not able; for you are not able to sell your place among the knights’ seats, and yet they are in common between you and the other knights. (7.12, trans. Stewart 1887, slightly modified)

Because both formal and informal modes of exchange and donations played so important a role in the lives of ancient Greeks and Rome, classical thinkers were moved to reflect on the question of debt versus gratitude, and it is worth examining the way they approached it. One way of getting round the obligatory nature of gratitude is to treat charity as its own reward: simply to do a favor is already to be compensated, and so no further gesture or sentiment of gratitude is required. Cicero toyed with this solution in a speech he gave in August of the year 54 bc in defense of Cnaeus Plancius (Pro Plancio). Plancius had been elected to the office of aedile, defeating M. Juventius Laterensis; Laterensis, upset by the loss, accused Plancius of corruption in the canvassing of votes, which would disqualify his candidacy. Cicero was deeply indebted to Plancius for his support during Cicero’s exile in 58 bc, when Plancius had the courage and kindness to take Cicero under his wing in Thessaloniki, where Plancius was serving as quaestor.6 Part of Laterensis’ strategy in undermining Cicero’s arguments was to insinuate that Cicero was moved to defend Plancius not on the merits of the case but out of an excess of gratitude. This charge put Cicero in a delicate position: he could hardly pronounce himself ungrateful to Plancius, but at the same time   For the case, see Alexander (2002, 128–​44).

6

Gratitude and Liberality | 103

he had to show that gratitude was not the reason why he sought to vindicate him. As Cicero puts it, “I am not afraid that . . . it can really be considered as a charge against me when those men say that I am too grateful [gratus].” Nevertheless, he postpones a closer discussion of the matter, as he says, until after he has responded to the accusations against Plancius, “lest my client should seem to have been defended not so much by his own innocence, as by the recollection of his conduct at the time of my necessity” (4, trans.Yonge 1891). Indeed, one of the ways of exonerating Plancius is to show that he won the election by virtue of his largesse to the community, for which in turn they were grateful: “do not deny our order generosity [liberalitas]; do not think that favor [gratia] is a crime” (47, trans.Yonge 1891, much modified).7 When Cicero takes up the issue of his gratitude to Plancius in earnest, he begins by conceding that he is not only indebted (debere) to Plancius but to all those who supported him—​among this number is Laterensis himself; and indeed, he will make good on his debt (dissolvere) to each, when it is requested (petitur, 68). It is here that Cicero introduces a distinction:

  Cicero discusses liberalitas (which he equates with benignitas) in De officiis 1.42–​50, where he specifies that such generosity must take account of one’s resources and the worth (dignitas) of the beneficiary (42); the latter includes moral character (mores), attitude (animus) toward us, social bonds (communitas ac societas vitae), and prior services rendered to us (45). One must also take into account the benevolence (benevolentia) of the recipient in respect to ourselves (47), which Cicero distinguishes from the passionate love characteristic of the young (adulescentulorum more ardore quodam amoris); cf. also 2.65–​67, where eloquence is included among the gifts the liberal person can dispense, the reference being to the service that advocates (called patroni) rendered their clients in legal proceedings. 7

104 | In the Orbit of Love

Although, being in debt for money and for kindness [pecuniae debitio et gratiae] are two different things. For the man who returns money [dissolvit] at once no longer has [habet] that which he has paid back [reddidit], and he who owes [debet] retains what belongs to another [alienum]. But the man who requites a favor [gratiam refert] still has it [habet, i.e., the favor done], and he who has it [habet], requites it by the very fact of his having it. Nor shall I cease to owe [debere] Plancius if I make return [solvero], nor would I be paying him back less in my own wishes [voluntate ipsa], if this trouble had not befallen him. (68-​69, transl.Yonge 1891, much modified)

Cicero has played adeptly with the Latin vocabulary. The word gratia has a variety of meanings, but it commonly signifies a favor or gracious act. When one has been the beneficiary of such an act, one is said to have the favor (gratiam habet), which is the standard expression in Latin for being grateful. To repay a favor or gift is gratiam reddere—​the prefix re-​, signifying return, is added to the stem dare or “give”—​or gratiam referre. So when Cicero says that someone who has a favor requites it precisely by virtue of having it, what he means is that the gratitude of the beneficiary constitutes the repayment; likewise, when one has repaid a favor, one still has it, that is, can still feel grateful. That is why Cicero can continue to be grateful even though he is now requiting Plancius’ generosity, and why, even if this opportunity had not arisen, he would have paid him back all the same (by being grateful). Cicero’s prestidigitation in this passage did not escape ancient critics. Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, a collection of learned commentary, reports that Antonius Julianus, one of Gellius’ teachers (his specialty was rhetoric), praised its elegant style, but noted the clever substitution in the wording. Julianus argued that one can speak of a debt for a favor and for money (debitio gratiae et pecuniae) only if both can be said to be owed (deberi); but when

Gratitude and Liberality | 105

speaking of a favor (gratia), Cicero employs rather the word “have” (habet, that is, “is grateful”), and this alters the terms of comparison: “for it would be absurd and forced to say that a favor not yet requited is requited by the mere fact that one owes it” (sed absurdum et nimis coactum foret, si nondum redditam gratiam eo ipso redditam diceret, quia debetur, 4.1–​8). For all the cleverness of his verbal sleight of hand, by which gratitude is implicit in the very receipt of a gift, Cicero nevertheless can characterize gratitude as a burden. As he explains, he has plenty of reasons for defending Plancius without invoking gratitude; with heavy irony he exclaims: “Sure, wise as I am, I figured out how I might appear bound by the greatest bonds of favor [beneficium], although I was free [liber] and unobliged [solutus]!” (72). Cicero alleges that ordinary soldiers are reluctant to admit that a comrade saved their life, not because it is somehow shameful but because they dread the onus of a favor [beneficium], by which they would owe a stranger what they owe their parents—​that is, life itself (72). So too, Cicero is bound to requite the favor (referendam gratiam) that Plancius rendered him (78), though he avers that in fact gratitude for a benefaction is a light burden (leve enim est onus benefici gratia). It is just this sense of obligation associated with gratitude that leads Cicero to describe it as a virtue, indeed the source of all virtues: In truth, O judges, while I wish to be adorned with every virtue, yet there is nothing which I can esteem more highly than the being and appearing grateful [gratus]. For this one virtue is not only the greatest, but is also the mother of all the other virtues. What is filial affection [pietas], but a grateful inclination towards one’s parents?8 Who are good citizens, who are they who deserve well of   Cicero had affirmed earlier in this same speech (where he was praising Plancius’ devotion to his family) that filial affection or respect (pietas) was 8

106 | In the Orbit of Love

their country both in war and at home, but they who recollect the kindnesses [beneficia] which they have received from their country? Who are holy men, who those attentive to religious obligations, but they who, with proper honors and with a mind that remembers, acquit themselves [persolvunt] to the immortal gods of the gratitude that is due them? What pleasure can there be in life, if friendships be taken away? And, moreover, what friendship can exist between ungrateful people [ingrati]? (80, trans.Yonge 1891, slightly modified)

Cicero sums up his view in a resounding sentence: “I, in truth, think nothing so much the peculiar property of man, as to be bound [adligari] not only by a kindness [beneficium] but by even an intimation of good-​will [benivolentiae significatione]” (82, trans. Yonge 1891, modified; on the debt of gratitude owed to Plancius, cf. also 101).9 Cicero’s oration is perhaps more revealing of tensions in the traditional conception of gratitude than a demonstration of its coherence, since it seems to be both a duty (it is a burden, however light) and a unique kind of debt that is repaid without loss to the debtor. Such antinomies are characteristic of ideologies generally, and we remarked, in the Introduction, on the double construction of social relations in classical Greece and Rome as predicated both on reciprocity and on selfless affection. Seneca, in his treatise on favors or benefactions (De beneficiis), is aware that the foundation of all virtues (nam meo iudicio pietas fundamentum est omnium virtutum, 29).   For a defense of gratitude as a virtue see Wellman (1999); Wellman observes that “the terminology of duties cannot accurately capture our moral condemnation of those we find culpably ungrateful” (285–​86). See also Kristjánsson (2013). 9

Gratitude and Liberality | 107

gratitude constitutes an obligation on the part of the beneficiary, both in the form of a sentiment and as evidence of the wish, at least, to repay the debt in more material coin: Gratitude (gratia) is returned for that benefaction which the action (actio) has accomplished if we receive it with goodwill (benevole), but we have not yet paid back that other [sc. debt] which consists in the value (res); rather, we wish to pay it back. We have compensated the intention (voluntas) with our intention, but we still owe value for value. (voluntati voluntate satis fecimus, rei rem debemos, 2.35.1)

Seneca also affirms that the joy in bestowing a benefaction lies in perceiving the cheer that it brings to the recipient and in the knowledge that we have brought about that cheer, even if it is not manifested in the form of overt gratitude toward the benefactor (as in the case of an anonymous gift).10 Seneca’s definition of a favor, however, seems to take a more radical view: What, then, is a benefaction [beneficium]? It is a benevolent action that bestows joy [gaudium] and receives it in the bestowing, inclined toward what it does and primed on its own. Therefore what matters is not what is done [fiat] or given [detur], but with what attitude [mente], since a benefaction consists not in what is done or given but in the very mind [animo] of the one who is doing or giving. (1.6.1)11   Cf. 3.17: “If having received [a benefaction] is pleasing [iuvat] to a person, he enjoys a fair and continual pleasure [voluptas] and feels joy [gaudet], looking to the mind [animus] of the one from whom he received it, not to the value [res].” For discussion, see Raccanelli (2010, esp. 53–​56). 11   My translation; on this definition see Konstan (2014a). 10

108 | In the Orbit of Love

Here, the benefit bestowed is not the cause of joy; rather, it is joy itself that is transmitted by virtue of the favor, and since the benefactor experiences joy in the act of giving, accounts are squared at the very moment that the favor is bestowed: there is no further transaction. By this definition, benevolence is truly its own recompense. The problem with this view is that it eliminates entirely the role of the beneficiary: what meaning is there to gratitude when there is no one who experiences it? To be sure, gratitude on this description is not obligatory; indeed, it is not even possible. For a richer account of gratitude that recognizes that there are two agents, not just one, involved in the bestowal of a favor, we may turn to Aristotle’s discussion in his treatise on rhetoric. Aristotle identifies gratitude precisely as a response to a free favor or kindness, one offered without the demand for restitution in any form. His treatment has received relatively little attention, since, remarkable as it may seem, it is only in the twenty-​first century that scholars have recognized that one of the chapters in his treatise on rhetoric, in which Aristotle discusses a series of emotions including anger, love, hatred, fear, shame, pity, and envy, among others, is devoted to gratitude.12 The assumption, since the Renaissance at least, is that in this section Aristotle is rather discussing kindness or benevolence. The reason for this extraordinary misapprehension has to do with a curious feature of the Greek language for the way it expresses the notion of gratitude. To see how it works, we may cite the opening sentences of Aristotle’s discussion: “Those toward whom people have kharis and in what circumstances [or for what things] and how they   For discussion, see Konstan (2006, chap. 7); Rapp (2002) came to the same conclusion independently. 12

Gratitude and Liberality | 109

themselves are disposed, will be clear when we have defined kharis.” Aristotle then proceeds to offer a definition of kharis, employing a formula that he uses in defining several other emotions: “Let kharis, then, in respect to which one who has it is said to have kharis, be a service to one who needs it, not in return for anything, nor so that the one who performs the service may gain something, but so that the other may have it.” This sounds very complicated, and critics, in attempting to follow Aristotle’s meaning, have focused, naturally enough, on the description of kharis itself. Clearly, Aristotle means by kharis an altruistic deed, done entirely on behalf of the recipient, without any expectation of compensation: just what a number of modern thinkers, from Mauss to Derrida, have reckoned to be paradoxical or impossible. One might well have thought that kharis was the topic under consideration, since that is what is defined, were it not that Aristotle plainly offers his definition of this term with a view to explaining what is meant by “having kharis”; this is how the passage begins, after all, and it is the purport of that puzzling clause that Aristotle places in the midst of his definition: “in respect to which one who has it is said to have kharis.” If kharis means a benefaction or favor, then “having kharis” might be taken to signify receiving a favor—​but in fact this is to misread the phrase. For “to have kharis” (in Greek, kharin ekhein) means one thing and one thing only in classical Greek, and that is to feel gratitude (cf. e.g., Rhetoric 1374a23; Plutarch Life of Cato theYounger 66.2; Thucydides 2.40.4); in this respect, the Greek formula is exactly the same as the Latin gratiam habere (gratia or “grace” is equivalent to the Greek kharis). To do a favor or a service is kharin pherein or tithesthai, that is, roughly, “deliver or offer kharis” (one may also use the verb kharizesthai); and to receive a service is kharin lambanein (again, the Latin expressions are analogous).

110 | In the Orbit of Love

Thus, Aristotle’s point is simply that if we wish to know what gratitude is, we must first know what it responds to, namely a freely granted favor, without any strings attached or the least expectation of reciprocity. Aristotle’s manual is intended for orators, who will have need not only of arousing a sense of gratitude in their audience but also, on occasion, of reducing it, for example toward one’s opponent. Thus Aristotle observes: “It is clear too on what basis it is possible to diminish the kharis and render people ungrateful [akharistoi]. Either [argue] that the one party is rendering or rendered the service for their own sake (this was said not to be a kharis), or that the service happened by chance or they were constrained to do it, or that they paid back rather than gave, whether knowingly or not: for either way, it is ‘in return for something,’ and so would not thus be a kharis.” Here again, the emphasis is on the gratuitous nature of the favor bestowed, without expectation of return.13 To be grateful is distinct, in Greek, from returning a favor. The latter sense is rendered typically by verbs with the prefix apo-​(roughly equivalent to the “re-​” in “return”), for example, apodidōmi (“give back”), apolambanō (“take back”), apaiteō (“demand back”). But when kharis refers to gratitude, it is invariably found in the expressions kharin ekhein or kharin eidenai (literally, “know or acknowledge kharis”).14 But if gratitude is not a duty or obligation, but a response precisely to a benefaction that neither demands nor invites a return, in what precisely does it consist—​what is   Cf. Lucian Iuppiter Confutatus, where Zeus affirms that “those who sacrifice do not do so for the sake of a benefit [khreia], creating a kind of exchange [antidosis] and as it were buying goods from us, but rather pay honor to what is better”; see also Lucretius De rerum natura 5.1198–​1203 on the proper spirit of piety. 14   Discussed more fully in Konstan (2006, 166–​67). 13

Gratitude and Liberality | 111

its content? For Aristotle, it is first and foremost an emotion or pathos, that is, a response elicited by the perception of an external situation (the noun pathos is related to the verb paskhein, meaning “to experience” or “suffer” something). Pity, for instance, is a response to the impression of undeserved misfortune, indignation a response to unmerited prosperity, anger a response to an insult or slight. Gratitude, then, is a response to a favor that is rendered solely for the sake of the beneficiary, with no self-​ interested motive on the part of the benefactor.15 Now, the only other context in which Aristotle insists on disinterestedness is in his discussion of love, which he defines as follows (Rhetoric 2.4, 1380b36–​81a1, quoted also in ­chapter 1): “Let loving [to philein] be wishing for someone the things that he deems good,16 for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one’s ability” (to philein is an articular infinitive, with the article “the” [to] prefixed to the infinitive philein, “to love”). A friend or philos, in turn, is “one who loves and is loved in return” (2.4, 1381a1–​2). The coincidence of language suggests that love, or something like love, may be the reason someone would unselfishly bestow a benefit or kharis upon another—​a matter that Aristotle does not raise explicitly in his discussion of gratitude.17 If so, then we may characterize gratitude   Cf. Emmons (2004, 5): “At the cornerstone of gratitude is the notion of undeserved merit.” 16   As noted above, Cope (1877 vol. 2, 42) translates “whatever we think good,” but the singular oietai goes better with the antecedent tini; those who love do not necessarily impose their conception of the good on their friends. 17   Cf. Cicero De officiis 2.21: “Whatever people grant another so as to enhance or honor him, they do either out of kindness [benevolentia], when they love [diligunt] someone for some reason or other, or out of respect [honor], if they admire someone’s virtue and believe that he is deserving of 15

112 | In the Orbit of Love

as the emotion that responds to a spontaneous and disinterested manifestation of affection or regard on the part of another, and more specifically one that takes the form of a service rendered in a time of need. Indeed, gratitude resembles love, which is itself, at the highest level, a response to the perception of virtue in another. Aristotle does not elsewhere consider what kind of reaction the perception of another person’s fondness or concern for us might elicit, but gratitude would seem to be the likely candidate, all the more so in that in Aristotle’s definition of love the emphasis is entirely on the wish to be of service and the realization of the intention to the extent possible. If virtue, according to Aristotle, is the finest among things that are lovable, that by no means implies that one is obliged to love all virtuous people, or love all equally, though we can feel well-​ disposed (eunous) toward them. One can, according to Aristotle, have only a limited number of friends. As an emotion, love is not a duty, nor is it coerced. So too, I think, with gratitude: perhaps not each and every favor will inspire such a sentiment, but benefits are the type of thing that does so—​gratitude is, we may say, a kindly feeling toward one’s benefactor, aroused by the perception of his or her goodwill toward us, rather than by the favor or service itself. Here I am going beyond what Aristotle says, but I think that I am being faithful to the implications of his argument. The economy of love and gratitude is not that of reciprocity, that is, the formal or semi-​contractual relations that govern relations among members of a community. The latter is the the greatest good fortune, or because they trust him [fidem habent] and think that he will take good care of their affairs, or because they fear his resources, or because they want something from them . . ., or finally because they are induced by gain and money, which is the basest reason” (my trans.). Love and respect seek no return.

Gratitude and Liberality | 113

territory of commercial exchange, at whatever level of social development, whether primitive barter or gift-​exchange or modern commodity capitalism. As an emotion, gratitude is free and hence contingent: it is always possible not to feel it, and this in itself is not a reason for reproach.18 But if this is so, why is ingratitude so frequently counted as a vice? Would this not imply that gratitude itself is a virtue, as Cicero took it to be? The conundrum, I think, lies in treating ingratitude as the opposite of gratitude. In fact, as the term is commonly used, ingratitude is not the name of an emotion but rather of a disposition, that is,

  Perhaps this is why gratitude is covered by unwritten prescriptions rather than legal codes, as Aristotle remarks in Rhetoric 1.13.11–​13: “[11] there are two kinds of just and unjust acts (for some are written and some unwritten). I have discussed those which the laws speak about. Of those that are unwritten there are two kinds. [12] These are those in accord with what goes beyond virtue and vice [τὰ μὲν καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας]: they incur reproaches and blame, dishonor and honors, and privileges, for example, being grateful [τὸ χάριν ἔχειν] to one who has treated you well and to treat well in return [ἀντευποιεῖν] one who has treated you well, to be helpful to one’s friends, and other such things. Then there are those that are omitted from specific written law [τοῦ ἰδίου νόμου καὶ γεγραμμένου]. [13] For the equitable seems to be just, but the equitable is the just that is beyond written law.” Cope (1877) comments ad loc.: “The two kinds of unwritten law are, first the universal law, the precepts of which suggest higher considerations and higher duties than mere legal obligations to pursue virtue and avoid vice . . . and the breach or violation of it punished by censure, reproach, dishonour. The second kind of unwritten law is . . . what is omitted by (i. e. intended to supply the deficiencies of) the written law.” Cope compares the Rhetoric to Alexander 1.6.7, which places in the class of unwritten law what is noble or shameful [τὰ καλὰ καὶ τὰ αἰσχρά], examples of which are honoring one’s parents, treating friends well, and paying back benefactors [τοῖς εὐεργέταις χάριν ἀποδιδόναι], and more generally Plato Laws 7, 793A–​C. 18

114 | In the Orbit of Love

a habitual incapacity to be grateful. Similarly, a person may be irascible (in Greek, orgilos), without experiencing the occurrent emotion of anger (orgē). A radical deficiency in the capacity to be angry, which Aristotle calls aorgēsia, is the sign of a servile temperament (Nicomachean Ethics 4.5, 1125b26–​26b10). So too, an incapacity to be grateful is a fault, indicative of an ignoble nature. An excessive proneness to gratitude would, presumably, also be a defect, perhaps shading over into flattery. In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, Clytemnestra prefaces her praise of Achilles for promising to rescue Iphigenia from the sacrifice planned by her father by declaring: “How might I praise you in words without excess, and yet not ruin the grace [kharis] of it by falling short? For when good people are praised they somehow hate those who praise them, if they praise too much” (977–​80). A good person is open to gratitude when the occasion calls for it, but the sentiment is not compulsory any more than we are obliged to love all those we recognize as virtuous.19 There is a similar relation between shame, which is clearly treated by Aristotle as an emotion, and shamelessness, which is a fault of character; as Aristotle expresses it (Rhetoric 2.6, 1383b12–​14): “Let shame then, be a pain or disturbance concerning those ills, either present, past, or future, that are perceived to lead to disgrace, while shamelessness is a disregard or impassivity concerning these same things.” Impassivity is not an emotion, but a fault of disposition or character.20   It may be worth noting that Aristotle classifies philia as an emotion in the Rhetoric (2.4), but in the Nicomachean Ethics says that it is either a virtue or accompanied by virtue (8.1). On deficiency and excess in respect to gratitude conceived of as a virtue, see Nisters (2012). 20   Cf. Baxley (2010, 160): “In sum, gratitude, for Kant, is a virtue, where this particular virtue of love amounts to a disposition to express one’s genuine appreciation in response to the beneficence of others.” 19

