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.

FRIENDSHIP AS AN HISTORICAL VARIABLE

The subject of this book is the history of the relationship we call friendship in the classical world, beginning with the Homeric epics and concluding in the Christian empire of the fourth and fifth centuries AD. While the idea of friendship is not uniform over various cultures or even within a single culture at any given moment, the core of the relationship with which we shall be concerned may be characterized as a mutually intimate, loyal, and loving bond between two or a few persons that is understood not to derive primarily from membership in a group normally marked by native solidarity, such as family, tribe, or other such ties. Friendship is thus what anthropologists call an achieved rather than an ascribed relationship, the latter being based on status whereas the former is in principle independent of a prior formal connection such as kinship or ethnicity.

An achieved relationship does not necessarily mean one that depends essentially on free or personal choice. One may meet friends by accident and be drawn to them for mysterious reasons having little to do with decision, as is often the case with erotic attraction, for example. Arranged marriages and those based on individual sentiment or infatuation may from a certain point of view seem like two kinds of constraint; the fifth-century BC rhetorician Gorgias thus held that rōs or erotic passion was involuntary (Helen 19), and in canon law infatuation may be grounds for annulment because marriage was not entered into freely. In addition, friendship is “socially patterned” by numerous factors such as class or age.

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).

Centre and periphery

With distance from the market, transport costs rise and the price of land falls. It becomes less economical to intensify production by increasing inputs of labour or capital, except on land which either is very fertile or has particularly good access to transport arteries. It may therefore be predicted that the intensive, slave-run villa will be successful and profitable only within a limited area of central Italy. Farms outside this region may still sell their surplus production to the metropolis. However, it becomes increasingly unlikely that there will be dramatic changes in agricultural practice in response to the demands of the market; at most, we may expect to find that regional specialities, distinctive local products which could be sold in Rome, would have a prominent place within the standard mixture of crops. In many areas of Italy, farming practices were determined purely by local environmental conditions; in other regions, the stimulus to change was provided by the demands of markets other than the metropolis.

It is possible, however, that this picture of the steady decline of metropolitan influence with distance from the city is misleading. In the ‘world-systems theory’ of Wallerstein, the periphery is not left to its own devices by the more advanced countries that form the core of the worldsystem; rather, it is exploited in a different manner. The periphery serves as a source of raw materials and as a market for goods manufactured by the core nations, and it is in the latter's interest to maintain this state of affairs.

Demand and supply

The dramatic growth of the population of Rome was impossible without an equally dramatic increase in the city's food supply. In part, this was achieved through state action. The political imperative to feed the urban plebs led magistrates and emperors to intervene in the grain supply, buying additional supplies in times of shortage and distributing grain collected as tax at a reduced price or without charge. The system of the annona became increasingly sophisticated, with the appointment of a praefectus annonae and incentives offered to shipowners to supply the city. The state may also have attempted at times to manipulate the market, by releasing quantities of state grain or by withholding it to drive prices up, but it was not in the administration's interests to antagonise the private traders who made an equally important contribution to the city's food supply.

State action alone was insufficient to keep the metropolis fed; a sizeable proportion of the city's demands for grain was met through the free market. Moreover, until the annona was expanded to include oil (at the turn of the second century A.D.) and wine and pork (in the 270s), Rome's supplies of all other foodstuffs were brought in through private channels. The elite may have fed their households from the produce of their own estates; the majority of the urban population had no option but to rely on the vagaries of the market.

Whether or not Orwell believed that a body could survive without a digestive system, the implications of the simile are clear: it would be better off without one. London is inhabited by people who are ‘deeply civilised but not primarily useful’; it contributes nothing of any worth to the life of the rest of the country. The need to feed this belly is a heavy burden, a distraction from more important activities. What might human beings, or nations, not achieve if they were relieved of the necessity of devoting most of their days to filling the insatiable gut?

Such remarks are part of a long tradition of debate over the place of the city, and above all of the great metropolis, in the economy and society of the country that supports it. The Western city is the embodiment of modernism and modernisation, and praised or reviled as such. At the present time, the dominant image is the urban dystopia of films like Blade Runner. In the past, the city was seen both as the symbol of the brave new industrial civilisation and as one of the agents that brought it into being, overcoming the reactionary forces of feudalism and ignorance.

The marketing of villa produce

In the course of his account of the duties of the vilicus, Columella warns that the man should not become involved in buying and selling using his master's money, ‘for doing this diverts him from his duties as a vilicus and makes him a negotiator rather than a farmer’. To judge from the lack of attention paid to the subject, the idea that marketing was not one of the proper concerns of a farmer pervades the entire work. There is little doubt that in Columella's opinion the ultimate aim of cultivation was profit, and numerous passing comments make it clear that the bulk of the estate's produce was intended to be sold. The means by which this produce was turned into money, however, are barely hinted at. Varro, meanwhile, having stated that the final part of his sixfold division of the farmer's year was the marketing of produce, dramatically interrupts the dialogue after the fifth part (storage) with the news of the murder of the aeditumus. As in Columella's work, it is clear that the crops are to be sold, but Varro neatly (and, we must conclude, deliberately) evades discussion of the mechanisms involved.

It is left to Cato, whose avariciousness is highlighted in Plutarch's biography, to offer a set of sample contracts for the sale of estate produce. The succeeding centuries saw an increase in the volume of advice offered on cultivation, important changes in agricultural practice and a new unwillingness on the part of Roman authors to address certain issues.

Beyond a certain distance from the market it is no longer profitable or practical to specialise in exotic, perishable foodstuffs; farms outside the immediate hinterland of the city will tend to grow the standard mixture of cereals, vines and olives. However, according to our model it is likely that many farmers in the succeeding zone will still alter their methods of cultivation in response to the demands of the market. Within a region extending up the Tiber Valley and along the Tyrrhenian coast, the price of land – at any rate the price of the most fertile land, and of land with good access to transport arteries – will be high enough to persuade farmers to intensify production, whether by increasing inputs of land, capital and labour, by introducing improved technology and techniques or by making changes in the organisation of labour.

Our most important literary sources for the development of agriculture in central Italy are once again the works of the Roman agronomists. Invaluable though these writings are, a number of problems should be noted. The treatises contain a mixture of description and prescription, and in many cases it is impossible to say how far the advice may have been followed by farmers. The way in which the agronomists illustrate their precepts with anecdotes and examples, and above all their clear awareness of the innumerable different situations which may be encountered in the field, suggest that their works are not merely theoretical or rhetorical exercises, but this may still be farming as practised by an enthusiast with the income to support his hobby.

In praise of Rome

In the summer of A.D. 143, the Greek orator Aelius Aristides arrived in the imperial capital, having made a vow to the gods that, in return for safe passage, he would compose an address in praise of the Roman people:

But, since it was quite impossible to pledge words commensurate with your city, it became evident that I had need of a second prayer. It is perhaps really presumptuous to dare undertake an oration to equal such majesty in a city … For it is she who first proved that oratory cannot reach every goal. About her not only is it impossible to speak properly, but it is impossible even to see her properly … For beholding so many hills occupied by buildings, or on plains so many meadows completely urbanised, or so much land brought under the name of one city, who could survey her accurately? And from what point of observation?

The inability of the orator and of oratory to do justice to the subject is a standard part of the prolegomenon to any panegyric, but Rome inspired similar reactions in other visitors. The emperor Constantius, visiting the city in A.D. 357, is said to have ‘complained of Fama as either incapable or spiteful, because while always exaggerating everything, in describing what there is in Rome, she becomes spiteful’; one of his companions meanwhile remarked that ