ROMAN FRIENDSHIP

The earliest Latin texts that can count as literature date to the latter half of the third century BC, when Rome was already master of most of Italy, and the ruling aristocracy could look back to three hundred years or more of continuous supremacy within the state. What is more, Roman culture was already deeply indebted to Greek: the first literary work in Latin is a translation of Homer's Odyssey, and the earliest surviving compositions are the plays that Plautus and Terence adapted from Greek New Comedy. No original Latin text of any size written before the first century BC survives complete (a few brief epigrams and the prologues to Terence's six dramas are the exceptions). When Roman ideas on friendship become available for study, they are already the product of a complex interaction between cultures.

Unlike Greek, Latin has a word for friendship. Though amicitia has a certain breadth of meaning, as does the English “friendship,” and may assume, especially in philosophical contexts, some of the wider connotations of philia, it does not normally designate love in general but rather the specific relation between friends (amici). The term corresponding to philia in the more sweeping sense is amor, just as amare is the Latin equivalent to the Greek verb philein, though both words may be employed also for erotic passion which in Greek is distinguished by erōs and its cognates.

There is thus no need to demonstrate for Latin as for Greek that the vocabulary of friendship marks off a field of relations different from kinship, ethnicity, and utilitarian associations such as business partnerships.