Gratitude and Liberality | 115

An examination of Aristotle’s view of liberality (eleutheriotēs, formed on the root eleutheria, “freedom”) may help to shed light on his view of gratitude as the emotion aroused by the perception of disinterested kindness on the part of another. In his response to the excellent paper by Charles Young on liberality in Aristotle,21 David Blankenship concludes by suggesting two future directions of research. This is his first proposal: “recalling how broad a range ‘friendship’ covers, extending to fellow citizens (VIII.9), we may learn a good deal about the working and motivation of liberality from the sections in the books on friendship which deal with friends benefiting friends (especially but not only IX.7). The attitude of the benefactor toward himself and those he benefits should be understood in connection with the kind of self-​love which motivates the most altruistic actions of friendship (IX.4, 8).”22 The combination of self-​love and altruism is paradoxical, and although subtle dialectics can reconcile the two ideas in Aristotle’s thought, their coexistence may also reflect his desire to balance a notion of reciprocity with that of unconditional generosity. Blankenship’s recommendation is surely along the right lines, but to the best of my knowledge students of Aristotle have not seriously pursued this approach so far. For example, Howard J. Curzer, in his very rich study Aristotle and theVirtues, devotes a substantial chapter to liberality without discussing the role of philia at all—​not just in the sense of “friendship” but more generally as “love” or “affection.”23 This lack is perhaps the more remarkable in that there are indications that Aristotle himself was conscious of the role   Young (1994).   Blankenship (1994, 342). 23   Curzer (2012); the fourth chapter bears the title “Liberality and Benevolence (NE IV.1).” 21 22

116 | In the Orbit of Love

of affection in his analyses of liberality and benefactions. For example, when discussing benefactors and beneficiaries, Aristotle writes: “those who have done a service for others feel friendship and love [philousi kai agapōsi] for those they have served even if these are not of any use to them and never will be. This is what happens with craftsmen too; every man loves [agapāi] his own handiwork better than he would be loved [agapētheiē] by it if it came alive; and this happens perhaps most of all with poets; for they have an excessive love [huperagapōsi] for their own poems, doting [stergontes] on them as if they were their children” (9.7, 1167b31–​1168a2, trans. Ross). So too, in the section on liberality, Aristotle writes: “Those are thought to be more liberal who have not made their wealth but inherited it; for in the first place they have no experience of want, and secondly all men are fonder [agapōsi mallon] of their own productions, as are parents and poets” (4.1, 1120b11–​14, trans. Ross). Furthermore, Aristotle regards loving as more fundamental an aspect of love than being loved, a point he argues in detail in Book 8 (1159a33–​35) but mentions again in his treatment of benefactions: “love [philēsis] is like activity [poiēsis], being loved [to phileisthai] like passivity [to paskhein]; and loving and its concomitants [to philein kai ta philika] are attributes of those who are the more active” (9.7, 1168a20–​21, trans. Ross). Aristotle goes on to say, “all men love more [mallon stergousin] what they have won by labour; e.g., those who have made their money love it more than those who have inherited it” (9.7, 1168a17–​18), a clear reminiscence of his comments in regard to liberality. What, then, is the connection between a benefaction and a favor, as Aristotle defines the latter in his treatise on rhetoric? For a kharis too, as a strictly altruistic gesture, would seem to be motivated by love, even if Aristotle, with his attention focused on gratitude, does not make the connection explicit (so Descartes writes, “A favor is, properly speaking, a desire to see good

Gratitude and Liberality | 117

come to someone toward whom one feels goodwill”).24 Does liberality, like favors, invite gratitude? If gratitude is elicited not by generosity per se but only when the benefaction is perceived as a sign of philia—​the desire to do good things for another with no expectation of gain—​then what response is due to a service motivated by eleutheriotēs? Liberality, Aristotle explains, is associated with the act of giving rather than that of receiving, since it is by giving that we make use of wealth—​this is the active aspect of liberality (to eu poiein kai to kala prattein), as opposed to the passive nature of receiving (tēi de lēpsei to eu paskhein, 4.1, 1120a14–​15); we may note the similarity to Aristotle’s discussion of benefactions, quoted above, and also to his distinction between loving and being loved. Aristotle goes on to say, in Ross’s translation: “And gratitude [kharis] is felt towards [more literally, pertains to] him who gives, not towards him who does not take, and praise also is bestowed more on him” (1120a16–​17; kai hē kharis tōi didonti, ou tōi mē lambanonti, kai ho epainos de mallon). Kharis here might, of course, signify “gratitude,” a common shorthand for kharin ekhein in contexts where this  Descartes, Les passions de l’âme, article 192; the full passage reads as follows: “La faveur est proprement un désir de voir arriver du bien à quelqu’un pour qui on a de la bonne volonté; mais je me sers ici de ce mot pour signifier cette volonté en tant qu’elle est excitée en nous par quelque bonne action de celui pour qui nous l’avons. Car nous sommes naturellement portés à aimer ceux qui font des choses que nous estimons bonnes, encore qu’il ne nous en revienne aucun bien. La faveur, en cette signification, est une espèce d’amour, non point de désir, encore que le désir de voir du bien à celui qu’on favorise l’accompagne toujours. Et elle est ordinairement jointe à la pitié, à cause que les disgrâces que nous voyons arriver aux malheureux sont cause que nous faisons plus de réflexion sur leurs mérites.” I am grateful to Theo Verbeek for calling my attention to this passage. 24

118 | In the Orbit of Love

sense of the word is clear, in which case Aristotle’s meaning would be that giving is appreciated more than receiving. However, it is odd to speak of being grateful for declining to accept a donation (the case is different with praise, since one can be laudable for refusing assistance). I am inclined rather to understand kharis here in the way that Aristotle defines it in the Rhetoric, namely as a wholly unconditional service to a person in need. In that case, the idea would be that a favor, in the sense given, pertains more to one who gives than to one who does not receive: the latter is not manifesting altruism in any direct way, whereas the giver is doing so in precisely the way Aristotle stipulates. If we accept this interpretation, then it suggests a link between Aristotle’s treatment of liberality and favors—​a link that at the same time indicates that the two ideas are not synonymous. How, then, does liberality or eleutheriotēs differ from a favor (kharis) for which one might be grateful (kharin ekhein)? For one thing, a favor would, if I am right, be the product or manifestation of an emotion or pathos, specifically affection or philia. Liberality differs in that it is a virtue, and the services or resources that a liberal person provides are a consequence of an ethical disposition, that is, a hexis. Specific to liberality as a virtue is the learned, ingrained ability to make proper use of wealth, broadly defined as anything that has a monetary value. There is a sense in which generosity can be manifested in turning down monetary assistance, even in time of need; if nothing else, it would reflect a conviction that one can live perfectly well on modest means, and someone with such a disposition or belief is likely to disburse superfluous riches to the needy. But this need not follow: a person might turn down aid out of pride, for example, and yet not be inclined to help others. Various puzzles have been posed by modern commentators in this connection, but Aristotle is quick to dismiss such a posture as the true mark of liberality, so there is no need to enter into the

Gratitude and Liberality | 119

finer points of his demonstration.25 When it comes to receiving money, Aristotle is mainly concerned to eliminate any hint of greed on the part of the liberal individual—​he is not to be given to asking for handouts (he will not be aitētikos, 1120a33), and above all will avoid any suspicion that he may have derived his income from unsavory trades, such as that of brothel-​keeper or usurer, not to mention gambler and thief. All these are illiberal (aneleutheros, 1121b33, 1122a8), that is, unworthy of a free person.26 In this respect, Aristotle’s idea of liberality differs from the notion of generosity, although the word “generous” originally meant “nobly born,” and carried more of the connotations of Aristotle’s term. As with many if not all virtues, Aristotle takes the ultimate purpose as conformity with what is fine or excellent (kalon). As Aristotle puts it, “actions in accord with virtue are fine [kalai] and for the sake of what is fine. The liberal man too, accordingly, will give for the sake of what is fine, and in the correct way [orthōs]” (1120a23–​24, my translation). The various dimensions of correctness include to whom and how much and when to give, which Aristotle will go on to specify in broad strokes; furthermore, such acts of generosity have to be effortless and pleasant, and not go against the grain (this is a condition for all virtuous behavior). These stipulations are in accord with Aristotle’s general view of virtue, which is that it involves crucially a sense of proportion and good judgment: one must distinguish between those who are genuinely in need and mere freeloaders   For discussion, see Curzer (2012, 91–​93).  Strictly, eleutheros signifies someone who is not subject to a master; the institution of slavery is an inescapable backdrop to Aristotle’s ethical doctrines. Ross obscures the matter by rendering aneleutheros as “sordid” in the first instance (1121b33) and “mean” in the second (1122a8). 25 26

120 | In the Orbit of Love

or flatterers, and one must bestow grants in aid in relation to one’s resources and on the right occasions. Aristotle does not attempt to provide a complete inventory of such conditions; they are reasonably obvious to decent people (and more particularly to those who are phronimoi), and that suffices for his purposes. The main point is that Aristotle is setting out the motive for acts of liberality, which must have as their goal to kalon. If they are undertaken for any other purpose or reason, then they do not count as liberal. Thus people who give recklessly and are indifferent to the how and whence of their possessions are precisely those who care nothing for what is fine (to mēden tou kalou phrontizein, 1121b1); what they give is not liberal because their donations are not fine or for the sake of what is fine (1121b3–​4). Aristotle omits such considerations entirely from his discussion of favors or kindnesses in the Rhetoric, and this should not cause any surprise: the important thing in doing a favor is concern for the other, not for one’s own virtue. In his treatment of benefactions in the part of the Nicomachean Ethics devoted to philia, however, he does take account of to kalon in explaining why it is that the benefactor feels more affection for the beneficiary than vice versa. The reason is that for the benefactor there is something fine about his action (tōi men euergetēi kalon to kata tēn praxin), and he naturally takes pleasure in the person in whom this fine act is realized, whereas the person benefited finds nothing fine in the agent, but only something advantageous to himself, if that, and this is less pleasant and lovable (hēdu kai philēton). Aristotle adds that the memory of fine deeds endures, since what is fine is long-​lasting (to kalon gar polukhronion) and it is enjoyable, as opposed to that which is merely useful (9.7, 1168a10–​18). We may perhaps infer from this brief passage that the benefactor is moved to confer the benefit or service just because it is fine, but Aristotle’s point here

Gratitude and Liberality | 121

seems to be that such acts are, generally speaking, virtuous—​he does not need to enter here into all the conditions that would make it so—​and to the extent that people like to contemplate their good deeds, a benefactor will enjoy thinking about his beneficiary and even like him, since what is pleasant is one of the categories of the lovable. Affection for the beneficiary here is the result of the benefit bestowed, not the cause, as I have suggested is the case with wholly altruistic favors.27 There is, then, a radical distinction between a favor spontaneously bestowed upon a person for that person’s sake, without expectation of return and with solely the other’s interests at heart, and an act of liberality which is a manifestation of one’s own virtue and undertaken for the sake of the kalon. We may properly ask whether this latter kind of benefaction merits gratitude at all, as Aristotle describes it in the Rhetoric, given how different the two motives are. Nor is motive incidental to Aristotle’s concept of virtue. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle indicates two ways of understanding virtue: first, virtue is a mean [mesotēs] when taken “in respect to its substance [ousia] and the account [logos] that states its essence [to ti ēn einai]”; second, virtue is an extreme or absolute (akrotēs), when it is taken in respect to what is best (ariston) and the good (to eu, 2.6, 1107a6–​8). In the Eudemian Ethics, in turn, Aristotle affirms that virtue is the best disposition (diathesis) of the soul, in regard to its function (ergon) or use (khrēsis, 2.1, 1218b37–​1219a5). Elsewhere in the same work, Aristotle speaks of virtue as a hexis

  Cf. Rogers (1993, 366): “At 1168a9–​12, Aristotle is not saying that what makes beneficence καλόν and therefore pleasant for one is that one aims at another’s good, but that in providing good for another, one is being active and thereby actualizing oneself.” 27

122 | In the Orbit of Love

on the basis of which people are productive (praktikoi) of what is best (tōn beltistōn) and are best disposed (arista diakeintai) concerning what is best (to beltiston), and he notes as well that what is best (beltiston kai ariston) is what is in accord with orthos logos; he then stipulates that “this is the middle [meson] between excess and deficiency in regard to us” and is concerned with the middle or mean in regard to pleasure and pain and things that are pleasant and painful (2.5, 1222a6–​12). Although translators render the phrase orthos logos as “right principle” (Rackham)28 or “correct reasoning” (Kenny),29 it is evident that Aristotle is playing on the double sense of logos as “reasoning” and “proportion.” In any case, virtue as a mean is treated as a consequence of a disposition to do what is best. It is not clear whether the idea of “being productive of what is best . . . and disposed concerning what is best” is precisely equivalent to doing something for the sake of the kalon, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the virtuous agent will have as the goal doing what is fine or noble, and this involves steering a middle course between extremes.30 Virtuous people are, of course, socially beneficial. A just person treats others fairly, a courageous person defends his community. But each does so for the sake of what is fine. It is true that fine or noble behavior almost by definition serves not only the self but also the interests of others; but when we look to the goal or intention, those who act in accord with or for the kalon may be said to serve others incidentally, in contrast to the motivation that Aristotle specifies for love and favors, which is to serve the   Rackham (1981).   Kenny (2011, 21). 30   I wish to thank Marko Malink for calling my attention to these passages and the puzzle concerning the definition of virtue that they imply. 28 29

Gratitude and Liberality | 123

interests of the other and not oneself. No doubt, virtuous people too can bestow a favor, but in that case they will not be doing it in the first instance for the sake of the kalon.31 Is one expected, then, to feel gratitude for a benefit that is bestowed when the benefactor is motivated by what is fine or noble rather than by love? Will such an action in itself endear the giver to the one who receives, if the benefactor takes delight in his or her own virtue rather than in the alleviation of the other’s need? Howard Curzer affirms that, on the standard interpretation of Aristotle’s view, liberal people “give and receive gifts correctly, so liberality includes what we might call the virtues of benevolence and gratitude insofar as they concern wealth” (83). Curzer regards

  Roger Crisp (2014, 236) observes: “A virtuous person . . . chooses virtuous actions not for the sake of any product (such as to win favour), but for the sake of those actions themselves.” In reply to Irwin (2011), Crisp affirms that Aristotle’s claim concerning the self-​love of virtuous people (Nicomachean Ethics 9.8) “seems consistent with the view that the virtuous person’s only object of concern is his own happiness, and that he is concerned to promote the good of others only in so far as doing so is noble and so such as to advance his own good. I suggest that we would not ordinarily describe such a person’s concerns as ‘unselfish’ or ‘impartial’ ” (239). Kelly Rogers (1993, 364) notes that “there are a handful of passages in the Ethics that also seem to conceive of the καλόν in altruistic terms, thereby backing up the Rhetoric’s account,” but offers reasons to doubt that they do so in fact. With regard to benefactions in particular, she challenges Irwin’s claim (1986, 130) that the kalon is other-​regarding because giving is more kalon than receiving; as she notes, the passage “does not say that giving is appropriate [Rogers’s translation of kalos] to generosity and virtue, and taking inappropriate, but that giving is more appropriate than taking. Since both are appropriate, however (cf. 1120b27–​1121al), the passage of itself offers no more reason for associating the καλόν with one than the other, or for saying that generosity and virtue are only καλόν in so far as they involve giving, but not in so far as they involve taking” (365). 31

124 | In the Orbit of Love

this picture as “wrong in absolutely every respect.” In the case of gratitude in particular, Curzer writes: roughly speaking, accepting a birthday present is not a liberal act; collecting donations for Oxfam is. To take liberally from others is to act as a middleman, delivering a gift from a well-​off person to a needy one. Gratitude is, therefore, inappropriate for liberal people qua liberal. Of course, liberal people might express gratitude on behalf of the ultimate recipients of a gift, but this is someone else’s gratitude, so to speak. Presumably, liberal people occasionally accept gifts for themselves, and they should be grateful for them and express their gratitude appropriately. But that does not seem to be part of liberality. (2012, 93)

But ought “the ultimate recipients of a gift,” having received it from someone who is simply acting for the sake of virtue, feel and express gratitude? Curzer also notes that ingratitude is among the hazards of liberality; as he puts it, in addition to impoverishing themselves, “Liberal givers also risk ingratitude. Ingratitude is not so devastating as poverty, but it can still hurt” (105). But ought they to have expected gratitude in the first place? In the case of a kharis, the answer is clearly yes; but liberality, as we have seen, has a different raison d’être. The beneficiary might well feel indebted to the benefactor, but as we noted above, in discussing beneficence in relation to philia Aristotle maintains that the one who is benefited finds nothing fine in the agent but only something advantageous to himself, and this, as Aristotle makes clear, has less of what is pleasant and lovable (hēdu kai philēton). A truly virtuous benefactor ought to be immune to possible disappointments in connection with the gratitude of the beneficiary. We have observed how Seneca, in his treatise On Benefactions (De beneficiis), wrestles with the double nature of gratitude. On the one hand, a benefaction requires a counter-​gift, and so places

Gratitude and Liberality | 125

the receiver in the position of a debtor, under obligation to the giver. On the other hand, the very delight that the receiver takes in the gift serves as a kind of spiritual or moral compensation for the giver, as Seneca suggests in his definition of a beneficium (quoted above). The split between intention and deed is even clearer in cases where one wishes to bestow a benefaction but is not able to do so; as Seneca puts it, “If someone has wished to grant me a benefaction but was unable to do so, I will feel friendly toward him, to be sure, but not indebted” (ei qui voluit mihi beneficium dare sed non potuit amicus quidem ero sed non obligatus, 6.11.2–​3). This is not to map the distinction between kharis and liberality, as Aristotle describes them, onto Seneca’s division between voluntas and res: liberality, as a virtue motivated by an aspiration for what is noble, is not the same as Seneca’s benevolentia, which does, Seneca affirms, expect a return, if not in material terms—​or not immediately—​then in the form of a sense of indebtedness. But Aristotle recognizes that under ordinary circumstances gifts have strings attached, and in the passage in which he speaks of the non-​symmetrical affection between benefactor and beneficiary, he mentions the popular view that lenders desire the well-​being of their debtors so that the debt can be repaid, whereas those who have borrowed have rather the reverse feeling toward the creditors (Nicomachean Ethics 9.7, 1167b13–​33). Aristotle denies the analogy between a benefaction and a loan, and provides his own explanation, as we have seen. Even so, he seems to doubt that the recipients of a gift will feel much affection for the giver. Two primary considerations have motivated the distinction drawn in this chapter between Aristotle’s account of favors and of the kinds of benefactions that are done out of liberality. First, they seem to have different intentional goals: favors are for the sake of the other, whereas liberality is for the sake of the kalon. To be sure, the two motives are not unrelated, but they

126 | In the Orbit of Love

are distinguished by their immediate purpose. Second, there is no talk of gratitude in connection with liberality, and there is reason to think that beneficiaries do not necessarily feel well-​ disposed toward their benefactors. It may help us to understand Aristotle’s view if we think of the donations people make to beggars: they may be motivated by sympathy for the individual’s plight, but people often give a coin because they believe it is the proper thing to do. Should the beggar be grateful? Do we even wish such a response, as though our gesture entitled us to gratitude? Liberality in the classical world was a kind of noblesse oblige, an act on the part of the wealthy toward the less well to do. As a virtue, it partook of the same social style as pride, or what Aristotle calls megalopsukhia, literally “greatness of soul.” The proud or “magnanimous” man has a deep voice, walks slowly, and radiates security and power (Nicomachean Ethics 4.3; cf. Crisp 2006; Cullyer 2014, 140–​47). Liberality is a class phenomenon, and any gratitude it inspires is inevitably tinged with a sense of deference. Kindness, on Aristotle’s description, seems to be something like an emotion, being analogous to affection, whereas liberality is rather a virtue that has as its aim actions that are fine or noble. The liberal individual looks to the conditions under which a benefaction is appropriately bestowed, but a favor can be given for sentimental reasons that do not necessarily take due account of propriety and desert (though emotions too look to merit, as in the case of pity, which responds, according to Aristotle, to undeserved misfortune, and love too, as we have seen in ­chapter 2, has its reasons). It is not surprising, then, that the two types of giving should elicit different responses and that gratitude, itself a pathos according to Aristotle, should respond more to favors done for the recipient’s sake than to benefactions granted out of

Gratitude and Liberality | 127

a self-​regarding concern for the kalon.32 To be sure, one may feel goodwill (eunoia) and even philia toward a virtuous individual, and all the more so, perhaps, toward one whose specific excellence is that of liberality, except insofar as receiving a benefaction entails an unpleasant sense of obligation. But the emotion of gratitude is not a response, in the first instance, to a perception of virtue in another. It answers rather to the affection that motivated the kindness, which is understood to have been as selfless as love itself.33 If gratitude, in classical descriptions, seems nevertheless to

  We may compare Clement of Alexandria’s insistence that one ought not to give alms even for the sake of salvation, although such generosity does count in one’s favor, but rather out of love alone: “ ‘And if I give away all my possessions’ he says [1 Corinthians 13:3], not according to the principle of affectionate fellowship [τῆς κοινωνίας τῆς ἀγαπητικῆς], but according to that of recompense [τῆς ἀνταποδόσεως], either from the person who was benefitted or from the Lord who promised [sc. salvation], and if I have total faith so as to move mountains and to cast away blinding passions, but I do not trust in the Lord from love [δι’ ἀγάπην], I am nothing” (Stromateis 4.18). Cf. Downs 2014,500–​02, whose translation I have adapted. 33   Martial, in his cynical way, captures the dilemma of gift-​giving neatly in a variety of epigrams, such as this one (10.11): 32

Nil aliud loqueris, quam Thesea Pirithoumque, Teque putas Pyladi, Calliodore, parem. Dispeream, si tu Pyladi praestare matellam Dignus es aut porcos pascere Pirithoi. “Donavi tamen” inquis “amico milia quinque Et lotam, ut multum, terve quaterve togam.” Quid, quod nil unquam Pyladi donavit Orestes? Qui donat quamvis plurima, plura negat.

