THE GREEK WORD FOR “FRIEND”

The poems of Solon bear witness to a period of class tension in sixth-century BC Athens, which was followed by nearly half a century of autocratic rule by Pisistratus and his sons. At the end of the century, a revolution installed a direct democracy that was ultimately to bestow political rights on all adult male citizens, including the poorest. The elite families did not completely abandon aspirations to power, and twice in the fifth century succeeded in instating oligarchical regimes of brief duration, but the broadly based democracy endured until the Macedonian hegemony curtailed the independence of the autonomous city-states. The epoch beginning with the democratic reforms in Athens and ending with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC is conventionally called classical or Hellenic.

Documents from the democratic era are relatively copious, and the regular term for “friend” in classical (and later) Greek is philos. It designates a party to a voluntary bond of affection and good will, and normally excludes both close kin and more distant acquaintances, whether neighbors or fellow-citizens.

Evidence for the restricted range of the noun philos is abundant. Plato, for example, writes (Meno 91C1–3): “May such a madness never seize any of my relations or friends [mēte oikeiōn mēte philōn], nor a fellow citizen or foreigner” (cf. Plato, Ep. 7.334c).