THE WORLD OF HOMER

As the oldest evidence for the history of friendship in the classical world, the two epic poems attributed to Homer present a paradox. The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad is often cited in antiquity as one of three or four legendary friendships. Theocritus (29.34), for instance, calls it exemplary; Bion of Smyrna (fr. 12) lauds Achilles and Patroclus along with Theseus and Peirithous and Orestes and Pylades, and Dio Chrysostom (Or. 57.28) mentions the same three pairs as the only examples of true friendship in all history. Lucian (Toxaris 10, trans. Harmon 1936: 119) remarks on the Greek “poets, who have rehearsed in the most beautiful of epic lines and lyric verses the friendship [philia] of Achilles and Patroclus and the comradeship [hetaireia] of Theseus, Peirithous, and all the rest”; Plutarch (On Having Many Friends 93E) praises them; in the fourth century AD, Themistius (Or. 22.266b, 271a), tutor to the emperor Gratian, and Libanius (Or. 1.56), tutor to Julian the Apostate, are still mentioning Achilles and Patroclus as model friends. Their friendship, according to William Anderson (1993: 35), “showed the way for later Greek tragedy to explore the pathos of self-sacrifice and the guilt in allowing another to take on one's own fatal danger.”

Nevertheless, many modern scholars suppose that in archaic epic, friendship is conceived as a formal and non-emotional bond based on obligation rather than love. Thus Paul Millett (1991: 120–1), summarizing the influential argument of Arthur Adkins (1963), writes: “Homeric ‘friendship’ appears as a system of calculated cooperation, not necessarily accompanied by any feelings of affection.”