128 | In the Orbit of Love

hover between a loving response to altruism and a debt owed to a benefactor, we may take it as yet another sign of the interference between ideas of selfless affection and the regime of reciprocity that pervades the ideologies of ancient Greece and Rome—​and indeed, in our own time as well.

Calliodorus, you talk of nothing but Theseus and Pirithous, and think yourself the equal of Pylades. Damned if you are fit to hold a chamber pot to Pylades or feed Pirithous’ pigs. “All the same,” you say, “I gave a friend five thousand and a gown washed three or four times at most.” Well, but Pylades never gave Orestes anything. A giver, however generous, denies more than he gives” (trans. D. R. Shackleton-​Bailey, Loeb edition 1993).

4 GRIEF AND THE SELF

Of all the emotions, grief for the death of a loved one might seem like the most other-​regarding and least concerned with the self. The pain we feel at the loss of another is a function of the affection we bore when that person was alive: if the love perhaps fell short of complete selflessness before, the sorrow at being deprived of a dear one is a reflex of love in its purest form, when one can expect no possible return and any motive of debt and reciprocity is excluded. Such was the view of Søren Kierkegaard; as Laura Llevadot summarizes his position, “He who follows the precept of loving the dead discovers a love that is free, disinterested, and without hope, because the dead have no expectations and cannot reward us in the way we would like and expect of the living. The duty to love the dead expresses the duty to love unconditionally and without interest.”1 Nevertheless, grief has a self-​centered quality, inasmuch as our suffering is due to our own privation; we are not perturbed on behalf of the deceased but on our own account. Grief so conceived is another manifestation of the egoism that is said to be characteristic of love generally, irrespective of the subtleties   Llevadot (2011, 214).

1

130 | In the Orbit of Love

and sophistries concerning the description of the loved one as another self. People everywhere lament the loss of loved ones, but in some cultures lamentation assumes a ritual form. Hired mourners may perform dirges at the gravesite, employing traditional phrases and postures to express the grief of the bereaved. Poets, in turn, may further refine such chants, varying them to suit literary context and characterization and thereby giving rise to something like a genre. The lineaments of such a genre are already evident in Homer’s Iliad, which offers a rich set of examples that were models for subsequent adaptations and experiments. The epic concludes, remarkably, with a series of three laments, all uttered by women, over the death of Hector, the mainstay of the Trojan army who has just been slain by Achilles before the walls of Troy. The first of these is pronounced by Andromache, Hector’s widow, and is followed by those of Hector’s mother, Hecuba, and his sister-​in-​law, Helen, who had eloped from Sparta with Paris, half-​ brother to Hector.2 Here are Andromache’s words: Husband, you have died too young, leaving me a widow in the palace, and your son, whom we his unhappy parents brought into the world, is still a babe who I fear will never grow to adolescence. For this city is doomed to perish utterly, as you have perished who watched over it, and kept its wives and children safe, who will soon be captive aboard the hollow ships, I among them.You my child will go with me, and labor somewhere at menial tasks for some harsh master. Or else some Greek will seize you by the arm and hurl you from the wall to your death, angered perhaps because Hector killed his brother, father, son, for many are the Achaeans   On women’s laments in epic and tragedy, see (inter alia) Dué (2002); Tsagalis (2004); Dué (2006); Dunham (2014). 2

Grief and the Self | 131

whose mouths have bit the dust at the hands of Hector, and your father was not a kindly man in battle. Now the people lament you throughout the city, Hector, and unspeakable grief your death has brought your parents. But bitter pain [algea lugra] has fallen especially to me, because you did not die in your bed, stretching out your arms to me, with some tender word that I might have treasured, in tears, night and day. (vv. 725–​45, trans. A. S. Kline, slightly modified)

In this archetypal complaint, one may well have the impression that Andromache is mourning her own fate more than the loss of her husband: she thinks of her enslavement and that of her son, or, alternatively, the boy’s premature death (even more untimely than that of his father), and the threat that the loss of Hector implies for the entire city of Troy. Only the final lines seem to indicate a special intimacy between Andromache and her husband. Of course, we can readily understand her anxiety: Hector was the bulwark of the Trojan army, and her forebodings echo his own, earlier in the poem, when he expressed the wish that he lie buried beneath the earth, sooner than see his wife dragged off into slavery (6.440–​93). Hector was a symbol of Troy’s sad destiny, which was, as Homer relates it, a consequence of Paris’ violation of the code of hospitality and his abduction of the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Andromache has every reason to bemoan her situation, the more so since she was herself a war bride and depended entirely on Hector for her position in the city (6.405–​32). I certainly do not wish to disparage her sentiment as selfish. Her emotion is a compound of a raw sense of loss of her beloved husband and her understanding of the consequences of his death for herself and her son. An awareness of her situation and a clear apprehension of what the death of Hector means to her and for her is part and parcel of her grief. No doubt anyone,

132 | In the Orbit of Love

anywhere, is liable to such a feeling when they perceive that they have lost all and find themselves in a state of utter vulnerability; in this sense, the capacity to experience this kind of grief may be said to be universal. But there is, nevertheless, another sense in which it is culturally constructed. Andromache’s grief is characteristic of those in need of protection, which is why lamentation as a subgenre in the classical Greek literary tradition was associated especially with women and with the weak. Andromache’s lament is of a piece with those of Hecuba and Helen, which follow; here is Helen’s which, extraordinarily, is the culminating moment of the poem: Handsome Hector, dearest to me of all my Trojan brothers! Godlike Paris, my husband, brought me to this land of Troy, though I’d rather I had died there and then, and this is now the twentieth year since I abandoned my native country, yet in all that time I had no harsh or spiteful word from you. If any in the palace reproached me, your brothers, sisters, your brothers’ fine wives, or your mother, for your father was ever gentle to me like my own, you would turn away their wrath, and restrain them with gentle acts and words. So I grieve aloud for you, and in my heart for my wretched self, since there is no one else in all wide Troy who’ll be kind or gentle to me, all of them shudder as I pass. (trans. Kline)

These words are pronounced at Hector’s funeral. Earlier, as the Trojans witness the mutilation of Hector’s corpse by the vengeful Achilles, Priam “groaned in anguish, and a wave of grief spread round them through the city, no less than if all of lofty Ilium were on fire.” He grovels in the dust, and cries out in words that anticipate Andromache’s: “If he could but have died in my arms! Then I and his mother, who to her sorrow bore him, could have

Grief and the Self | 133

wept and wailed our fill over his corpse” (22.426–​28). So too, Hecuba laments: “My child, how wretched I am! Why should I live on in suffering now you are dead? You were my pride of Troy, night and day, a saviour, greeted as a god, by every man and woman in this city, surely their great glory while you lived. But now death and fate overtake you” (22.431–​36). The loss of Hector is perceived as a diminishment of his mother’s status. Heroic warriors also mourn, to be sure, but their attachment to their comrades is not motivated by the need for protection; on the contrary, they may feel guilty for not having been able to defend their weaker ally. We may illustrate this other-​regarding concern by way of a remarkable passage in the essay On Death by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, a contemporary of Cicero, Julius Caesar (Philodemus was a permanent guest at Caesar’s father-​in-​law’s villa in Herculaneum, on the outskirts of Naples), and of the great Roman poet Lucretius, who wrote a didactic poem expounding Epicurus’ philosophy. Epicurus regarded the fear of death as the primary cause of anxiety in this life, and also of irrational desires, such as limitless greed and ambition, which he interpreted as vain efforts to deny our mortality. Philodemus, however, allows in this essay for a surprising exception to the detached attitude toward death that Epicureans preached. The standard view is our own death is nothing to us, since there is no afterlife and so we cannot be aware of any post-​mortem misfortune; as Epicurus put it, “when we are, death is not present, and when death is present, then we are not” (Letter to Menoeceus 125). It follows that we ought to face the end of our own life with perfect equanimity. The point is brought home with great eloquence and irony by Lucretius, in a passage in which he alludes briefly to the sorrow that a head of household may feel at the thought that his loved ones will no longer greet him affectionately, nor will he be able to protect them once he is gone (3.894–​99).

134 | In the Orbit of Love

Lucretius dismisses both concerns with the curt reminder that the dead man will no longer be in any position to miss (desiderium, 3.901) these things.Yet Philodemus acknowledges that there may be what he calls a “natural bite” that arises unavoidably when we imagine our friends and family undergoing hardship after our death. As he writes: Now leaving behind parents or children or a wife or certain others of those close to us, if they will be in dire straits on account of our death or will even lack necessities, has of course a most natural sting, and this alone, or more than anything else, stirs up emissions of tears in the sensible man. (col. XXV.2–​9 Henry)3

There are possible ways to reconcile Philodemus’ view with that of Lucretius (it may be simply a matter of emphasis).4 But Philodemus’ argument illustrates that the proleptic grief of a male head of household in regard to his own death is natural and acceptable, precisely because his anguish is not for himself but rather for the defenseless dependents he will leave behind, much as Hector feels sorrow at the thought that Andromache may be led off to slavery after he is slain and the city of Troy has fallen (6.440–​93). The griefs of Hector and Andromache are not symmetrical: they are informed and defined by different kinds of anxiety attaching to the loss of a loved one, and depend on distinct social situations. Both have semiformal patterns of expression, predicated in part on the division of roles characteristic of a warrior society, in which the conquest of a city typically meant the extermination of the adult male population and the enslavement   Trans. Henry (2009); cf. Armstrong (2003); Warren (2004, 193–​94); Tsouna (2007, 49); Pearcy (2012). 4   See Konstan (2013). 3

Grief and the Self | 135

of the surviving women and children. As a social phenomenon, as opposed to the instinctive sense of loss that human beings share with other animals, grief is gendered.5 Grief is, as we have observed, a response to the loss of a loved one: it is not simply hurt, although the Greek and Latin words that commonly designate grief—​lupē and dolor—​may refer also to physical pain. The ambiguity, or rather the range, of the Greek terms, is evident in the final words of Andromache’s lament: But bitter pain [algea lugra] has fallen especially to me, because you did not die in your bed, stretching out your arms to me, with some tender word that I might have treasured, in tears, night and day.

Algos is typically used of corporeal pain, but Andromache clearly means something more psychological; it is not the immediate impact of the sight of Hector’s body and the knowledge that he is now dead that she bewails, but the absence of a final gesture or gentle expression that might have served as a reminder of Hector’s affection. Such a parting token is not meant to diminish Andromache’s sense of loss; quite the contrary, by cherishing it forever, she runs the risk of perpetuating her mourning,

  In this I depart from Holst-​Warhaft, in her sensitive and moving study (2000, 76): “The emotions aroused by death are not . . . culturally specific. The fear of death and the grief of bereavement, however they are displayed, are universal experiences.” There is certainly an elemental truth to this view, and yet recent studies of emotions confirm Aristotle’s view that our beliefs are not simply incidental to emotion but are part and parcel of the feeling itself, and determine its specific nature; see notes 22 and 23 below on appraisal theory. 5

136 | In the Orbit of Love

converting it into that abiding grief that ancient thinkers came to regard as pathological. Homer was aware of the syndrome of perpetual mourning. When Achilles has recovered sufficiently from his sorrow over the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector to consent to returning his body to Priam for a proper funeral (Achilles had planned to mutilate it and deny Hector burial), he counsels the elder man on the necessity to give over one’s grief, however intense, and return to ordinary life, signified here by eating as opposed to the fasting that symbolizes union with the deceased: Venerable lord, your son’s body has been placed on a bier and I shall release it to you as you wished. At dawn you may look on him, and carry him back, but now let us eat. Even long-​haired Niobe eventually thought to eat, though her twelve children had been slain, six daughters, six sons in their prime. Apollo angry that Niobe had boasted of bearing so many children compared with Leto who had borne but two, killed the sons with arrows from his silver bow, while his sister Artemis killed the daughters. The pair slew them all, and left them lying in their blood, for nine days, since Zeus had turned the people to stone and there was no one to bury the corpses. On the tenth day the heavenly gods gave them burial, and only then did Niobe, exhausted by her grief, take sustenance. Now, turned to stone herself, she stands among the crags on the desolate slopes of Sipylus, where men say the Nymphs that dance on the banks of Achelous take their rest, and broods on the sorrows the gods sent her. Come let us too take sustenance, venerable lord: in Ilium you can lament your son once more, and grieve for him with a flood of tears. (Iliad 24.599–​620, trans. Kline)

Grief and the Self | 137

Scholars have noted the apparent contradiction in Achilles’ advice: on the one hand, he holds Niobe up as an example of one who was able to overcome her grief and consent finally to eat, after ten days of fasting while her children lay unburied (there is perhaps a minor inconsistency in Achilles’ advice, since Hector has not yet been interred, but it is now agreed that his body will be returned); on the other hand, he recalls that Niobe has been metamorphosed into stone and in this guise pines and weeps forever. In this respect she is a symbol of unending and incurable sorrow, a refusal ever to abandon the sense of loss. Conceivably, Andromache imagines for herself some such indelible suffering. Certainly, there are signs of this posture in Achilles himself, which we shall examine more closely below. Achilles’ advice to Priam may be regarded as the earliest instance of another genre related to grief—​one that, like the lamentation, is foreign to modern taste. This is the genre of the consolation, a therapeutic message in the form of an essay addressed to a grief-​stricken party, with the intention of reasoning the individual out of his or her anguish. When Plutarch’s two-​ year-​old daughter died, he was away from home, and since his wife’s message missed him, he first learned of the event from his niece. He took the opportunity to send his wife a letter of consolation, although he presumably could have returned home himself in more or less the time it took for the letter to be delivered. Some scholars have assumed that the consolation was written subsequently, or that it was originally much shorter and less didactic in tone, and that Plutarch reworked it for publication at a later date.6 What disturbs modern readers is the preachy tone, and Plutarch’s apparent coolness in respect to his daughter’s   See Martin Phillips (1978, 394–​95).

6

138 | In the Orbit of Love

death. Thus, Sarah Pomeroy observes: “To the modern reader, a letter addressed by one parent to another offering consolation on the death of their young child may seem a distinctly odd creation. The sharing of grief is the intention, but the very fact that the writer can marshal his thoughts and create a work of literary merit would seem to betray a lack of feeling.”7 (75). Pomeroy concludes that “the contents of the letter suggest to me that Plutarch did not want to arrive home and find his wife hysterical with grief. The letter warned her that he was coming and that he anticipated that she would control herself as she had in past situations of crisis” (76). Jo-​Marie Claassen, however, has offered a different interpretation of Plutarch’s purpose in writing the consolation: rather than curbing his wife’s excessive displays of grief, he is celebrating her for her good sense and self-​control. At the same time, he is composing a memorial to his beloved daughter, for whom he bore an exceptional affection, equal to that of the mother, and, finally, addressing his advice as much to himself as to his wife; the letter reveals “Plutarch the father attempting to act as a physician healing himself by whatever means he can.”8 I imagine Plutarch and his wife referring to the epistle at moments when they feel overwhelmed by sorrow, so as to remind themselves of the reasons to take pleasure in the memory of the child rather than bemoan her early departure from this world. Like other thinkers, Plutarch distinguishes between the perfectly natural response to the loss of a dear one and the compounding of such sorrow by false beliefs. “Most mothers,” he writes, “take their children in their arms like toys when they have been cleaned and made pretty by others, and then,

  Pomeroy (1999, 75).   Claassen (2004, 42).

7 8

Grief and the Self | 139

if they die, dissolve into vain, ungrateful grief, not out of affection [eunoia] (which is a good and reasoned thing) but because a large admixture of vanity [to pros kenēn doxan] in a small quantity of natural emotion [tōi phusikōi pathei] makes the act of grieving wild, insane, and difficult to sedate” (6, trans. Russell). Plutarch is clearly having recourse to the distinction between an instinctive response to loss, which he calls “natural,” and the mad kind of passion that results from vain or empty opinion (kenē doxa), a standard technical term for false beliefs in Epicurean and Stoic doctrine. It is such beliefs that convert the reflexive and due response to loss into an enduring and excessive emotion. At the conclusion of the consolation Plutarch avails himself of some of the conventional topoi of the genre. He adjures his wife not to feel pity for the child “because she died unmarried and childless,” an allusion to the pity conventionally evoked for those who have suffered an untimely or aōros death.9 But, Plutarch states, one should be grateful for the life that was granted and not pine for what was not to be. Finally, Plutarch reminds his wife that the child   It is a commonplace in funerary inscriptions, as in this fourth-​century bc inscription from the Attic deme of Rhamnous: “We must all die, but you have left behind pity for your youth,” Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 42 (1992); cf. Lattimore (1962, 178, 184–​99), and on Roman funerary inscriptions indicating grief for the very young, King (2000). Another in the same genre: “Good Xenokleia, having left behind her two unmarried young daughters, Xenokleia, the daughter of Nicarchos, lies dead, after having mourned the pitiful end of her son, Phoinix, who died at open sea at the age of eight. Who is so ignorant of lamentation, Xenokleia, that he does not pity your fate? After having lost your unmarried young daughters, you die because of longing for your son, who, lying in the dark sea, has (there) his unpitying grave” (CEG 526, 4th century bc Attica, trans. Tsagalis [2008, 229]; translation slightly modified). 9

140 | In the Orbit of Love

now suffers no pain or sense of deprivation (9). With this last reflection, Plutarch distances himself from the doctrine of the Epicureans, according to whom the soul is wholly dissolved upon death, and appeals rather to the belief in the immortality of the soul, as taught by the mystical rites of Dionysus, into which both Plutarch and his wife had been initiated (10). For just as wrong or vain views can cause one to mourn excessively for the deceased because of a conviction that they are wholly extinguished or indeed even suffering, so the belief that they are happy, and indeed that one will be reunited with them in the afterlife, can alleviate the sense of loss. We find a comparable distinction between the immediate pain of loss and unnaturally prolonged mourning in Seneca’s consolatory letters. In order to assuage his mother’s sorrow at Seneca’s own exile, he explains that he hesitated to write sooner, since he knew that solace for pain that is still fresh may inflame the wound rather than alleviate it, and so he waited till it diminished in intensity and could bear the cure (1.2). The fact that Helvia is a woman, Seneca avers, is no excuse for endless weeping; the ancestors stipulated a ten-​month period of mourning for husbands, thus limiting rather than prohibiting grief (luctus): “for when you have lost one of your dearest, it is foolish indulgence to feel infinite pain [dolor], but to feel none is inhuman harshness. Best is a due proportion between regard [pietas] and reason, both to feel the loss and to control it” (16.1). So too, in his Consolation to Marcia for the loss of her son, he complains that all the efforts of her friends have been in vain, and even time, which is nature’s remedy for grief, has wasted its forces on her (1.6). For three years she has mourned without the least remission in intensity; like all vices that are not controlled, misery feeds on its own bitterness and the pain becomes a kind of perverse pleasure (prava voluptas, 1.7). Seneca evidently regards grief as inevitable when

Grief and the Self | 141

the loss is recent, and only when it is prolonged and becomes a fixed state of melancholy does he condemn it as excessive and even perverse. The distinction between the immediate and instinctive pain at the loss of a dear one and the enduring melancholy that results from vain opinion reflects a corresponding differentiation between two kinds of love or philia. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle illustrates his argument that love (philia) consists more in loving than in being loved with the following example: “Some [mothers] give out their own children to be raised, and they love and know them, but they do not seek to be loved in return, if both [loving and being loved] are not possible; but it seems to them to suffice if they see them [i.e., their children] doing well, and they love them even if they, as a result of their ignorance, provide in return none of the things that are due a mother” (8.8, 1159a28–​33). A mother’s love is paradigmatic for affection, in that it does not, like friendship, depend on reciprocity, but is innate. Aristotle himself had noted earlier that philia “seems to inhere by nature in a parent toward offspring, not only among human beings but also among birds and most animals, and also in those of the same species toward one another, and this above all in human beings” (8.1, 1155a16–​22).Yet there is an important difference between the human mother’s attitude and that of an animal: the mother in Aristotle’s story is not said to grieve for the child she has given away, presumably because she knows that it is properly cared for. Doubtless she felt a pang upon giving it up, but her confidence in its well-​being is analogous to Plutarch’s faith that his daughter is at peace in the next world. The contrast between the instinctive affection that animals bear for their young and human love and friendship was drawn most clearly by the Stoics, who denied that animals have emotions at all, in the strict sense of the word. The reason is

142 | In the Orbit of Love

that emotions require assent to a proposition (more strictly, two propositions, e.g., in the case of anger, that one ought not to have been wronged and that one should seek vengeance), and only rational creatures are capable of such judgments. Both Aristotle and the Stoics define anger, for example, as a desire to avenge a deliberate insult or offense; an evaluation of the intention behind the act is inseparable from the emotion. This is why Seneca denies that animals can be angry: “Animals have violence, rabidity, ferocity, aggression, but do not have anger any more than they have licentiousness. . . . Dumb animals lack human emotions, but they do have certain impulses that are similar to emotions” (De ira 1.3).10 Seneca allows that animals experience a kind of grief or, more precisely, a sense of loss or missing (desideria) a fellow creature; indeed, they do so intensely, but only for a brief time. As Seneca puts it: “no animal has a lengthy sorrow for its offspring except man, who adheres to his grief and is stirred not to the extent that he feels it but to the extent that he has decided to be” (Consolatio ad Marciam 7.2). In the 99th epistle to Lucilius (99.18), Seneca again notes that the sense of loss in animals is relatively transient; birds and wild animals love their young with a fierce passion, he avers, but it is quickly extinguished when they have died (99.24). Human beings react with a similar intensity to the death of a dear one: “when the first news of a bitter death strikes us, when we hold the body that is about to pass from our embrace into the fire, a natural necessity forces out our tears.” In this regard, we are not unlike other animals, and our tears are shed independently of our will or decision (99.19). Human beings, however, remember the deceased; to forget loved ones and bury memory of them along   For further discussion of Seneca’s theory of emotions, see Konstan (2014b; 2015; and 2016b). 10

Grief and the Self | 143

with their bodies is inhuman, Seneca writes, and he concludes that a sensible person will continue to remember the dead, but will cease to grieve (lugere) for them. Again, Seneca is concerned with mourning that is prolonged to excess. He does not censure the initial response to bereavement; as he says, when our dear ones have passed away, it is natural to miss them, provided that the passion is moderate. Even the strongest intellects feel a sting simply when friends are absent, not to mention when they have died (Ad Marciam 7.1). This sentiment is analogous to the unreasoning feeling of loss that animals experience; it is independent of judgment, and so does not count as an emotion (adfectus, pathos) in the strict sense of the term. A similar distinction between the immediate impact of loss and persistent mourning is found in Epicurean sources.11 In the course of arguing that atoms come in an almost infinite variety of shapes, Lucretius observes that however similar they may seem, each member of any species differs from the rest: this is why offspring can recognize their mothers, and mothers their offspring (349–​ 51). As Lucretius writes (352–​66): for often a calf, slain in front of a temple of the gods, has fallen at the incense-​bearing altars, pouring a warm river of blood from its breast; but its bereft mother, wandering through the green fields, recognizes the traces left by its cleft hooves in the ground, scans every place with its eyes, if perhaps she may detect somewhere her lost newborn, and she stops and fills the leafy woods with her cries, and again and again returns to the stable, transfixed with longing [desiderio] for the calf, nor can the tender willows and the grass bright with dew or any of the rivers that flow at the top of their banks delight her mind [animus] and ward   For further discussion, see Konstan (2013).

