Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Friendship, Gender, Politics
- Part I Friendship and Betrayal
- 1 Indemnity for Enemies, Oblivion for Friends: Changing Political Allegiances in the English Civil Wars
- 2 “Obligation here is injury”: Exemplary Friendship in Katherine Philips's Coterie
- 3 The Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden: Friendship's Counsel in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder
- Part II The Rewritten Legacy
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden: Friendship's Counsel in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder
from Part I - Friendship and Betrayal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Friendship, Gender, Politics
- Part I Friendship and Betrayal
- 1 Indemnity for Enemies, Oblivion for Friends: Changing Political Allegiances in the English Civil Wars
- 2 “Obligation here is injury”: Exemplary Friendship in Katherine Philips's Coterie
- 3 The Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden: Friendship's Counsel in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder
- Part II The Rewritten Legacy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
And therefore it is no longer a wonder, that men Love, or Dislike each other commonly at first interview, though they scarce know why: nor can we longer withold our Assent to that unmarkable Opinion of Plato, that Similitude of Temperaments and so of Inclinations, is not only the Cement, but Basis also of Amity and Friendship.
The epigraph comes from Walter Charleton's 1654 Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, a translation and modification of Pierre Gassendi's Epicurean natural philosophy. In this text, Charleton presents the French Gassendi's Christianization of Epicurus, a philosopher widely considered atheist, to an English public in the midst of civil war. In this passage, Charleton explains sympathy and antipathy by physical means: the “Similitude of Temperaments and so of Inclinations.” The language, derived from Plato, evokes in another register the distinctive nature of friendship, repeating the key terms of made and found in cement (solidifying over time) and basis (the initial foundation). In a slightly later text that introduces and translates some of Epicurus' own writings, Epicurus's Morals (1656), Charleton uses the same language to present Epicurus' appeal for the mid-seventeenth-century reader:
Similitude of Opinions, is an argument of Similitude in Affections, and Similitude of Affections the ground of Love and friendship, … you will soone admitt him into your bosome, and treat him with-all the demonstrations of respect due to so excellent a Companion.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Friendship's ShadowsWomen's Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705, pp. 114 - 150Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012