Introduction: international friendship formation and its discourses

The Romans were not the first people to initiate informal international friendships in the Mediterranean basin in antiquity: that honor most likely belongs to the Greeks. The Romans, however, adopted the practice with great enthusiasm beginning in the third century bc. This chapter explores the dynamics of Roman international friendship formation using the same interpretative framework applied in the previous chapter to the phenomenon of beginning interpersonal friendship. This chapter also closely scrutinizes the language and rituals of international friendship formation using the insights of IR Constructivist theory as discussed in Chapter 1. As will be seen, moral standards and interests, and ideas and ideals, seem to have been as much genuine concerns for the participants in interstate friendship as they certainly were to the ancient literary sources that record them. Here I will begin building the rather difficult case that the moral aspect of amicitia formation had significant real-world, constitutive effects on the violent anarchy of the ancient Mediterranean international system.

The difficulty of arguing for the constructive effect of moral discourse and dispositions arises from the fact that states almost invariably form friendships and alliances because of the real or perceived threats they face from other states, that is to say, primarily for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons. States also align themselves with others usually for the sake of some short- or long-term self-interested goal (strategic advantage, economic gain, and so on). The language of affect, emotion, and morality is often present, but is usually instinctively rejected by observers and analysts as mere discourse, hypocrisy – or worse, political cover for naked self-interest. As Polly Low observed, the main difficulty with gauging the real-world effects of moral criteria in international relations is that “they can be made to be relevant to anything, and, more crucially, be made part of an argument justifying just about any course of action.” In the Roman context, Alexander Jakobsen has recently shown that the Roman ideology of iustum bellum, “the just war,” had to satisfy normative ethical and moral demands rather than strictly formalistic or technical-legal criteria, which implies the malleability of moral justifications and their susceptibility to being transformed into pretexts.