11

144 | In the Orbit of Love

off her sudden anxiety [cura]. Nor can other kinds of calf in the flourishing meadows divert her mind and relieve her anxiety: that is how much she seeks what is her own and familiar to her. (my translation)

The capacity of animals to identify their own is the reason they feel their absence so intensely. It is a primitive kind of pain, independent to any beliefs about the fate of a missing creature: the cow does not know that its calf has been sacrificed—​it is looking for it elsewhere, in the pasture or the stable, not the temple—​ nor even that it is dead; it is simply absent. This is not the kind of anxiety for the dead that human beings experience, in their ignorant assumption that corpses can suffer or that the soul may be punished in the afterlife. The entire purpose of Epicureanism is to inveigh against the fear of death arising from such mistaken suppositions, which Lucretius ridicules with cutting irony. Not even those who acknowledge that the deceased is beyond all suffering are spared his scorn: “You are insensible in death, and so will be forevermore free of all bitter pains; but we have wept insatiably as you were cremated on the horrifying pyre, and never will the day come that will remove eternal grief [maeror] from our breasts” (904–​08). Lucretius asks in turn: “what is so bitter about something returning to sleep and quietude, that a person can waste away in eternal mourning [luctus]?” (909–​11). Lucretius is not, I think, condemning the survivors for their immediate sorrow, which, as we have seen, human beings share with other animals, but rather the expectation that their grief will last forever. The raw, instinctive pain that arises from the loss of loved ones, however, is inescapable. Plutarch informs us that Epicurus wrote a consolatory letter to a certain Dositheus and Pyrson upon the death of Hegesianax, Dositheus’ son and Pyrson’s brother (OnWhy It Is Impossible to

Grief and the Self | 145

Live Pleasurably according to Epicureanism 1101a–​b1 = Epistles fr. 16 Arrighetti), adding that the Epicureans polemicize against those who eliminate grief [lupai], tears and groans at the death of dear ones, and they say that freedom from grief [alupia] that is carried to the point of insensitivity [to apathes] arises from another and greater vice, namely ruthlessness or uncontrolled vanity or insanity. It is therefore better to feel [paskhein] something and to grieve [lupeisthai] and even, by Zeus, for one’s eyes to glisten and melt with tears, and all the other things which, when people suffer and write them, they are thought to be sensitive and loving sorts.

Plutarch sees this posture as hypocritical on Epicurus’ part, given his insistence that death is nothing to us. But it is consistent with the view that such losses are deeply painful, irrespective of one’s opinions about death. No amount of consolation can alleviate this sting.12 It is tempting to think of instinctive affection as other-​ regarding: mothers care for their young selflessly, save to the extent that humans look also to being tended by their children in return when they grow old, a standard view of what offspring were expected to do in exchange for having been brought into the world and raised by their parents. This quid-​ pro-​quo conception of child-​rearing brings parental love into the sphere of reciprocity: children are forever indebted to their parents, since they have received a gift beyond recompense.13   It is commonly assumed that the earliest example of a letter of consolation was penned by the Platonist philosopher Crantor (died around 275 bc), and addressed to his friend Hippocles on the death of his son (see Kassel 1958); but Epicurus’ letter or letters would have been earlier. 13   For references to classical sources and discussion, see Parkin (1999, 124–​29); Parkin (2003, 205–​11). 12

146 | In the Orbit of Love

Parents who die while their children are still young, husbands whose death renders their wives premature widows, children who pass away before they have had a chance to care for their elderly parents, have all in some degree failed to fulfill their role as family members bound by philia. Andromache’s lament may implicitly express such a reproach of Hector, whose commitment to honor and reputation exposed him to the spear of Achilles. The self-​centered aspect of mourning came under criticism in antiquity, and nowhere more engagingly that in Lucian’s bitingly witty essay, On Mourning (Peri penthous). Lucian imagines a dead boy coming back to life at his own funeral and castigating his father for making a spectacle of his grief. The father has been exclaiming that “his beloved son is no more; he is gone; torn away before his hour was come, leaving him alone to mourn; he has never married, never begotten children, never been on the field of battle, never laid hand to the plough, never reached old age; never again will he make merry, never again know the joys of love, never, alas! tipple at the convivial board among his comrades. . . . He imagines his son to be still coveting these things, and coveting them in vain” (13–​14, trans. Fowler and Fowler). The revivified boy reproaches him: “Why are you so sorry for me? Is it because I am not a bald, bent, wrinkled old cripple like yourself? Is it because I have not lived to be a battered wreck, nor seen a thousand moons wax and wane, only to make a fool of myself at the last before a crowd?” Lucian comments in his own voice: “The old man who mourns like this and says all this and more is not carrying on tragically, it would seem, for the sake of his son—​for he knows that he will not hear him even if he should bellow louder than Stentor—​nor for his own sake, for it would be enough for him to understand and know without the bellowing: no one needs to bellow to

Grief and the Self | 147

himself! So all that’s left is that he is babbling for the sake of the bystanders” (15.1–​9, my translation). If one knows in one’s heart that the dead are beyond suffering, then public displays of grief are motivated not by concern for the departed but solely to make an impression on others. Lucian does not deny the father’s pain, but only protests its extreme expression in accord with conventional patterns of lamentation, which, Lucian supposes, can only be for show. But surely mourning goes deeper than that, and not all extreme cases can be chalked up to social expectations, mistaken beliefs about the afterlife, or the loss of material support, however severe the consequences may actually be (such as slavery in the case of Andromache, and the likely death of her son). Achilles’ grief at the death of Patroclus in the Iliad is a case in point. His mutilation of Hector’s body goes beyond the conventional conception of revenge, as the gods themselves observe. He declares that Patroclus’ death was more painful to him than that of his own father would have been, and he is so distraught when he hears of it that a comrade grasps his hands so that he might not do harm to himself. His sorrow, however, is not unmixed: it would appear that he simultaneously harbors a deep rage against the man who killed Patroclus, and this passion too feeds his anguish. When Achilles decides to give over the wrath he had harbored toward Agamemnon and return to battle in order to slay Hector, an ancient commentator remarked: “of the two emotions besetting Achilles’ soul, anger [orgē, sc. toward Agamemnon] and grief [lupē, sc. for Patroclus], one wins out. . . . For the emotion involving Patroclus is strongest of all, and so it is necessary to abandon his wrath [mēnis] and avenge himself on his enemies” (schol. bT ad Il. 18.112–​13). At one time, I maintained that “the scholia have got it right”: there was indeed a clear shift from the rage that motivated Achilles’ withdrawal from battle at the beginning of

148 | In the Orbit of Love

the Iliad to the grief that caused him to return.14 I now think that there is undeniably an element of anger, or something like anger, in Achilles’ response to Patroclus’ death. Philip Fisher puts it well: “In the injuries done to the body of Hector, the residue of anger within mourning reappears” (207).15 And yet, Achilles’ rage persists even after he has slain Hector, and he continues to abuse his body until the gods themselves are appalled and instruct him to cease. Achilles seems to seek retribution without limit. It is reasonable to ask what motivates his extreme passion. A plausible answer is that Achilles feels guilty for having sent his friend out to fight the Trojans in his stead, and so is at least partly responsible for his death.16 The Iliad does not ascribe guilt explicitly to Achilles, but there are two possible reasons for the poem’s silence in this regard. First, guilt in the modern sense, as opposed to shame, is not clearly articulated as an emotion in classical Greek, and some scholars have spoken of the world of the Homeric epics as reflecting a “shame culture” as opposed to a “guilt culture,” in which guilt is understood to be predicated on internalized moral standards rather than responding to the judgments of others. This conception of the Homeric world as a morally primitive society, however, has been subjected to withering criticism, and it is clear that, had Homer wished to represent Achilles as feeling culpable for the death of Patroclus,

  See Konstan (2006, 53); contrast Taplin (1992, 199): “Hektor has replaced Agamemnon as his target.” 15   Ovid describes how Apollo’s grief for the death of his son Phaethon turns to anger at Earth for having demanded that Jupiter destroy the chariot of the Sun, of which Phaethon had lost control, so that it not incinerate the entire universe: datque animum in luctus et luctibus adicit iram /​officiumque negat mundo (Metamorphoses 2.384–​85). 16   On Achilles’ guilt, see Zanker (1994, 18). 14

Grief and the Self | 149

he could easily have done so, employing, for example, the term aitios and its congeners. But guilt is a morally uncomfortable sentiment, one that we tend to hide from ourselves; as a result, it is often experienced symptomatically, and Homer may well have intimated, rather than expressly described, Achilles’ sense of guilt so as to capture precisely its repression. Achilles’ rage, then, is the displaced manifestation of this unacknowledged motive. In her elegant and perceptive doctoral dissertation, Emily Austin has argued that what Achilles fails to recognize is not guilt but rather the depth of his attachment to Patroclus, to the degree that, with his death, Achilles has lost a part of himself. As she writes: “Although on one narrative level Achilles’ anger is highly focused on Hektor and Troy and succeeds in destroying both, the poem simultaneously tells a story of futility. Just as the consuming desire to weep does not assuage the ποθή [pothē, i.e., sense of loss] that drives it, the various deeds of anger and vengeance fail to restore the loved one’s presence. This failure is rooted in, so to speak, a displacement of ends: what Achilles longs for, life shared with Patroklos, is not what he aims at in his weeping or his killing.”17 Austin adds: “The fruitlessness of vengeance born of grief distinguishes such anger from anger in the strict Aristotelian sense, in which one responds to an undeserved slight and seeks to reverse the wrong” (87). The urge to compensate for the longing for the deceased by way of acts of vengeance cannot satisfy; as Austin puts is, “The insatiety in Achilles’ anger, which persists well beyond his duel with Hektor, illuminates a narrative fact of the poem: killing Hektor does not ease Achilles’ grief. The killing is a manifestation of the insatiety of grief-​longing, not its cure” (89–​90). Austin provides a wealth of citations to show that it is longing for Patroclus, labeled pothē in the poem, that is both the   Austin (2016, 86).

17

150 | In the Orbit of Love

deepest passion motivating Achilles and the one that, by a kind of misrecognition, he seeks to alleviate by his rampage against the Trojans and his mistreatment of Hector’s body. But why should grief be insatiable? If part of the answer lies in Achilles’ misperception of the source of his pain, and his futile attempt to assuage his grief by taking it out on Hector’s corpse, the epic has also exhibited the unique intensity of Achilles’ bond with Patroclus that rendered their relationship as legendary as that of Orestes and Pylades, and even gave rise to the idea, otherwise unsupported by the text, that it must have been a pederastic passion or erōs.18 We have remarked in the Introduction and in ­chapter 1 on the classical formula, according to which intimate friends and loved ones were conceived of as part of oneself, as “one soul dwelling in two bodies” (Aristotle in Diogenes Laertius 5.1.20). As Cicero put it, a human being naturally “both loves himself and seeks out another whose mind [animus] he may so mingle with his own as almost [paene] to make one mind out of two” (On Friendship 81). In the same vein, as we have seen, Aristotle several times describes a friend as “another self,” and Cicero again echoes the idea. Friends, moreover, wish to spend their days together (sunēmereuein), since living together (suzēn) is the actualization or activity (energeia) of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics 9.12, 1171b35). Aristotle’s point, as we have argued, is that

  Achilles and Patroclus as friends: Theocritus 29.3; Bion of Smyrna (fr. 12); Dio Chrysostom Oration 57.28; Lucian Toxaris 10; Plutarch On Having Many Friends 93 E; Themistius Oration 22.266b, 271a; Libanius Oration 1.56; as lover and beloved: Plato Symposium 179D–​180A; Plutarch Amatorius 751c; Martial 11.43.9–​10; Lucian Amores 54; Seneca (Letter to Lucilius 88.6) mentions the relative ages of Achilles and Patroclus as a popular conundrum, evidently inspired by the attempt to determine which was the lover and which the beloved. 18

Grief and the Self | 151

people are only being friends in the fullest when they are in each other’s company. This shared life sustains the mutual awareness of affection that is the ground of friendship. Friendship does not reside in affection as a sentiment, even when it is reciprocated; it is rather a matter of mutual activity, a continual manifestation of love by actions that reaffirm and sustain the affective bond. Seen this way, the death of a friend constitutes a genuine diminution of the self: one does not so much miss the other as feel that a part of the complex identity that is constituted by friendship, or more generally by philia, has been severed. The suffering resulting from such an amputation is immediate, and does not require reflection; in itself it is sufficient to account for Achilles’ intense anguish at the death of his friend, who was, in Horace’s phrase, half his soul. But Achilles does not leave it at that. Rather, he compounds the feeling of loss by holding Hector responsible for his agony, and his pain is thus a mixture of distress and rage, anger that is carried over, perhaps, from his still undigested fury at the treatment he received at Agamemnon’s hands. To assimilate the loss and accept its finality, he must cease to feed it with images of revenge, which, as Austin observes, cannot ease the primal yearning for his now riven self; otherwise, he must mourn forever, like Niobe (though her grief, as Achilles represents it to Priam, is uncompounded with thoughts of vengeance—​for who can exact vengeance from the gods?). There is a spectrum of grief, along multiple axes: it varies in intensity, duration, and susceptibility to relief or consolation. Since we grieve at the privation of a dear one, the Greeks and Romans related grief to the complex nature of love. At the most basic level, which we share with other animals, the pain of loss is instinctive and unreflective, like parental love itself; it may be overpowering and there is no remedy but time. The Roman poet Statius, imagining himself at the funeral of the foster child of

152 | In the Orbit of Love

Atedius Melior, urges Atedius to give rein to lamentation and the “joy of weeping” (Silvae 2.1.15–​16). Again, in his “Consolation to Flavius Ursus on the Loss of His Beloved Boy,” Statius exclaims: “You are too cruel, who would assign gradations to tears and limits to grieving. It is pitiable for a parent to light the pyre for infants and—​horrible!—​growing children. . . . Do not repress your tears, do not be ashamed: let your grief break its bonds. . . . Who will disapprove of mourning given free rein for this funeral?” (Silvae 2.6.1–​18, excerpted; cf. 3.3.8–​12, 5.3.56–​ 58). The time for comforting words will come later. There is no defense against this anguish, but under normal circumstances it diminishes over time. The nurturing of offspring may also be regarded as a creative or artistic enterprise, with the maturing child as the product. Aristotle argues (as we have seen in ­chapter 3) that the affection that humans bear for their children depends in part on the labor that has been invested in them, in much the way artisans love the products that they have created and benefactors, for the same reason, feel more affection for their beneficiaries than vice versa: “every man loves his own handiwork better than he would be loved by it if it came alive”; indeed poets “have an excessive love for their own poems, doting on them as if they were their children.” Because of the labor invested, Aristotle continues, “those who have made their money love it more than those who have inherited it,” and for this same reason “mothers are fonder of their children than fathers; bringing them into the world costs them more pains” (Nicomachean Ethics 9.7, trans. W. D. Ross). In his recently discovered epistle on absence of grief (Peri alupias), the philosophically minded medical authority Galen (second century ad) expatiates on how he managed to retain his equanimity when a great many of his most prized possessions were destroyed by a fire in the warehouse in Rome where he had stored

Grief and the Self | 153

them while he was traveling in Italy. What most tested his resolve and philosophical commitment was the destruction of his own manuscripts and those of others that he had personally corrected, along with instruments that he had designed (14–​37). Because we feel affection for our creations, we are moved by the loss of them, and only the cultivation of a kind of detachment, achieved by imagining in advance every kind of misfortune and bereavement, can prepare us to value such damages at their true worth and so to accept them with serenity (45–​56). As Galen advises his addressee, “you must train the representations [phantasia] of your soul pretty much at every instant” (56).19 Aristotle defines love, as we have seen, as a willingness to serve and assist the well-​being of the beloved selflessly, for the sole sake of the other and not one’s own. The pain of losing a person for whom we bear such a love may derive from the belief that she or he has suffered harm, whether through prematurely passing from this world or from some imagined suffering after death. This is the home territory of the consolation genre, which addresses the cognitive dimension of emotion—​in Aristotelian and Stoic terms, just that which renders an instinctive affective response an emotion in the proper sense of the word. There is no perception after death, affirmed the Epicureans, and so no harm can befall the dead; the notion that they can suffer is pure superstition. Nor is happiness in this world increased by duration: a person happy in the moment, the Epicureans argued, is as happy as a human being can be, and the addition of time does not augment the quality of a life. The Stoics, for their part, regarded virtue as the only good and vice as the only evil; thus death was nothing bad and no cause for lamentation. Seneca also, like Plutarch, allows for some survival in the afterlife (presumably only limited, until the next   Text in Boudon-​Millot and Jouanna (2010).

19

154 | In the Orbit of Love

world conflagration, as the Stoics maintained), and the expectation of rejoining the deceased in the next world might help alleviate the feeling of bereavement. Loving and being loved, however, is its own pleasure, and to be deprived of that is deeply painful. That is why, I believe, Aristotle states that, for all that we want good things for our friends, we would not want them to be transformed into gods, which should count as the greatest benefit of all (Nicomachean Ethics 8.7, 1159a10–​12).20 Friendship, Aristotle held, cannot exist between beings of extremely unequal station, and the gods are simply too far above us for there to be the requisite parity and mutuality. To wish that a friend become a god is to desire the end of the bond of friendship: it is philia’s self-​destruct, and so contrary to the very aim and essence of love. A friend’s apotheosis is like death—​forever removed from our mortal sphere, but free of any thought of harm or suffering.We do not wish it for our loved ones because we do not want to be deprived of the joy they bring us. If it were to happen, we would grieve. Even the most altruistic conception of love, then, would seem to have an egoistic aspect. But friendship is more than just love: as we observed in ­chapter 1, two people are friends when the affection is reciprocated, and each is aware, Aristotle is careful to specify, of the feelings of the other. For all that one may love and wish the best for a friend, there cannot be friendship if the other person fails to love in return. Evidence of a lack of condign affection would be the failure on the part of the friend to provide the necessary aid when one was in dire need. There are numerous mentions of such disappointed expectations in the literary sources, and it is here that even the most selfless conception of love manifests itself also as a demand. The dead can no longer   For discussion and bibliography, see Pangle (2003, 59 with 216-​17n.3). 20

Grief and the Self | 155

provide us with good things, however much we might require them; in other words, they cannot love us. Perhaps this hurt too motivates Andromache’s despair at the slaying of Hector: he can no longer protect her nor even wish to do so, and so the bond that was constituted of their mutual philia is broken. What looks like a material concern is an expression of the pain of a lost relationship. Even an infant might be expected to care for its parents in turn when they grew old, and its premature demise may thus deprive us of the pleasurable anticipation of its active affection. We grieve for what our loved ones will never again give us. Finally, as we have seen, the very notion that a friend is a second self raises the question of whether our suffering at their death is self-​ centered. If Achilles feels that a part of himself has been amputated at the death of Patroclus, as we have suggested, then his mourning becomes an expression of pain for himself rather than for another. But this is sophistry: the meaning of such a profound identification between two people is that one is truly diminished by the absence of the other. If such grief too is healed by time, as a physical wound may be, we are still missing an essential part of ourselves, as much as if a limb had been severed. Perhaps there are no words to cure this kind of grief; at all events, in taking his vengeance on Hector, Achilles signs, as he knows, his own death warrant: there is no future for the person he was while Patroclus was alive. The tensions that we saw playing themselves out in respect to philia between altruism and reciprocity, self and other, emotion and reason, emerge once more in connection with grief, the obverse of love, just as they did, in different registers, in connection with loyalty and gratitude. As an emotion, grief is grounded in beliefs and judgments, and is subject to argument. This is the basis of the genre of the consolation that, with its deft exploitation of therapeutic reasoning, seeks to strip away the false appraisals that embellish the immediate experience of loss

156 | In the Orbit of Love

and convert it into enduring melancholy. Recently, two eminent psychologists, Gerrod Parrott and Nico Frijda, have proposed a distinction similar to that drawn by the Stoics between certain instinctive responses, which human beings share with animals, and fully realized human emotions. Parrott writes that we may “use the term ur-​emotion to refer to the commonalities shared by otherwise different emotions of various species.”21 He goes on to observe that “there are many differences between the emotions marah (in Indonesian), ikari (in Japanese), song (in Ifaluk), and anger (in English), but in all of them the ur-​emotion of antagonism is evident—​all four are aimed at an object that is appraised as interfering in some way with one’s concerns, and all four give rise to a motivation to stop that interference in different, culturally specific ways. . . . The recognition of these components across cultures leads to the intuition that there is something universal about emotions, but it is a mistake to suppose that there exist universal ‘basic emotions’—​marah, ikari, song, and anger are not the same emotion! Rather, it is the presence of the ur-​ emotion of antagonism that provides the intuition of universality” (248).22 Parrott and Frijda are among those psychologists who

  Parrott (2012, 247–​48); see also Parrott (2010), and Frijda and Parrott (2011). 22   I prefer to label these basic, trans-​cultural responses “affects,” borrowing the term from the work of Silvan Tomkins and applying it to those subrational reactions that the Stoics call “preliminaries to emotion” (Seneca) or “pre-​emotions” (propatheiai), in Greek; see Tomkins (1995). There has recently emerged a branch of literary theory called affect studies, according to which “there are diverse and valuable forms of nonconceptual emotions and . . . these are present in moods and in esthetic experiences” (Altieri 2012, 879), and cf. Leys (2011a); Connolly (2011); and Leys (2011b). I am largely in agreement with Leys, who emphasizes the cognitive 21

Grief and the Self | 157

emphasize the fundamental role of appraisal in emotion,23 a view that, as modern theorists have recognized, is anticipated by the cognitive approach of Aristotle and the Stoics, and favors the kind of therapeutic orientation that underpins the classical consolation.24 Many other techniques are advertised in an array of self-​help manuals for dealing with bereavement. Nevertheless, psychologists still struggle to determine the boundary between what is regarded as normal and pathological grief. As Middleton, Raphael, Martinek, and Misso write, “research to date has not clearly identified areas of psychopathology that are grief-​ specific. This reflects in part a lack of operationalized criteria for pathological grief.”25 Other investigators point out the disagreement over whether grief is to be conceived as an emotion or as a disease.26 Under the circumstances, we would do well, perhaps, to regard the ancient consolations less condescendingly, and to acknowledge that Greek and Roman reflections on love and the self may still have something to teach us about grief today. and intentional dimension of emotion, and would reserve the term “affect” for what the Stoics define as pre-​emotions.   Cf., e.g., Barrett (2014,: 294): “Appraisals are really just another way of describing emotions—​the construal of affect within a situation is the emotional episode itself.” We also recognize emotions of others by reconstructing the thought processes that underlie them; thus, the attribution theory of emotion holds that “individuals are aware of the typical thoughts, such as causal beliefs, that give rise to specific emotions. Accordingly, emotions can serve as signals of such thoughts” (Hareli 2014, 338). For further discussion, see Konstan (2006, 3–​40). 24   Cf. Lazarus (2001, 40): “those who favor a cognitive-​mediational approach must also recognize that Aristotle’s Rhetoric more than two thousand years ago applied this kind of approach to a number of emotions in terms that seem remarkably modern.” 25   Middleton, Raphael, Martinek, and Misso (1993, 44). 26   See Averill and Nunley (1993). 23

5 L O V E A N D T H E   S T AT E

In an important investigation of social solidarity in classical Athens, published under the title The Limits of Altruism in Democratic Athens, Matthew Christ affirms: “Athenians distinguished sharply between their obligations to help their kin and personal friends on the one hand, and their responsibilities to fellow citizens outside this intimate group on the other. Although Athenians viewed the helping of strangers as noble and laudable, for the most part, they did not see this as obligatory, and in practice they were pragmatic and cautious in extending help to fellow citizens.” Christ adds that this attitude “is, in fact, consistent with a democratic ideology of citizenship that placed a premium on citizens leaving each other alone as free and equal persons rather than on their engaging in mutual support and that emphasized the importance of the helping relationship between citizen and city rather than among individual citizens.” It is only in comparison with their sense of responsibility toward outsiders that Athenians might seem to have some duties to one another; as Christ writes, “if the obligation of Athenians to help fellow

160 | In the Orbit of Love

citizens was fairly tenuous, their responsibility to intervene to assist the peoples of other states was even more tenuous.”1 Affection and the altruism it inspired certainly bound together family members and close friends, all those who fell under the narrow definition of philoi. It is remarkable, for example, that even the most ostensibly cynical and self-​interested figures in classical literature—​those sophists whom Plato lambasted for defending the right of the stronger as opposed to customary morality in dialogues like the Republic and the Gorgias—​seem not to have professed a strictly egoistic outlook. Egoism presupposes, according to the definition offered by Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, that “all ultimate desires are self-​directed; when people care about the situations of others, they do so for purely instrumental reasons” (296). The operative word here is “all”: a true egoist recognizes no exceptions, not for friends, not for loved ones. An egoist never does anything for someone else for his or her sake, as an end in itself. Can we affirm that even the most radical of the sophists held such a position? Antiphon the Sophist, in a fragment preserved by Stobaeus (fr. 87B 49 D–​K), warns that marriage and children bring as much anxiety as they do pleasure. The sentiment is familiar from other literature, such as Semonides’ elegy on wives or the bachelor’s topos in New Comedy (e.g., Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus 122–​25), but Antiphon gives the argument a special twist: “If I had another body [sōma],” he says, “that mattered to me as I do to myself, I could not live,” since he gives himself more than enough trouble in   Christ (2012, 1); Christ remarks: “Three works in particular have advanced an optimistic view of Athenian attitudes toward helping and their impact on Athenian behavior” (3), citing Sternberg (2006); Herman (2006); and Low (2007). But I should indicate that I too am among those Christ sees as adopting too positive a view of Athenian altruism. 1

Love and the State | 161

connection with his own health, daily provisions and reputation; “what then,” he asks rhetorically, “if I had another body, which mattered equally to me? Is it not obvious that a wife, if she is to her husband’s liking [katathumia], causes him no less fondness and pain than he does to himself,” and so he must worry now about the health and so forth of both their bodies? It is still worse, he says, when one has children. Antiphon advises us to avoid those conditions, in particular marriage and parenthood, that promote identification with another person; this is a selfish view, but not one that denies the possibility of caring for another as much as one does for oneself. On the contrary, the argument is predicated on precisely that capacity. The conceit of a wife or loved one as a second body anticipates Aristotle’s description of a friend as another self, or, in the formula attributed to him by Diogenes Laertius, as one soul in two bodies. Callicles, a character probably invented by Plato in his Gorgias just in order to defend unabashedly a will to power without regard for conventional norms of justice, nevertheless admits to a concern for others; for he rejects Socrates’ view that doing what is just is preferable to one’s own advantage on the grounds that a person who follows Socrates’ advice will be unable to protect from danger “either himself or anyone else” (Gorgias 486b6–​7), or “to grant more to his friends than to his enemies” (492c2; cf. 508c4–​7). It is simply assumed that people, however selfish, will wish to aid their friends, not merely in order to secure themselves against danger but because helping friends (and harming enemies) is what a person is naturally disposed to do.2   Cf. Democrates (presumably Democritus): “The generous person [kharistikos] is not he who looks to a return, but rather he who treats another well by choice [proēirēmenos]” (D–​K fr. 68B 96; also fr. 229). 2

162 | In the Orbit of Love

The solidarity of the household (oikos in Greek) finds expression also in the idea of inherited guilt, as when children pay the penalty for crimes committed by their parents or grandparents. Whereas it may seem cruel or barbaric for the innocent offspring to be held accountable for the faults of their ancestors, the conception of the family as a single unit extending over time renders the notion more comprehensible.3 The notion that the group of intimates constitutes a single moral entity is evident also, for example, in the way Aristotle describes such emotions as anger or pity. Anger, for example, is defined as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight on the part of people who are not fit to slight one or one’s own [eis auton ē ti tōn autou]” (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a31–​33). Aristotle takes it for granted that an insult addressed to any of one’s intimates counts as an insult to oneself. So too Aristotle defines pity as “a kind of pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm in one not deserving to encounter it,” of the sort that “one might expect oneself, or one of one’s own, to suffer, and this when it seems near” (Rhetoric 2.8, 1385b13–​16). We do not pity those who are closest to us, because their misfortune counts as our own (self-​pity in Greek sounds as odd as self-​envy does in English). Here again, the circle of close family members and friends is perceived as a single unit.   See Gagné (2013, 202): “In the early archaic period, the immediate kin group remained the principal unit of social life. The individual of that period was first and foremost a member of the household. The bond of a community, the bond of an alliance, was essentially conceived of as a union of households. As the pivot of the basic kin unit, the father embodies the essence of authority. He can speak for the group. He can commit the entire household to his word. The father can bind wife and child, property, slaves and animals to a solemn declaration. He can strike the μέγας ὅρκος [great oath].” 3

Love and the State | 163

Friends and family, however, represent a small circle. Could affection be extended more widely so as to include an entire community? Few, I think, would affirm today that citizens of a country are bound together by love of one another or that fellow citizens may be described as friends. And yet, ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes spoke as though citizenship entailed, or was based upon, friendly feeling. Thus, Aristotle states in the Nicomachean Ethics (1155a22–​23): “Philia, it seems, binds cities together, and lawgivers are more concerned about philia than about justice: for concord [homonoia] seems to be something similar to philia.” So too Cicero remarks in De amicitia (23): “But if you remove the bond of goodwill from the world, neither home nor state will be able to stand, nor will even agriculture endure. If one fails to understand how great the power of amicitia and concord is, one can see it clearly from its opposites, dissension and discord. For what house is so stable, what city so secure, that it cannot be utterly toppled by hatred and quarrels? From this one may judge how great a good resides in amicitia.” Although Matthew Christ has sought to insert a wedge between the ideas of civic like-​mindedness (homonoia) and affection (philia) as the basis for social solidarity within the polis, we see that the two ideas are not so readily separated. Plato affirms that “there is an element of friendship in the community of race, and language, and laws” (Laws 708C2–​3; trans. Jowett).4 When Socrates inquires of Alcibiades, in the dialogue named for him, what must be present if a city is to become better,   See El Murr (2014, 18): “In several key passages of the Laws, the Athenian emphasizes that one of the goals of legislation is the promotion of friendship among citizens.” Tiberghien (2002, 94) cites Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8.1, 1155a24–​28 and adds: “Cette idée de l’amitié comme ciment de la communauté se trouve déjà chez Platon mais sous une forme double et reversible. Car la communauté fonde aussi l’amitié, une ‘comunauté cosmique’ que Platon évoque dans le Gorgias” (507E), where 4

164 | In the Orbit of Love

Alcibiades replies: “philia”; and when Socrates follows up by asking whether philia is concord (homonoia) or discord, Alcibiades is quick to answer: “concord” (Alcibiades I 126B8–​C5; cf. also Statesman 311B–​C, Republic 351D). In the Clitopho (409E3–​8), which, like the Alcibiades, is not securely attributed to Plato but certainly comes from his school, there is introduced a significant proviso with respect to concord: “Real and true philia is very plainly concord. But when he [a companion of Socrates, interrogated by Clitopho] was asked whether he would say that concord is shared opinion [homodoxia] or rather knowledge, he disparaged shared opinion, since there necessarily arise many harmful shared opinions among people, but he maintained that philia is invariably a good thing and a product of justice.” Aristotle too, after affirming that “philia binds cities together” (NE 1155a22–​25)5 and that “concord seems to be something friendly [philikon]” (1167a22–​b13), adds that concord is not shared opinion as such, since people can hold the same view about the stars, for example, without any friendly feeling arising between them; rather, concord has to do with practical affairs in civic life. Nor is concord a matter of people thinking exactly the same thing, for, Aristotle points out, both the masses and the aristocracy can and should agree that the better sort ought to rule: in this example, the masses think that others should rule, Socrates associates the koinōnia among gods and humans with philia but also with moderation and justice.   See Coleman (2008, 113): “For Aristotle . . ., politics begins with the prior assumption of reciprocal friendship so that political justice, not injustice, is a narrower specification”; also 131: “This [i.e., Aristotle’s] reciprocal friendship and common like-​mindedness is a passionate attachment to those with whom we engage in various ways in all of our reciprocities.” 5

Love and the State | 165

whereas their betters think that they should. Indeed, people of the baser sort, according to Aristotle, are unable to think alike, except for a short while. In the Eudemian Ethics (1241a32–​33) Aristotle affirms categorically that “concord is civic [politikē] friendship,” and he again stresses that concord involves like-​mindedness about practical affairs concerning the community. But he adds that concord, like philia, has two senses: strictly speaking, base people cannot be in agreement about what is good, but more loosely the term is applied when people simply desire the same thing. If they cannot all have it, then they quarrel; with true concord, there would be consensus about who is to rule and who is to be ruled, and so no dissension can arise (cf. also Magna Moralia 2.12.11–​13). It is possible to detect some squirming here. On the one hand, concord among citizens is likened to or identified with friendship or affection, and unites entire cities; on the other hand, it is, like true philia, said to be characteristic specifically of good or decent people (aristoi, epieikeis). What is more, only the latter are fit to rule, and concord in the community as a whole depends on agreement on this point too. The distinction between rulers and ruled is a moral one, but with clear overtones of class. Plato and Aristotle evidently wish to present civic harmony as a function of friendship or affection among all citizens, irrespective of status, while at the same time restricting true friendship and concord to the better sort, ideally with the willing consent of the baser classes as well. It is an awkward compromise, and reflects, I expect, the struggles over the nature of democracy in the city-​states of the fourth century bc, and perhaps earlier.6   I have concentrated on philosophical discussions, where the evidence for philia as a name for the civic bond as such is most abundant; outside of philosophical texts, however, the evidence is rather scant, though Demosthenes links homonoia and philia in On the Crown 246 (cf. sec. 6

166 | In the Orbit of Love

Both Aristotle and Cicero were aware that in applying the concept of friendship to the citizen body at large, they were extending the usual sense of the term. Friendships developed over time, and long acquaintance was required to generate the trust that friends must have in one another. Nevertheless, an electioneering manual attributed to Cicero’s brother Quintus explains that the “word ‘friends’ extends more widely in campaigning than in life generally, for whoever displays any sign of favor toward you or attends to you or visits you at home is to be considered among the circle of your friends” (Commentariolum petitionis16; cf. Seneca Ep. mor. 3.1). Aristotle too observes that “Those who are friends to many [poluphiloi] and treat everyone in an intimate manner do not seem friends to anyone, except in the political sense [politikōs]; they also call them ingratiating [areskoi]. Now, it is possible to be a friend to many in the political sense and not be ingratiating, but truly decent [epieikēs]” (EN 9.10.1171a15–​ 9). These reservations might seem to run counter to the equation between civic concord and philia or amicitia, but neither Aristotle nor Cicero would have supposed that the bond of amity among fellow citizens was comparable to that between the most intimate of friends, who wish to spend the entire day together and are willing to sacrifice everything for the person they regard as their alter ego. Not every kind of affection is experienced or practiced in the same degree. More radical visions of civic harmony recast the entire polis as a large family. Aristophanes, in his comedy Ecclesiazusae or Assemblywomen, imagines a new regime, installed by women, in which all property is held in common, the walls that divide homes 28). General reflections on civic solidarity are not the stuff of political or forensic speeches, of course, but the dearth of references to philia is noteworthy.

Love and the State | 167

are torn down, and men and women mate with whomever they please, since marriage is reconceived as the union of all adult citizens (slaves are excluded from this dispensation). Children will, accordingly, regard all adult males as their fathers and females as their mothers. The scheme anticipates Plato’s fantasy of an elite class of guardians, in his ideal city described in the Republic, similarly bound by an idea of intimate kinship: all members of the ruling elite will regard their agemates as brothers and sisters, their elders as parents, their juniors as their own children. To be sure, this extreme collapse of the civic into the familial pertains, in Plato’s vision, only to the ruling stratum (unlike Aristophanes’ comic utopia), but it reveals a habit of thought that perceives fellow citizens as kin. These are among the texts that led Vincent Farenga (2006, 347) to conclude that the citizen self in ancient Athens was constituted as an intersubjective identity, which arises precisely from ties of love: the citizen subject is, as he puts it, “not a corporeal individual but an intersubjective creature who is plural and decorporealized.”7 The myth of autochthony symbolized the kinship of all Athenians. Fictions of shared ancestry, whether in regard to eponymous founders of ethnic groups, like Dorus or Ion (for Dorians and Ionians), or of birth from the land, as in the Athenian myth and that of many other cities (for example, the Theban legend of men sown from a dragon’s teeth), were invented or adapted to advance political solidarity. There is some evidence that the Athenian story took shape just around the time when Pericles was tightening eligibility for citizenship to those descended from citizen parents on both the paternal and the maternal side, thus   Farenga’s formulation is reminiscent of the modern concept of distributed cognition, although this latter view regards cognition as operating in and through the body as well as the mind (see c­ hapter 1). 7

168 | In the Orbit of Love

discouraging (among other things) the aristocratic practice of forging interstate alliances through intermarriage.8 The Platonic dialogue Menexenus offers specially rich testimony for the jingoistic purposes to which this version of autochthony might be put: the Athenians are “children of the soil” (autochthonas, 237B) and so they saw it as their duty to “fight both against Greeks for the sake of Greeks for freedom’s sake, and against barbarians for the sake of all Greeks” (239B; earlier, as Vincent Rosivach has argued, autochthony probably referred rather to the fact that one or two of the mythical early kings of Attica, whose lower bodies were in the form of serpents, were imagined as having been born from the earth).9 In a different register, the notion of a national character, such as Pericles delineated in his famous funeral oration reported by Thucydides (History 2.35–​46), was designed to create a sense of common identity among Athenians, defined in this instance not by blood but by shared values and lifestyle. Sometimes the range of philia might be widened even further. Aristotle speaks fleetingly of a sense of affection among all mankind, which is testified to by the fact that lone travelers rejoice in meeting another human being on the road (Aspasius, who composed a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the second century ad, observes that such an encounter might also generate fear). The Stoic Hierocles, writing around the same time as Aspasius, envisaged human relations as a series of concentric circles,   In Rome, intermarriage across communal boundaries was a major source of cohesion; Beck (2015, 69) quotes Livy on the loyalty of the Capuans to Rome during Hannibal’s occupation of southern Italy: “the long-​established right of intermarriage had united many distinguished and powerful families [in Capua] with the Romans” (23.4.7: conubium vetustum multas familias claras ac potentis Romanis miscuerat). 9   Rosivach (1987); see also Kennedy (2016, 13–​19). 8

Love and the State | 169

with the inmost representing the individual (or the mind), and successively larger rings representing the immediate family, more extended kin, fellow citizens, and finally all humanity. Hierocles recommended that we attempt to collapse each circle into the next smaller, addressing fellow citizens, for example, as if they were relatives, cousins or aunts and uncles as siblings or parents. Stoic cosmopolitanism, in turn, extended affiliation beyond the city to include all the wise and even the gods. Such grand visions of community were as quixotic then as they continue to be now, but within individual city-​states, of which Athens, the largest, had at most a couple of hundred thousand inhabitants, including slaves, there were any number of social and ritual occasions that served to encourage sentimental solidarity among citizens. It has been calculated that an Athenian participated in festivals of one sort or another at least one third of the days of the year. As David Pritchard writes, “Ancient historians cannot agree whether the Athenian dēmos (‘people’) spent more on festivals or wars.” (Pritchard concludes on the basis of a careful calculation of expenditures “that it was not religion or politics but war that was the overriding priority of the Athenian people,” but it is illuminating simply to see that, in a period in which the Athenians were almost constantly engaged in hostilities, such a question could arise.)10 Within the city, competitions were often staged among tribes, the ten groups or classes into which Athenians were rather arbitrarily distributed at the inauguration of the democracy under Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century bc; this created a unanimity of sentiment not wholly unlike that of football fans rooting for their local teams (in the Olympics people identified with their home cities, just as they do with their countries in the modern Olympics). These same citizens fought   Pritchard (2016, 43).

10

170 | In the Orbit of Love

side to side in the phalanx formation, or rowed together in the fleet, activities requiring synchronized cooperation not wholly different from the choruses in which they danced and sang in the dramatic festivals. Of course, individuals had adversaries too among their compatriots, as the slogan, “help your friends and harm your enemies,” indicates. But the state went to extraordinary lengths to encourage and maintain feelings of affection among the citizen body. I do not mean to suggest that classical Greek city-​states relied entirely on affection as the glue that held the community together. Athenians swore an oath of commitment to the state when they became eligible for military service at the age of eighteen (the ephebic oath), at least from the fourth century bc and very likely in the preceding century as well. Mogens Hansen has recently explored the widespread use of such oaths of allegiance in a number of ancient poleis, as a way of instilling a sense of obligation to the state (Hansen distinguishes between the voluntary obligation to obey the laws and duty, which is “imposed by others).”11 Respect for the laws and the state may be grounded as well in a sense of debt, such as Socrates invokes when, in Plato’s dialogue Crito, he imagines the personified Laws reminding him that he owes everything to them. One may also recognize the pragmatic benefits of cooperation, which may be reinforced by the threat of punishment for dereliction of duty. We are all embedded in our communities through a variety of social and economic ties based on interest as much as on altruism. Not every society,

  Hansen (2015, 9). Liddel (2007) shows the extent to which services to the state were cast as obligations over a wide range of activities, from liturgies (the formal requirement that wealthy citizens donate funds to cover certain public expenses) to various other forms of civic participation. 11

Love and the State | 171

however, places the same weight on affection as a basic motive of solidarity. If Athenians could imagine themselves as united by affection, the case was different in Rome, despite Cicero’s passionate affirmation (quoted above) of the importance of amicitia in social life generally. In contrast to the radical democratic ideology that prevailed in classical Athens, the aristocratic culture of republican Rome evolved a system of patronage that operated across class lines.12 There were, to be sure, deep discrepancies of wealth and power in Athens too, though never so profound as those in Rome, where the resources that the ruling class could appropriate for itself were so much greater. But Athens did not have anything like the formal structure of patronage and dependency (called clientela) that prevailed in Rome, and the corresponding vocabulary seems to have been entirely lacking.13 Unlike friendship, relations between patron and client were perceived as based firmly on reciprocity: the wealthy assisted the poor (or poorer) by means of protection and benefactions or handouts in return for political and other forms of support, from electoral campaigns to outright military service (some particularly distinguished houses had clients numbering in the thousands).14   Roman patronage was not the occasional sponsorship of gifted artists on the part of wealthy aristocrats with refined tastes, though this too existed, as in the case of Maecenas, who gave his name to this kind of support (see White 1993; Bowditch 2001). 13   See Millett (1989); Arnaoutoglou (1994). 14   See Saller (1982); Wallace-​Hadrill (1989). While the rules or norms governing the duties of patron and client had relaxed considerably by the time of the late Republic and were no longer formally codified (if indeed they ever were), the tradition remained vigorous. Ganter (2015, 35) describes the relation between patron und client as “ein besonderes Verhältnis von Reziprozität” (“a special relationship of reciprocity”), although she also suggests that patrons might represent their favors as 12

172 | In the Orbit of Love

In the troubled century leading up to the achievement of absolute power by Octavian, generals could raise entire armies made up of their clients. To take but one example, Pompey organized a full legion from among his clients during the civil war of 83–​81 bc.15 Indeed, the relationship between a general and his troops came to be conceived on the model of patronage. This quasi-​formal vertical pattern of association existed in tension with friendship, which was imagined as a relationship between equals. As Aristotle put it, “amity is parity” (philotēs isotēs, EN 8.5, 1157b36; 8.8, 1159b2–​3; cf. EE 7.4, 1239a1–​6; 7.10 1242a9–​11), even though Aristotle recognized as well the possibility (within certain limits) of philia between superior and inferior (the affection between husband and wife, or parent and child, are instances of this asymmetrical relation). Patronage as an alternative model of interpersonal associations, then, had the effect of blocking or inhibiting the extension of friendship to embrace all members of society in Rome. Most generally, I suggest that in societies characterized by openly acknowledged hierarchical relations, such as ancient Rome, friendship or affection is less likely to serve as an expression for solidarity among the entire populace than it is in polities, like classical Athens, that presuppose and actively promote an image of equality among citizens. This is not to say that there cannot exist

altruistic (35–​37). In particular, she notes that an element of genuine affection was presupposed, at least among the aristocracy, between the “patron” or legal advocate, such as Cicero, and the person he defended: “Eine emotionale Verbundenheit zwischen Patron und Klient musste nicht nur bewiesen warden, weil sie als Hinweis auf ein Nahverhältnis das Auftreten des Patrons legitimierte, sondern sie resultierte aus der Forderung, das ein Nahverhältnis auf beidseitiger virtus der Beteiligten gründen müsse” (36).   Seager (1994, 187); cf. Flower (2010, 32, 92, 155).

15

Love and the State | 173

personal friendships between members of different social orders, in Rome or in other societies marked by sharp class divisions—​ even between slave and free, as Aristotle himself, in a rare moment of human sympathy, allowed (we may feel philia for a slave qua human being though not qua slave, Nicomachean Ethics 1161b1–​6). But it does mean that friendship is unlikely to be appropriated as the general term for the bond that unites the different fractions of society as a whole. The dissonance between friendship and patronage in Rome was in part a function of the different motivations on which the two relationships were predicated: the ostensibly selfless generosity associated with love and the more or less self-​interested quid pro quo of the patron-​client relation. Now, we have already remarked that some scholars have argued that friendship itself was fundamentally based on reciprocity, a view that finds some support in the treatises of Aristotle, Cicero, and other ancient thinkers (see ­chapter 1).16 Even scholars who have allowed for a measure of affect and altruism in ancient ideals and practices of friendship, however, have protested that friendship entailed some types of obligation. Renata Raccanelli, for example, writes: “Certainly, Konstan is right to observe that the common model of true   In a volume entitled Aspects of Friendship in the Graeco-​RomanWorld, the editor, Michael Peachin, observes that “D. Konstan has recently argued against the majority opinion and has tried to inject more (modern-​style?) emotion into ancient amicitia. Various articles presented below, on the other hand, point us back to a heavily formalized, even legalized, bond between friends” (2001, 7). Peachin notes that “it is difficult to imagine a world utterly devoid of what we would call truly friendly relationships,” and allows that there were, among the Greeks and Romans, bonds that “we would readily recognize as proper friendships”; but he adds that ties typically identified as amicitia or philia would not seem “particularly friendly” to us (10). 16

174 | In the Orbit of Love

friendship must grant major importance to sentiment. . . . But it is nevertheless well not to ignore the role that notions of obligation, mutual exchange of gifts, and prestations also play within relations of friendship. . . . The element of concrete and obligatory exchange seems inseparably bound up with friendship, which cannot be identified with the mere affective dimension of the relationship.”17 Raccanelli cites several passages in comedy in which friends expect assistance, and all the more so if they have already done the other a good turn. So too, Gabriel Herman affirms that friendly favors “generate a sense of obligation to reciprocate, often by returning a favour not merely equal to but more valuable than the favour received.”18 This is undoubtedly true, and a sound corrective to one-​sided accounts of philia. But in this respect, ancient friendship does not differ from modern: if friends fail to offer support when it is needed, it is a sign that   Raccanelli (1998, 20). But see Raccanelli (2010, 53), citing Seneca On Benefactions 6.11.2–​3: “If someone wishes to give but does not do it, the benefaction is not realized: ‘I have the intention [animus] but I do not have the gift [beneficium].’ But it is nevertheless true that the voluntas [will]—​even without tangible consequences—​is sufficient to kindle a friendly sentiment”; as Seneca puts it (quoted here by Raccanelli), “I will be a friend, indeed, to the one who wished to give me a gift but could not, but I will not be bound [obligatus, i.e., owe something in return].” Raccanelli observes: “the intention, in other words, is not sufficient for a gift but it is sufficient for friendship.” Raccanelli remarks on the “dimensione paradossale” of this aspect of Seneca’s thought (cf. 53–​57 and passim). Cicero, in his correspondence with his intimate friend Atticus, can speak of Atticus’ failure to manifest sufficient concern for his situation (To Atticus 3.154:  quantum me amas et amasti tantum amare deberes ac debuisses . . .; 4.1.1: Cognoram . . . te in consiliis mihi dandis nec fortiorem nec prudentiorem quam me ipsum nec etiam propter meam in te observantiam nimium in custodia salutis meae diligentem). 18   Herman (2006, 36). 17

Love and the State | 175

they are lacking in love, and hence a cue that the friendship is foundering. As Annalise Acorn observes, “North Americans think that to analyze relationships in terms of strict reciprocity is to insult the intrinsic value of the relationship. Each person is supposed to value the other for their friendship in and of itself and neither is supposed to be calculating the benefits of the relationship to himself or the other. Of course, this does not mean that North Americans do not calculate reciprocity of advantage and exchange in their relationships. It only means that they do not like to acknowledge the presence of these calculations.”19 Friendship, however, is not a repressed form of commerce, but a relation whose logic is distinct from the economy of exchange—​ or from that of patronage and benefaction in classical antiquity. If this is a paradox—​and, as we have seen (in the Introduction), Jacques Derrida has made much of it—​it does not alter the fact that the love between friends is, and was, imagined as not subject to duty or coercion. If friendship has sometimes been unduly assimilated to a semi-​ contractual relationship based on reciprocal services, it has also been taken by some scholars as a polite name for patronage itself, which runs contrary to the idea that friendship was fundamentally a relationship among equals. The contrast between friendship as a horizontal relation and patronage as a vertical one thus threatens to collapse, and friendship in the latitudinous sense may be seen as ranging over social bonds of every sort, including those between members of different classes. There are, however, good reasons for rejecting the equation between the terminologies of patronage and friendship in ancient Rome. The arguments in favor of their equivalence depend in part on Latin texts that speak of superior and inferior friends, that   Acorn (2007, 8).

19

176 | In the Orbit of Love

is, of higher and lower status, and on indications that individuals who were clearly of different social standing nevertheless claimed to be friends. Silvio Panciera, for example, has observed that honorary dedications to friends found in Rome and its environs, which amount to a mere nine or ten in all, are quite scarce in comparison with the great number of inscriptions honoring senators and knights.20 Panciera concludes that these friendships are not “born of reciprocal affection,” but reflect rather “a relation of dependency in which there is a superior amicus who assumes the role of patron and an inferior amicus who occupies the position of protected party,” entailing mutual obligations “in terms of beneficia and officia” (16). But why, then, are mentions of amicus so rare? Might we not rather infer that, in the exceptional cases where a dedicator specified a relationship of amicitia, there existed precisely a more personal tie? I do not doubt that members of different classes, even those who stood in a relation of patron and client, could be friends in Rome. But if they were, they had managed to overcome a social barrier and establish a genuine parity between themselves, insofar as their personal affection and mutual respect was concerned. This does not mean that they ceased to respect the difference of status where status counted: in this sense, it was a relationship between an inferior and a superior friend. But the name of friendship signified that it was entered into freely and was based on affection.21 Today too we sometimes call people with whom we are not particularly intimate “friends,” when we wish to boast of our social contacts or seek some other   Panciera (2000, 14).   It is worth noting that the vast majority of inscriptions discussed by other contributors to the volume edited by Peachin are to all appearances between people who are of equal social rank. For fuller discussion of this and other chapters, see Konstan (2002). 20 21

Love and the State | 177

gain, but this does not mean that friendship, as understood today, is a polite name for relations with important business or political acquaintances. What kind of language did the Romans use, then, to express the common identity of the entire population, if that of friendship was impeded by a hierarchical ideology and the idiom of patronage? In Rome as in Greece, the word for friendship was employed for alliances between states, somewhat like the English expression “friendly power.” The term societas too is often so used (for societas paired with amicitia in this sense, cf. e.g. Livy 7.29.3, 7.31.2, etc.; Tac. Hist. 4.64), but it may also refer more generally to the bond by which a polity is constituted. Thus Cicero, in his Republic (1.42), remarks that, although no unmixed constitution, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, is perfect, it is nevertheless acceptable “if it has that bond which originally bound people in the association of a republic” (illud vinclum, quod primum homines inter se rei publicae societate devinxit). In On Ends (5.65), Cicero affirms that there is nothing so fine as “the union of people with each other, a kind of association, as it were, and exchange of benefits, and the very love of the human race” (coniunctio inter homines hominum et quasi quaedam societas et communicatio utilitatum et ipsa caritas generis humani). And in the Laws (1.15), Cicero identifies the “bond among human beings” (coniunctio hominum) with “the natural sociability among them” (naturalis societas inter ipsos).22 A little later in the same work (1.49), he provides an illuminating analogy between societas and amicitia: “Where is that sacred friendship, if a friend is not loved with all one’s heart, and for himself, as they say . . .?   Cf. Accardi (2015, 24): “La riflessione ciceroniana sui doveri si sofferma in numerosi passi sulla costituzione dell’humana societas, la quale resulta sempre associata in modo imprescindibile allo scambio di prestazioni.” 22

178 | In the Orbit of Love

But if friendship is to be cultivated for its own sake, then societas among people and equality and justice are also to be sought for their own sakes.” Here, amicitia or friendship is understood as a relationship among individuals, whereas societas is a civic tie. So too Seneca (Epistle 48.3) affirms that “this societas that is carefully and reverently preserved, and which unites us human beings with each other . . ., also contributes greatly as well to the cultivation of that inner sociability of friendship of which I was speaking: for he who holds everything in common with a friend will hold much in common with mankind.” In turn, the exchange of gifts promotes community; as Seneca puts it near the beginning of his treatise on gift-​giving: “We must speak about benefactions and organize a subject that more than anything else binds human society [societas]” (1.4.2).23 The term societas thus seems to do duty for the social bond that Plato and Aristotle identified as philia, “love” or “friendship.” Though the abstract noun societas occurs in the second century bc in a tragedy by Ennius (quoted by Cicero On Duties 1.26) and in a speech by Cato (Against Minucius Thermus, quoted in Aulus Gellius 10.3.17), it comes into its own with Cicero (almost three hundred occurrences).24 Cicero connects the idea with fondness or caritas, but societas lacks the personal intimacy associated with friendship. Thus, in On the Parts of Oratory (88), Cicero explains that amicitia is divided into two subspecies, dearness (caritas) and love (amor): we say that the gods, parents, country, are dear to us, whereas we speak rather of love in reference to our spouses, children,   On this passage, see Raccanelli (2010, 41–​42).   There are over two hundred occurrences in Livy, who, however, employs it chiefly in the sense of “alliance”; over three hundred occurrences in the jurists, where it mainly refers to economic associations or corporations. 23 24

Love and the State | 179

siblings, and intimates—​that is, friends.25 To speak of the bond between fellow citizens as amor or even caritas evidently struck Cicero as peculiar or anomalous. He might resort to amicitia in a broadly philosophical context, as we have seen, where its use is clearly influenced by the Greek philia; but in his political works he preferred such terms as societas or coniunctio to describe that sociability of mankind which is the basis of civic life. The Latin term that comes closest to the Greek homonoia, which Plato and Aristotle defined as “political love” or “friendship,” is concordia, again a special favorite of Cicero’s (over one hundred occurrences). He employs the word in reference to the harmony of the citizen body as a whole (concordia civium: e.g., Philippics 10.8, On Fate 2.6), as well as to the special concord or consensus between classes, the concordia ordinum to which Cicero appealed during the crisis of the Catilinarian conspiracy (Against Catiline 2.19; cf. Letters to Friends 3.1.3), and which Livy saw as the basis of Rome’s social solidarity. In this usage, concordia represents a vertical relationship: to speak of amicitia between the orders would have sounded, I suspect, like an alliance between foreign powers. At all events amicitia remained, for Cicero, marginal to the civic relations designated by societas and concordia, and referred principally to the bond between personal friends.26   But for caritas as the more general term, cf. On Ends 3.73: “to maintain friendships and the other kinds of dearness” (ad tuendas amicitias et reliquas caritates). 26   Given that the Roman elite was constituted out of a relatively small number of powerful families, the ideology of amicitia was an important factor in the social cohesion of this stratum, though so too was its opposite, inimicitia; cf. Christian Rollinger (2017), who observes: “The rules of amicitia, which were in turn closely connected to and influenced by the philosophical understanding of amicitia as a sincere and emotional connection between two people, was thus instrumental for the functioning 25

180 | In the Orbit of Love

I have suggested that the extension of friendship to denote wider social relations might have been hindered in Rome just because of the highly stratified character of Roman society, as opposed to the more egalitarian nature of the Athenian democracy. Plato and Aristotle too sought, as we have seen, to restrict philia to the better class of citizens, or what Cicero would call the boni, but at the same time were obliged to recognize a broader usage, according to which the concord of all fellow citizens might be described as a kind of love or friendship. Greek writers could, of course, exploit the ambiguity of the word philia, which designated both “love” and “friendship,” a tactic that was not open to Cicero, since amicitia was univocal. But they could not entirely conceal the tensions that were implicit in their concept of political affection. There are some indications that friendship had a special value as a bond among the elite classes in Greece in the archaic and classical periods, just as it had in Rome of the second and first centuries bc. In Greece, participants in symposia—​an upper-​ class custom at least in the archaic period—​celebrated the philia that obtained among them, and close friends could serve as a claque or group of supporters to people seeking political power. We have already cited (in ­chapter 3) the lyric drinking songs or of Roman elite society and decisively shaped its conventions and habitus” (353); “Far from being merely a philosophical question divorced from any practical reality, the debate as to what was an amicus was central to the inner workings of the elite, and amicitia was a crucial cog in the machine of aristocratic society” (361). For further discusion, with an appeal to network theory, see Rollinger (2014), who notes that friendship involves a “dauerhafte, auf (quasi) symmetrischem Austausch und der Grundlage gefühlter oder betonter Gleichheit und/​oder emotionaler Beteiligung basierende, persönliche Beziehungen,” whereas the relationship between patron and client is based on an “unüberbrückbare Differenzen in Status, materiellem Wohlstand und emotionaler Beteiligung” (50, 51).

Love and the State | 181

skolia that were typically sung at such revelries, which stressed trustworthiness among friends (908) and the danger of being deceived about a friend’s true character (889).27 A similar anxiety over solidarity in the aristocracy is evident in the elegiac verses of Theognis, who lamented the decline of the traditional nobility in Megara, a city near Athens, and the corruption of traditional values under the influence of a new moneyed class. Theognis advises that the common folk should be held at a distance: “Make no heart-​felt friend from among these citizens [or “urban folk”: astoi], son of Polypaus, no matter what the necessity; appear a friend to all in word, but do not entrust any serious business to any” (61–​65; cf. 283–​84); and “never make a base man your philos hetairos [dear comrade]” (113; cf. 1080). The advice seems self-​evident just because Theognis cunningly amalgamates ethical and class categories. But ties within the nobility are threatened as well: “You will find few men, son of Polypaus, who prove trustworthy comrades [pistoi hetairoi] in difficult circumstances” (79–​80; cf. 73–​74, 209, 322a, 415–​16, 529, 575, 645, 697–​98, 813–​14, 861). Theognis exhorts himself: “twist your character adaptably toward all friends, mixing in the traits that each one has,” as his lack of confidence in his comrades leads him to adopt the very behavior he condemns. The Theognidean corpus views friendship as the antique virtue of an upper class that is in decline and on the way to losing the organic solidarity of a fantasized golden age.28 If philia was a watchword of the old aristocracy, then it is possible that partisans of the democracy in the fifth century appropriated the term to denote a more universal solidarity, thereby both imitating the style of the upper class and   Cited from Page (1962).   For further discussion, see Konstan (1997, 49–​52).

27 28

182 | In the Orbit of Love

simultaneously neutralizing the potentially subversive implications of private friendships among the elite. Aristotle’s complex treatment of civic philia as a form of friendship specific to the better class of people may be seen as a kind of compromise formation between the ideological values of the old nobility and newly empowered dēmos within the citizen body. As Rachel Zelnick-​Abramovitz observes, the “penetration of philia’s set of rules and vocabulary into politics and public life was not new; it had probably also characterized Athens in former centuries. . . . Democracy neither eliminated nor superseded it by creating a new vocabulary and alternative ways, but rather harnessed it to its purposes and ideology” (2000, 76).29 Cicero, as we have seen (­chapter 2), was worried that private loyalties between friends might be potentially in conflict with service to the state. He maintained that one of the causes of a rupture among friends is a “disagreement over sides [partes] in respect to the republic” (On Friendship 21.77), and denied that fidelity to friends can ever justify rebellion against the commonwealth (11.37).30 By contrast, there is no comparable   Zelnick-​Abramovitz (2000, 68) suggests that Aristotle’s account of unequal philia may have “led scholars to define it as patronage.” She concludes that unequal philia has some things in common with patronage as usually defined, but as opposed to the Roman model it was seen as temporary, obligations attaching to it were not formalized by law, and “the Greeks did not have a distinctive vocabulary to describe these relations” (79). 30   It may be worth noting a letter said to be addressed by Cornelia to her son Gaius Gracchus, cited in Cornelius Nepos’ On Latin Historians, in which she affirms that one must not pursue vengeance against one’s enemies if it will cause harm to one’s country (text and translation in Rolfe 1984, 326 = fr. 1.1). The theme of a tension between private friendships and enmities and loyalty to one’s land was current in Cicero’s time, and 29

Love and the State | 183

discussion of a possible conflict between friendship and civic loyalties in Aristotle’s detailed treatment of philia in his ethical treatises. Such anxieties over the political consequences of private friendships may be another reason Cicero and his contemporaries hesitated to treat amicitia as the fundamental bond among fellow citizens, even among the upper classes or boni (“the good ones,” Cicero’s term for right-​minded aristocrats, as he perceived them): better to insist on friendship as a purely private relationship, lest it seem to justify political factionalism within the senatorial and equestrian orders, and bring on civil dissension. Both Aristotle and Cicero may thus be seen taking a politically motivated stance on the question of civic friendship, reflecting tensions in the current ideology.31 Roman writers developed rich theories of benefactions, debt, and mutual exchange. Cicero in his treatise on duties (De officiis) and Seneca in his book on benefactions (De beneficiis) examine gifts and obligations among equals and between socially superior and inferior parties, and prescribe norms that look to maintaining solidarity in the society at large. Friendship or love was ideally conceived as an other-​regarding disposition, in which favors were granted solely for the sake of the loved one, with no self-​interested motive. In its most intimate form, friendship implied a coalescence of selves, not in a metaphorical sense but rather as a profound communion of thought and daily activity. conceivably (if this text preserves anything original in Cornelia’s letter) emerged at the time of the Gracchi. For the letter, see Hallett (2010).   The broad range or plasticity of philia may have made the application to political friendliness or concord easier than the narrower sense of amicitia (“friendship”) in Latin. Such terms as amor and caritas, in turn, had too strong an emotional charge to represent social solidarity. Cf. Konstan (1996). 31

184 | In the Orbit of Love

This kind of love might obtain, in a diluted degree, among wider circles in the state, but only with difficulty and in a very limited way could it extend to those of a different class or social status, such as slaves or (especially in Rome) members of a lower order. Regimes of reciprocity in principle governed relations between patrons and clients, but such formal systems of exchange underlay economic relations more generally, and these in turn colored exchanges among fellow citizens and even among friends. Such an interpenetration of two systems of association was natural and inevitable. Alice Accardi contrasts my claim that friendship in the classical world occupied a space apart from the give-​and-​take characteristic of commerce with the position of Koenraad Verboven, who sees both patronage and friendship as “alternative mechanisms for the allocation of scarce resources.”32 Accardi rightly, in my view, observes that “even recognizing the economic value of the reciprocal exchange of gifts, it cannot be reduced to its utilitarian aspect.”33 Rather than attempt to discover or impose a coherent view of gift-​giving in the classical world that reconciles its altruistic and egoistic dimensions, I have preferred to acknowledge the tensions between the two views, giving each its due weight. But the relative emphasis on one or another aspect of friendship and its place in the social whole differed between the Greek cities (the focus is inevitably on Athens) and Rome, and also at different moments in the evolution of each society as well as in the perspective of the several writers who treated the topic, who had interests of their own both personal and political. The presence of a strongly marked vertical relationship in the case of Roman   Acardi (2015, 59–​60); see Verboven (2002, 70–​71).   Acardi (2015, 60): “Pur riconoscendo il valore economico dello scambio reciproco di doni, esso non si può ridurre al suo aspetto utilitario.” 32 33

Love and the State | 185

patronage, for example, had an impact on how friendship was conceived. Although patrons and clients at Rome might sometimes become true friends, there was a resistance to collapsing the two categories, and hence to extending the sense of friendship so as to represent social solidarity as a whole. As an aristocratic value, friendship had a different function and dynamic than it did when it was appropriated by the wider citizen body, as happened in Athens after the democratic revolution of the late sixth century bc. The language of social relations does not evolve in a vacuum,34 and class and other conflicts affected interpretations of friendship and the purposes to which they were put. For all the various ways in which it was inflected, however, a vision of love as a selfless concern for the other remained a constant in classical ideologies and shaped in multiple ways such varied concepts as friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic solidarity.

  Ideally, one should take account of the entire set of social relations in studying any one component, for example family bonds. Thus brotherhood, for example, may signify membership in the same religion, as was the case in early Christianity, as well as other types of solidarity, such as trade unions and even racial or national identity. Nevertheless, one may mark off certain relations—​in this case, patronage and friendship—​for the purpose of analysis, holding others provisionally constant. 34

CONCLUSION

In this short book, I have explored the way Greek and Roman conceptions of love affected their thinking about a range of sentiments in ways that may seem strange or at all events different to us today. The idea that love might erase the boundaries that separate two distinct selves puts in question our sense of what it is that constitutes an individual identity. It raises questions as well about the nature of altruism versus egoism, both because self-​ interest is often assumed to be the primary if not the sole motive for human action, and because, if friends really are another self, then it becomes difficult to distinguish at all what is done for the sake of another and what is done for one’s own sake. As an emotion, moreover, love stands apart from other motives for social interaction, for example, duty, obligation, a code of fairness or reciprocity, and sheer economic calculation, which is presumed to condition the behavior of the rational agent of choice postulated by modern economic theory. Taken together, the chapters of this book offer a view of how Greeks and Romans experienced certain affective relations, or, more accurately, how a small subset of gifted, educated, and privileged men described and conceived of those relations. These

188 | In the Orbit of Love

are severe limitations to interpretation, and caution is required, as well as modesty. Inscriptions and other sources might alter the picture significantly. For example, high literary texts alone would lead one to believe that Roman men referred to women as “friends” (amicae, feminine) only in connection with amorous relations, and that when a woman spoke of a man as her amicus, it is safe to infer that she was less than respectable and was engaged in a sexual liaison. But Craig Williams has shown that this linguistic convention does not apply at all to funerary inscriptions, where men and women speak of their friends of the opposite sex without the least hint of impropriety.1 Important as this insight is, however, such sources are usually too thin to reveal the nature of the sentiments involved. Emotions are not raw feelings but involve evaluations and judgments about other people’s intentions and social situation, and the way we think is part and parcel of the way we feel. Those cognitive aspects are best recovered from the texts of philosophers, orators, poets, and historians, whose descriptions evoke the more subtle aspects of loyalty and gratitude, grief and civic solidarity. I hope to have indicated some of the ways in which Greeks and Romans saw and perhaps experienced certain intimate relationships differently than we do. If the record of their way of understanding their feelings has contributed to a clearer perception of our own sentiments as well, I shall feel that my purpose in writing this book has been more than achieved.   Williams (2012, 96): “In stark contrast to the language of amici and amicae in literary texts, that of the speech genre of inscriptions uses the terms symmetrically . . . the body of surviving inscriptions makes it clear that men and women—​slaves, freed, and freeborn—​could and did commission texts commemorating both men and women as their amici and amicae with no hint of denotative distinction among the various configurations of gender.” 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Accardi, Alice. 2015. Teoria e prassi del beneficium da Cicerone a Seneca. Palermo: Palumbo. Acorn, Annalise. 2007. “‘Sumimasen, I’m Sorry’: Apology in Dispute Resolution in North America and Japan.” Aichigakuin Law Review 48: 131–​ 61. http://​www.enelsyn.gr/​papers/​w12/​Paper%20by%20Prof%20 Annalise%20Acorn.pdf. Albee, Edward. 2013 (orig. 1966). A Delicate Balance. London: Duckworth. Alexander, Michael C. 2002. The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Altieri, Charles. 2012. “Critical Response II: Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys.” Critical Inquiry 38: 878–​81. Armstrong, David. 2003. “Philodemus, the Herculaneum Papyri, and the Therapy of Fear.” In Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance, edited by Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits, 17–​43. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Arnaoutoglou, Ilias. 1994. “Associations and Patronage in Ancient Athens.” Ancient Society 25: 5–​17. Arnott, Geoffrey. 2004. “Menander’s Epitrepontes in the Light of the New Papyri.” In Law, Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens: Essays in Honour

190 | Bibliography

of Douglas M. MacDowell, edited by Douglas L. Cairns and R. A. Knox, 269–​92. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Austin, Emily P. 2016, Grief, Longing, and Anger: Studies of Emotions in the Iliad. Doctoral thesis. Boston University. Averill, James R., and Elma P. Nunley. 1993. “Grief as an Emotion and as a Disease: A Social-​Constructionist Perspective.” In Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention, edited by Margaret S. Stroebe, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Robert O. Hansson, 77–​90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badhwar, Neera Kapur. 1993. “Altruism versus Self-​Interest: Sometimes a False Dichotomy.” Social Philosophy & Policy 10: 90–​117. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2014. “The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis.” Emotion Review 6: 292–​97. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Baxley, Anne Margaret. 2010. Kant’s Theory ofVirtue: TheValue of Autocracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beare, J. I. 1931. On Dreams. In TheWorks of Aristotle, edited by W. D Ross. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beck, Hans. 2015. “Beyond ‘Foreign Clienteles’ and ‘Foreign Clans’: Some Remarks on the Intermarriage between Roman and Italian Elites.” In Clientelae in the Roman Empire: A Reconsideration, edited by Martin Jehne and Francisco Pina Polo, 57–​72. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Berkel, Tazuko Angela van. 2012. The Economics of Friendship: Changing Conceptions of Reciprocity in Classical Athens. Doctoral thesis. Leiden University. Accessed May 29, 2015. https://​openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/​ handle/​1887/​20181. Blankenship, J. David. 1994. “Commentary on Young.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 10: 335–​43. Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boudon-​Millot, V., and J. Jouanna, eds. (with the collaboration of A. Pietrobelli). 2010. Galien: Œuvres, Tome IV: Ne pas se chagriner. Paris: Belles Lettres. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. “Marginalia—​Some Additional Notes on the Gift.” Trans. Richard Nice. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by A. D. Schrift, 231–​41. London: Routledge.

Bibliography | 191

Bowditch, Phebe Lowell. 2001. Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brink, David. 1997. “Self-​Love and Altruism.” Social Philosophy & Policy 14: 122–​157. Carlà, Filippo, and Maja Gori. 2014. “Introduction.” In Gift Giving and the “Embedded” Economy in the AncientWorld, edited by Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori, 7–​49. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Christ, Matthew. 2012. The Limits of Altruism in Democratic Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Citroni Marchetti, Sandra. 2017. “Cicerone alla ricerca dell’amicizia: dalla domus alla res publica.” Ciceroniana On Line 1: 235–​60 Clark, Andy. 2014. “The Extended Mind.” Video lecture in the History of Extended Cognition Project. Accessed September 20, 2015. http://​ www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/​seminars/​extended-​mind. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 2008. “Appendix.” In Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, by Andy Clark, 220–​32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Claassen, Marie-​Jo. 2004. “Plutarch’s Little Girl.” Acta Classica 47: 27–​50. Coleman, Janet. 2008. Ancient Greek, Modern and Post-​Modern Agonisms: The Possibilities for Democratic Toleration (The C.Th. Dimaras Lecture 2007). Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation. Connolly, William E. 2011. “The Complexity of Intention.” Critical Inquiry 37: 791–​98. Connor, James. 2007. The Sociology of Loyalty. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. Cope, Edward Meredith. 1877. The Rhetoric of Aristotle, with a Commentary. Vol. 2, revised and edited by John Edward Sandys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Courtney, Edward. 1995. Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of LatinVerse Inscriptions. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Crego, Cliff, trans. 1999. The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Accessed September 20, 2015. http://​picture-​poems.com/​rilke/​new. html#Love Song. Crisp, Roger. 2006. “Aristotle on Greatness of Soul.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, edited by Richard Kraut, 158–​78. Malden MA: Blackwell.

192 | Bibliography

Crisp, Roger. 2014. “Nobility in the Nicomachean Ethics.” Phronesis 59: 231–​45. Cullyer, Helen. 2014. “The Social Virtues (NE 4).” In The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, edited by Ronald Polansky, 135–​50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curzer, Howard J. 2012. Aristotle and theVirtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2007. “Participatory Sense-​ Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6: 485–​507. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. “The Time of the King.” Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by A. D. Schrift, 121–​ 47. London: Routledge. Dixon, Thomas. 2008. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downs, David J. 2014. “‘Love Covers a Multitude of Sins’: Redemptive Almsgiving in 1 Peter 4:8 and Its Early Christian Reception.” Journal of Theological Studies 65: 489–​514. Dué, Casey. 2002. HomericVariations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Dué, Casey. 2006. The CaptiveWoman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dunham, Olivia. 2014. “Private Speech, Public Pain: The Power of Women’s Laments in Ancient Greek Poetry and Tragedy,” CrissCross 1: article 2. available at http://​digitalcommons.iwu.edu/​crisscross/​vol1/​iss1/​2. Edghill, E. M., trans. 1928. Aristotle: Categories. In TheWorks of Aristotle, edited by W. D. Ross. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Accessed July 15, 2015. https://​ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/​a/​aristotle/​categories. El Murr, Dimitri. 2014. “Philia in Plato.” In Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship, edited by Suzanne Stern-​Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler SJ, 3–​34. Albany: State University of New York Press. Emmons, Robert A. 2004. “The Psychology of Gratitude: An Introduction.” InThe Psychology of Gratitude, edited by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, 3–​16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farenga, Vincent. 2006. Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography | 193

Felten, Eric. 2011. Loyalty: TheVexingVirtue. New York: Simon and Schuster. Fitzgerald, William. 2000. Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fletcher, George. 1993. Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships. New York: Oxford University Press. Flower, Harriet I. 2010. Roman Republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Force, Pierre. 2003. Self-​Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frijda, Nico H., and W. Gerrod Parrott. 2011. “Basic Emotions or Ur-​ Emotions?” Emotion Review 3: 406–​15. Fuchs, Thomas, and Hanne De Jaegher. 2009. “Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-​Making and Mutual Incorporation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8: 465–​86. Furley, William D. 2009. Menander Epitrepontes. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 106. Fürst, Alfons. 1996. Streit unter Freunden: Ideal und Realität in der Freundschaftslehre der Antike. Stuttgart and Leipzig: De Gruyter. Gagné, Renaud. 2013. Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galsworthy, John. 1922. Loyalties: A Drama in Three Acts. London: Duckworth and Co. Ganter, Angela. 2015. Was die römischeWelt zusammenhält: Patron-​Klient-​ Verhältnisse zwischen Cicero und Cyprian. Berlin: De Gruyter, Gill, Christopher. 1995. Greek Thought. Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics No. 25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, Christopher. 1996. Personality in Greek Epic,Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, Christopher, Norman Postlethwaite, and Richard Seaford, eds. 1998. Reciprocity in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1986. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gracián y Morales, Baltasar. 1647. Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. Huesca: Juan Nogués. Hallett, Judith. 2010. “Two Roman Women Writers and the Privileging of Human Connection.” In Valuing Others: Papers from the Penn-​Leiden

194 | Bibliography

ColloquiumV, edited by Ralph Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, 353–​74. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Hamilton, William Donald. 1964a. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–​16. Hamilton, William Donald. 1964b. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 17–​52. Hampton, Jean. 1993. “Selflessness and the Loss of Self.” Social Philosophy & Policy 10: 135–​65. Hampton, Jean. 1997. “The Wisdom of the Egoist: The Moral and Political Implications of Valuing the Self.” Social Philosophy & Policy 14: 21–​51. Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2015. Political Obligation in Ancient Greece and in the ModernWorld. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab /​The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Hareli, Schlomo. 2014. “Making Sense of the Social World and Influencing It by Using a Naïve Attribution Theory of Emotions.” Emotion Review 6: 336–​43. Hawkes, Kristen. 2001. “Is Meat the Hunter’s Property? Ownership and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing.” In Meat-​Eating and Human Evolution, edited by C. Stanford and H. Bunn, 219–​36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, Malcolm. 1987. The Poetics of Greek Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heilbron, Johan. 1998. “French Moralists and the Anthropology of the Modern Era: On the Genesis of the Notions of ‘Interest’ and ‘Commercial Society.’” In The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–​1850, edited by Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Björn Wittrock, 77–​106. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 1998. Henry, W. B. 2009. Philodemus, On Death. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Herman, Gabriel. 1987. Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, Gabriel. 2006. Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hermans, Hubert, and Agnieszla Hermans-​Konopka. 2010. Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-​Positioning in a Globalizing Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography | 195

Hirschman, Albert. 1977. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hitz, Zena. 2001. “Aristotle on Self-​Knowledge and Friendship.” Philosophers’ Imprint 11: 1–​28. Accessed September 19, 2015. www. philosophersimprint.org/​011012. Holst-​Warhaft, Gail. 2000. The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Honneth, Axel. 2005. Reification: A Recognition-​TheoreticalView. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Delivered at the University of California, Berkeley March 14–​16, 2005. Accessed September 20, 2015. http://​ tannerlectures.utah.edu/​_​documents/​a-​to-​z/​h/​Honneth_​2006.pdf. Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the  Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hutchins, Edwin. 2006. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.” In Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, edited by Stephen C. Levinson and Nicholas J. Enfield, 375–​98. New York: Bloomsbury. Inwood, Brad, and Raphael Woolf, trans. 2013. Aristotle: Eudemian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irwin, Terence. 1985. “Aristotle’s Conception of Morality.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy 1: 115–​43. Irwin, Terence. 2011. “Beauty and Morality in Aristotle.” In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: A Critical Guide, edited by Jon Miller, 239–​53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnstone, Steven. 2011. A History of Trust in Ancient Greece. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jollimore, Troy. 2013. On Loyalty. London: Routledge. Kassel, Rudolf. 1958. Untersuchungen zur griechischen und römischen Konsolationsliteratur. Zetemata 18. Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. 2016. “Airs, Waters, Metals, Earth: People and Environment in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought.” In The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds, edited by Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-​Lewis, 9–​28. London: Routledge. Kenny, Anthony. 2011. The Eudemian Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

196 | Bibliography

Kent Sprague, Rosamond. 1985. “Aristotle on Red Mirrors (On Dreams II 459b24–​460a23).” Phronesis 30: 323–​26. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1998 (orig. 1847). Works of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, Margaret. 2000. “Commemoration of Infants on Roman Funerary Inscriptions.” In The Epigraphy of Death: Studies in the History and Society of Greece and Rome, edited by Graham J. Oliver, 117–​54. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kleinig, John. 2014. On Loyalty and Loyalties: The Contours of a Problematic Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konstan, David. 1995. Greek Comedy and Ideology. New York: Oxford University Press. Konstan, David. 1996. “Greek Friendship.” American Journal of Philology 117: 71–​94. Konstan, David. 1997. Friendship in the ClassicalWorld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, David. 2002. Review of Peachin 2001. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.04.29. http://​ccat.sas.upenn.edu/​bmcr. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Konstan, David. 2009. “Friends in Tragedy.” In Ἀντιφίλησις: Studies on Classical, Byzantine and Modern Greek Literature and Culture in Honour of John-​Theophanes A. Papademetriou, edited by Eleni Karamalengou and Eugenia Makrigianni, 109–​15. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Konstan, David. 2010. “Are Fellow Citizens Friends? Aristotle versus Cicero on Philia, Amicitia, and Social Solidarity.” In Valuing Others: Papers from the Penn-​Leiden ColloquiumV, edited by Ralph Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, 233–​ 48. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Konstan, David. 2013. “Lucretius and the Epicurean Attitude toward Grief.” In Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, and Science, edited by Daryn Lehoux, Andrew Morrison, and Alison Sharrock, 193–​209. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konstan, David. 2014a. “The Joy of Giving: Seneca De beneficiis 1.6.1.” In Paradeigmata: Festschrift for Øivind Andersen on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, edited by Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, Anastasia Maravela, and Mathilde Skoie, 171–​76. Athens: Norwegian Institute.

Bibliography | 197

Konstan, David. 2014b. “Emotions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Alessandro Schiesaro, 174–​84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Konstan, David. 2015. “Passion over Reason: Seneca’s Stoic Dilemma.” Iride: Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate 27, no. 76: 611–​23. Konstan, David. 2016a. “Loyalty: The Missing Virtue in Classical Thought,” Alif 36: 10–​28. Konstan, David. 2016b. “Reason vs. Emotion in Seneca.” In Emotions in the Classical World: Methods, Approaches, and Directions, edited by Douglas Cairns and Damien Nelis, 231–43. Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien (HABES) vol. 55. Heidelberg: Steiner Verlag. Konstan, David. 2016c. “Understanding Grief in Greece and Rome,” ClassicalWorld 110 (2016) 3–​30. Konstan, David. 2016d. “The Freedom to Feel Grateful: The View from Classical Antiquity.” In Perspectives on Gratitude: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by David Carr, 41–​53. London: Routledge. Konstan, David. 2017. “Libéralité et Gratitude.” Revue de Philosophie Ancienne 15. Konstan, David. 2018. “One Soul in Two Bodies: Distributed Cognition and Ancient Greek Friendship.” In A History of Distributed Cognition, vol. 1 Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity, edited by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Kristjánsson, Kristján, 2013. “An Aristotelian Virtue of Gratitude.” Topoi 23 (October): 1–​13. doi: 10.1007/​s11245-​013-​9213-​8. Krauss, Amanda N. 2008. “Panegyris Channels Penelope: Mētis and Pietas in Plautus’ Stichus.” Helios 35: 29–​47. Krebs, Angelika. 2009). “‘Wie ein Bogenstrich, der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht’: Eine dialogische Philosophie der Liebe.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57: 729–​43. Lattimore, Richmond. 1962. Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lazarus, Richard S. 2001. “Relational Meaning and Discrete Emotions.” In Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, edited by Klaus R. Scherer, Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone, 37–​67. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

198 | Bibliography

Lear, Gabriel Richardson. 2006. “Aristotle on Moral Virtue and the Fine.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by Richard Kraut, 116–​36. Malden, MA: Blackwell’s. Lebar, Mark. 2009. “Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints.” Ethics 119: 642–​671. Lebar, Mark. 2013. TheValue of LivingWell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leys, Ruth. 2011a. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37: 434–​72. Leys, Ruth. 2011b. “Affect and Intention: A Reply to William E. Connolly.” Critical Inquiry 37: 799–​805. Liddel, Peter. 2007. Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Zhicheng, Nancy J. Nersessian, and John T. Stasko. 2008. “Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization.” IEEE Transactions onVisualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Vis/​ InfoVis’08) 14: 1173–​1180. Accessed September 20, 2015. https://​ www.cc.gatech.edu/​~stasko/​papers/​infovis08-​dcog.pdf. Llevadot, Laura. 2011. “Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida: The Death of the Other.” In Kierkegaard and Death, edited by Patrick Stokes and Adam J. Buben, 204–​18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Low, Polly. 2007. Interstate Relations in Classical Greece: Morality and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lundgreen, Christoph. 2013. “Beim Staate hört die Freundschaft auf! Ciceros amicitia als konkurrierende Transzendenzbehauptung.” In Jenseits der Geltung: Konkurrierende Geltungsbehauptungen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Stephan Dreischer, Christoph Lundgreen, and Sylka Scholz, 29–​46. Berlin: De Gruyter. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2006. “Egoism and Altruism.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Donald M. Borchert. 2nd ed. Vol. 3: 170–​75. Detroit: Macmillan Reference. Malo, Antonio. 2012. “The Limits of Marion’s and Derrida’s Philosophy of the Gift.” International Philosophical Quarterly 52: 149–​68. Marchese, Rosa Rita. 2016. Uno sguardo che vede: L’idea di rispetto in Cicerone e in Seneca. Palermo: Palumbo. Martin, Hubert, Jr., and Jane E. Phillips. 1978. “Consolatio ad uxorem (Moralia 608A–​612B).” In Plutarch’s EthicalWriting and Early Christian Literature, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, 394–​411. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Bibliography | 199

Mauss, Marcel. 1923–​24. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” L’année sociologique, 2nd series 1: 30–​186. McCabe, Mary Margaret. 2012. “With Mirrors or Without? Self-​Perception in Eudemian Ethics VII.12.” In The Eudemian Ethics on theVoluntary, Friendship, and Luck, edited by Fiona Leigh, 43–​76. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Meineck, Peter, and David Konstan, eds. 2014. Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Middleton, Warwick, Beverley Raphael, Nada Martinek, and Vivienne Misso. 1993. “Pathological Grief Reactions.” In Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention, edited by Margaret S. Stroebe, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Robert O. Hansson, 44–​61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Miller, William Ian. 1993. Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, andViolence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Millett, Paul. 1989. “Patronage and Its Avoidance in Classical Athens.” In Patronage in Ancient Society, edited by Andrew Wallace-​Hadrill, 15–​48. London: Routledge. Mirowski, Philip. 2001. “Refusing the Gift.” In Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge, edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, and David F. Ruccio, 431–​58. London: Routledge; reprinted in Philip Mirowski, The Effortless Economy of Science? Durham NC: Duke University Press, 376–​99. Montaigne, Michel de. 1991. Of Friendship. Trans. Donald Frame. In Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, edited by Michael Pakaluk, 186–​99. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Morgan, Teresa. 2015. Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, James B. 1997. “Virtue and the Good of Friendship.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71: 189–​201. Nisters, Thomas. 2012. “Utrum gratitudo sit virtus moralis vel passio animae, or Gratitude—​An Aristotelian Virtue or an Emotion?” In Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating Action, Discourse, and Argument, edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser, 65–​77. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Lexington Books. Noë, Ronald. 2001. “Biological Markets: Partner Choice as the Driving Force behind the Evolution of Mutualisms.” In Economics in Nature: Social Dilemmas, Mate Choice, and Biological Markets, edited by Ronald Noë,

200 | Bibliography

Jan A. R. A. M. von Hooff, and Peter Hammerstein, 93–​118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ober, Josiah. 2010. Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Osborne, Catherine. 2009. “Selves and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics vii 12.” Ancient Philosophy 29: 1–​23. Osteen, Mark. 2002. “Gift or Commodity.” In The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, edited by Mark Osteen, 229–​47. London: Routledge. Page, Denys L., ed. 1962. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Panciera, Silvio. 2001. “Onorare l’amico nella sua casa: Amicitia e topografia a Roma en el suo suburbio.” In Aspects of Friendship in the Graeco-​Roman World, edited by Michael Peachin, 11–​19. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 43. Pangle, Lorraine Smith. 2003. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkin, Tim. 1999. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Elderly Members of the Roman Family.” In The Roman Family in Italy: Status, Sentiment, Space, edited by Beryl Rawson and Paul Weaver, 123–​48. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parkin, Tim G. 2003. Old Age in the RomanWorld: A Cultural and Social History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Parrott, W. Gerrod. 2010. “Ur-​Emotions and Your Emotions: Reconceptualizing Basic Emotion.” Emotion Review 2: 14–​21. Parrott, W. Gerrod. 2012. “Ur-​Emotions: The Common Feature of Animal Emotions and Socially Constructed Emotions.” Emotion Review 4: 247–​48. Peachin, Michael, ed. 2001. Aspects of Friendship in the Graeco-​RomanWorld. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 43. Pearcy, Lee. 2012. “Does Dying Hurt? Philodemus of Gadara, De Morte, and Asclepiades of Bithynia.” Classical Quarterly 62: 211–​22. Petrides, Antonis K. 2014. Menander, New Comedy, and theVisual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomeroy, Sarah B. 1999. “Reflections on Plutarch, A Consolation to His Wife.” In Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive Essays, and

Bibliography | 201

Bibliography, edited by Sarah B. Pomeroy, 75–​81. New York: Oxford University Press. Porter, John. 1999–​2000. “Euripides and Menander: Epitrepontes, Act IV.” Illinois Classical Studies 24–​25: 157–​73. Preus, Anthony. 1968. “On Dreams 2, 459b24–​460a33, and Aristotle’s ὄψις.” Phronesis 13: 175–​82. Price, Anthony W. 1989. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Price, Jonathan. 2001. Thucydides and InternalWar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pritchard, David. 2016. “Public Spending in Democratic Athens.” Ancient History 46:43–​63. Raccanelli, Renata, 1998. L’amicitia nelle commedie de Plauto: Un’ indagine antropologica. Bari: Edipuglia. Raccanelli, Renata. 2009. “Cambiare il dono: Per una pragmatica delle relazioni nel De beneficiis senecano.” In Benefattori e beneficati: La relazione asimmetrica nel De beneficiis di Seneca, edited by Giusto Picone, Lucia Beltrami, and Lucinia Ricottilli, 303–​46. Palermo: Palumbo. Raccanelli, Renata. 2010. Esercizi di dono: Pragmatica e paradossi delle relazioni nel de beneficiis di Seneca. Palermo: Palumbo. Rackham, H., trans. 1991. Eudemian Ethics. In Aristotle. Vol. 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rapp, Christof, trans. and ed. 2002. Aristoteles Rhetorik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Reinstein, David. 2014. “The Economics of the Gift.” In Gift Giving and the “Embedded” Economy in the AncientWorld, edited by Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori, 85–​101. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Rogers, Kelly. 1993. “Aristotle’s Conception of τὸ καλόν.” Ancient Philosophy 13: 355–​71. Rogers, Kelly. 1994. “Aristotle on Loving Another for His Own Sake.” Phronesis 39: 291–​302. Rogers, Kelly. 1997. “Beyond Self and Other.” Social Philosophy and Policy 14: 1–​20. Rogers,Yvonne. 1997. “A Brief Introduction to Distributed Cognition.” Accessed September 19, 2015. http://​www.id-​book.com/​downloads/​ chapter%208%20dcog-​brief-​intro.pdf.

202 | Bibliography

Rolfe, J. C., trans. 1984. Cornelius Nepos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rollinger, Christian. 2014. Amicitia sanctissime colenda: Freundschaft und soziale Netzwerke in der Späten Republik. Heidelberg: Verlag Antike. Rollinger, Christian. 2017. “Beyond Laelius: The Orthopraxy of Friendship in the Late Republic.” Ciceroniana On Line 1: 343–​67. Rosivach, Vincent J. 1987. “Autochthony and the Athenians.” Classical Quarterly 37: 294–​306. Ross, W. D., trans. 1925. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. In TheWorks of Aristotle, edited by W. D. Ross. Vol. 9. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Roughgarden, Joan, Meeko Oishi, and Erol Akçay. 2006. “Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection.” Science 311: 965–​969. Rudder Baker, Lynne. 2011. “Beyond the Cartesian Self.” Phenomenology and Mind 1: 48–​57. Rudolph, Kelli. 2016. “Sight and the Presocratics: Approaches to Visual Perception in Early Greek Philosophy.” In Sight and the Ancient Senses, edited by Michael Squire, 36–53. London: Routledge. Saller, Richard P. 1982. Personal Patronage under the Early Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saller, Richard. 1988. “Pietas, Obligation, and Authority in the Roman Family.” In Alte Geschichte undWissenschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift für Karl Christ zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by P. Kneissl and V. Losemann, 393–​410. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Seager, Robin. 1994. “Sulla.” In The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 9: The Last Age of the Roman Republic 146-​43 B.C., edited by John A. Crook, Andrew Lintott, and Elizabeth Rawson, 165–​207. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shear, Julia. 2011. Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, George. 1950. “Faithfulness and Gratitude.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated by Kurt Wolff, 379–​95. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Simonton, Matt. 2012. Review of Shear 2011. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.02.12. http://​bmcr.brynmawr.edu/​2012/​2012-​02-​12.html. Sober, Elliott, and David Sloan Wilson. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography | 203

Ste. Croix, Geoffrey E. de. 1989. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stern-​Gillet, Susan. 1995. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sternberg, Rachel. 2006. Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stock, S. G., trans. 1925. Aristotle: Magna Moralia. In TheWorks of Aristotle, edited by W D. Ross. Vol. 9. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taplin, Oliver. 1992. Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tiberghien, Gilles A. Amitier. 2002. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Tomkins, Silvan. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsagalis, Christos C. 2004. Epic Grief: Personal Laments in Homer’s Iliad. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Tsagalis, Christos C. 2008. Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-​Century Attic Funerary Epigrams. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Tsouna, Voula. 2007. The Ethics of Philodemus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van der Eijk, Peter J., ed. 1994. Aristoteles: De insomniis, De divinatione per somnum. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Verboven, Koenraad. 2002. The Economy of Friends: Economic Aspects of Amicitia and Patronage in the Late Republic. Brussels: Latomus. Vogt-​Spira, Gregor. 2015. “Geben-​Empfangen-​Wiedergeben: Dynamiken der Sorgebeziehung in Rom.” In Sorge, edited by Gert Melville, Gregor Vogt-​Spira, and Mirko Breitenstein, 20–​38. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag. Warren, James. 2004. Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. 1959. 2nd ed. Springfield: G. and C. Merriam Company. Wellman, Christopher Heath. 1999. “Gratitude as a Virtue.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80: 284–​300. Westermarck, Edvard. 1908. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

204 | Bibliography

White, Peter. 1993. PromisedVerse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whiting, Jennifer. 2012. “The Pleasure of Thinking Together: Prolegomenon to a Complete Reading of EE VII.12.” In The Eudemian Ethics on theVoluntary, Friendship, and Luck, edited by Fiona Leigh, 77–​154. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Williams, Craig. 2012. Reading Roman Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodburn, James. 1998. “Sharing Is Not a Form of Exchange: An Analysis of Property Sharing in Immediate Return Hunter-​Gatherer Societies.” In Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, edited by C. M. Hann, 48–​63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodruff, Paul. 2013. “In Place of Loyalty: Friendship and Adversary Politics in Classical Greece.” In Loyalty, edited by Sanford V. Levinson, Joel Parker, and Paul Woodruff, 39–​51. New York: New York University Press = NOMOS LIV. Yonge, Charles D., trans. 1891. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. London: George Bell & Sons. Young, Charles. 1994. “Aristotle on Liberality.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 10: 313–​34. Zanker, Graham. 1994. The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zelnick-​Abramovitz, Rachel. 2000. “Did Patronage Exist in Classical Athens?” L’Antiquité Classique 69: 65–​80.

INDEX

Accardi, Alice, 184 Achilles, grief for Patroclus, 136–37, 147–51 Acorn, Annalise, 175 activity as a condition for friendship in Aristotle, 44–46, 49 and happiness, 44–45 and virtue, 44–45 Albee, Edward, A Delicate Balance, 86–88 altruism, 5–8, 21–29, 100 and Cicero on social solidarity, 25–26, 163 and Democritus, 23 and kharis, 109, 116–17 limits of, 159–60 and love, 154 and Plato, 23 and virtue, 26–29, 123 amica, sexual sense of, 188 amicitia, 33 and social solidarity,163; and caritas, 179; in inscriptions, 188 (see also friendship)

amor, 33 (see also love) and caritas, 179 anger in Aristotle, 91, 162 across cultures, 156 and grief, 147–48, 151 animals, and grief, 141–44 Antiphon the Sophist, 160–61 Antonius Julianus, 104–05 Aristophanes, Assemblywomen, 166–67 Aristotle on anger, 91, 162 on apotheosis of friend, 154 on constancy in friendship, 81–82 and egoism, 21–24, 27–29 on favors, 108–12 friendship, definition of, 39–41, 153 on gratitude, 110 on justice, 24 on liberality, 115–28 on love and gratitude, 111–12 on many friends, 166

206 | Index

Aristotle (cont.) on maternal love, 141, 152 on other self, friend as, 34, 150–51 on perception, 49–50 on philia as homonoia (concord), 163–65 on pity, 162 on political (civic) friendship, 165–66 versus Seneca, on benevolence, 125 shame, definition of, 114 Arnott, Geoffrey, 75 Aspasius, 168 Ausonius, Ephemeris # 7, 37 Austin, Emily, 149–51 autochthony, 167–68 Badhwar, Neera Kapur, 26–27 Bauman, Zygmunt, 97–98 benefaction. See gift Blankenshship, David, 115 Brink, David, 28–29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 96–97 Callicles, 161 caritas, 178–79 Carlà, Filippo, 98 Christ, Matthew, 159–60 Cicero on amicitia as concord, 163 on concord, 163, 179 on faction versus friendship, 64, 182–83 on friendship, 34, 150, 182 on friendship and politics, 166 on gratitude, 102–06

Laws, 177–78 on loyalty, 64–65 on many friends, 166 On the Parts of Oratory, 178–79 Pro Plancio, 102–06 Republic, 177 on social solidarity, 25–26 on societas, 177–80 citizenship, 1 Claassen, Jo-​Marie, 138 Clark, Andy, 55–56 clientship, at Rome. See patronage concern, for family and friends, 160–62 (see also altruism) concord in Aristotle, 163–65 in Cicero, 25–26, 163, 179 civic, and friendship, 17–19 in Plato, 163–64 concordia ordinum, 179 consolation (genre), 16–17, 137–41, 144–45 constancy, in friendship, 61–62, 81–82, 92 cosmopolitanism, 169 Curzer, Howard, 115, 123–24 Death and afterlife, 140, 153–54 as nothing to us, 133, 153 debt and gratitude, 104 two kinds, 104 democracy, 1 and friendship, 181–82 and ideology of individualism, 159–60

Index | 207

Democritus, and altruism, 23 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 96 distributed cognition, 54–57 duty and gratitude, 95–96 versus love, 80 egoism, 21–29 in Aristotle, 21–24, 28–29 in Cicero, 25–26 definition of, 160 in Democritus, 23 ethical, 27–28 in Plato, 23, 28–29 eleutheriotēs. See liberality elite, friendship among, 164–65, 180–81 emotion and appraisal theory, 156–57 favor as, 126 and friendship, 19, 187 and gratitude, 15, 19 and grief, 19–20, 155–56 and loyalty, 19 and ur-​emotion, 156–57 enactive intersubjectivity, 56–57 ephebic oath, 170 Epicureanism, and grief, 138–39, 143–45, 153 Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus, 133 Consolation, 144–45 erōs, 33 eudaimonia, 28 eudaimonism, and friendship, 30

Euripides Iphigenia in Aulis, 114 Orestes, 82–86 faction, versus friendship, 64, 182–83 Farenga, Vincent, 167 favor, 109, 116–17 contrasted with liberality, 121–23, 125–26 (see also kharis) Felten, Eric, 71, 90 Fisher, Philip, 148 Fitzgerald, William, 36–37 Fletcher, George, 72 freedom, 1 friend apotheosis of, 154 Aristotle’s definition of, 41 dying for, 9–12 versus kin, 84 as other self, 34, 38 shares everything, 101–02 friendship, 8–12, 33–59 (see also love, philia) as activity, 44–47, 49, 150–51 Aristotle’s definition of, 39 and civic concord, 17–19 and constancy, 61–62, 81–82, 92 and democracy, 181–82 among the elite, 164–65, 180–81 and emotion, 19, 187 among equals, 17–18 and eudaimonism, 30 and faction, 64, 182–83 and justice, 29

208 | Index

friendship (cont.) and liberality, 115–16 versus patronage, 172–73, 175–77, 184–85 between patron and client, 176–77 and reciprocity, 12–13, 52, 58, 154–55, 173–75 as a relation, 43–44 and self-​knowledge, 47–48 and separation, 46–47 and trust, 51, 86 as union of souls, 38–47, 59, 150 and virtue, 45 Frijda, Nico, 156–57 Fuchs, Thomas, 56–57 Furley, William, 74–75, 78 Galen, On the Absence of Grief, 152–53 Galsworthy, John, Loyalties, 65–71 Gellius, Aulus on Cicero De amicitia, 65 on Cicero Pro Plancio, 104–05 gift, 6–7 versus commodity, 99–100, 175 and debt, 104, 107 between friends, 101–02 gift economy, 7, 98–99 love as motive of, 111–12 paradox of, 96–97, 175 and reciprocity, 95–98, 112–13 and reputation (“social capital”), 100 as own reward, 107–08 Seneca’s definition of, 107–08

Gill, Christopher, 57–58 Gori, Maja, 98 gratitude, 14–15, 95–127 as a burden, 105 and debt, 104 as a duty, 95–96 as an emotion, 15, 19, 111 for a favor, 109, 116–17 Greek expressions for, 109 Latin expressions for, 104–05 and reciprocity 14–15 as a virtue, 15, 105–06 grief, 15–17, 129–57 Achilles’, 136–37, 147–51 and the afterlife, 140, 153–54 and anger, 147–48, 151 in animals, 141–43 anticipatory, 133–34 Aristotle on, 108–10 and consolation, 16–17, 137–41, 144–45 defining, difficulty of, 157 as egoistic, 17, 129–33 as an emotion, 19–20, 155–56 and Epicureanism, 138–39, 143–45 excessive, 138–41 expression of, 114, 146–47 Galen on the absence of, 152–53 gendered, 134–35 in Greek, 109–10 and guilt, 148–49 in Homer, 130–33, 135–37 immediate, 139–45 insatiable, 149–50 instinctive, 139–45

Index | 209

intentional, 107 and lament, 130–33 and love, 111–12 as other-​directed, 129 and pain, 135 perpetual, 136, 144 as positive, 151–52 and the self, 149–51, 155 words for, 135 guilt in Homer, 148–49 inherited, 162 Hampton, Jean, 28 Hansen, Mogens, 170 Herman, Gabriel, 174 Herodotus, on friendship among Arabs, 38–39 Hierocles, 168–69 Hitz, Zena, 47 Homer Achilles’ grief in, 136–37, 147–51 lamentation in, 130–33 homonoia (concord), philia as, 163–65 Honneth, Axel, 53 household. See oikos Hutchins, Edwin, 55 Ingratitude as a disposition, 113–14 and liberality, 124 Jaegher, Hanne De, 56–57 Jollimore, Troy, 71

Justice in Aristotle, 24 and friendship, 29 kharis (favor), 109, 116–17 contrasted with liberality, 121–23, 125–26 Kierkegaard, Søren, 129 kindness. See favor Krebs, Angelika, 53 lament gendered, 132, 134–35 in Homer, 130–33, 135 LeBar, Mark, 30 liberality, 115–28; benefactor and beneficiary, attitudes toward, 120–21 contrasted with favor, 121–23, 125–26 and gratitude, 117 opposed to greed 119 and love, 115–16 as a virtue, 118–21 Llevadot, Laura, 129 love, 3–5, (see also philia) for the dead, 129 as a feeling, 50 and friendship, 33–59 and gratitude, 111–12 and liberality, 115–16 versus loyalty, 88–89 maternal, 141, 152 as a motive, 31 reasons for, 72–73, 79 and self-​sacrifice, 12

210 | Index

love (cont.) and the state, 159–85 vocabulary of, 33–34 loyalty, 9–10, 13–14, 61–93 Cicero on, 64–65 versus love, 88–89 as non–​rational, 71–73 problems with, 63–73 Lucian, On Mourning, 146–47 Lucretius on animal grief, 143–44 on mourning, 133–34 on perpetual grief, 144 Marchese, Rosa Rita, 25–26 Mauss, Marcel, 6–7, 97–98 Menander, Epitrepontes, 73–79 Middleton, Warwick et alii, 157 Mirowski, Philip, 98 Montaigne, 73 mourning. See grief Murphy, James Bernard, 27–28 Niobe, 136–37 Nussbaum, Martha, 43 oikos (household), 2 city as, 167 solidarity of, 162 officium (duty), 80 Osborne, Catherine, 49 Osteen, Mark, 98–99 pain, and grief, 135 Panciera, Silvio, 176 Parrott, Gerrod, 156–57

patronage and friendship, 176–77, 184–85 and reciprocity, 171–73 at Rome, 171–77 vertical, 172, 175–77, perception, in Aristotle, 49–50 Pericles, Funeral Oration, 168 Petrides, Antonis, 73, 75 philein (to love), 40 philēsis, of non-​reciprocated love, 42 philia (see also friendship, love) Aristotle’s definition of, 40–41 civic, 165–66 and concord, 163–65 and democracy, 181–82 among mankind, 168 and obligation, 3–4, 33–34 selfless, 8–9 and social solidarity, 163–65 and societas, 178 Philodemus, On Death, 133–34 philos (friend), 41 pietas, 80–81 pity, Aristotle on, 162 Plato Alcibiades, 163–64 Crito, 170 and egoism, 23, 28–29 Gorgias, 161 Laws, 163 Menexenus, 168 Republic, 167 and social solidarity, 163–64 Plautus Menaechmi, 75–76 Stichus, 79–81

Index | 211

Plutarch Consolation to hisWife, 137–40 OnWhy It Is Impossible to Live Pleasurably according to Epicureanism, 144–45 Polis characterization, 1–2, 18, 169–70 as a household, 167 political (civic) philia, 165–66 and shared values, 168 Pomeroy, Sarah, 138 Porter, John, 76–78 pothē (loss), in Homer, 149–50 Pritchard, David, 169 Quintus Tullius (Cicero’s brother), Commentariolum petitionis, 166 Raccanelli, Renata, 99, 173–74 rape, 77 reciprocity, 3–4 and friendship, 12–13, 52, 58, 154–55, 173–75 and gratitude, 14–15 and gift-​giving, 95–98 and grief, 155 and patronage, 171–73 Reinstein, David, 99–100 relation, friendship as, 43–44 Rilke, Rainer Maria, “Liebeslied,” 53 Rogers, Kelly, 21–23 Rogers,Yvonne, 56 Rome, and patronage, 171–77; Rosivach, Vincent, 168

Self extended beyond individual, 35–38 union of with others, 38, 46–49, 53–59 self-​interest and evolution, 6–7; 21–22 as modern idea, 5–6 self-​knowledge, and friendship, 47–48 Seneca On Benefits 1.4, 178; 1.6, 107–08; 2.35, 107; 6.11, 125; 7.12, 101 Consolation to Helvia, 140 Consolation to Marcia, 140–42 Moral Epistles 27, 35–36; 48, 142–43, 178 Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, 92 shame, 114 shamelessness, 114 Simmel, Georg, 86–87, 95 slaves, 2 as extensions of master, 35–37 as friends, 173 Sober, Elliot, 160 societas and philia, 178 as social bond, 177–79; solidarity, social in Aristotle, 163 causes of, 169–70 in Cicero, 25–26, 159–85, 177–79 and friendship, 17–19 in Plato, 163–64 in Seneca, 178

212 | Index

Statius, Silvae 2.1, 151–52; 2.6, 152 Stoicism. See Seneca

as other-​regarding, 26–29, 122 types of, in Aristotle 121–22

Theognis, 181 Thucydides, 168 trust, and friendship, 51, 62–63, 86

Westermarck, Edvard, 95 Williams, Craig, 188 Wilson, David Sloan, 160

Verboven, Koenraad, 184 virtue, 3 and friendship, 45 liberality as, 118–21

Xanthias, epitaph for, 37 Zelnick-​Abramovitz, Rachel, 182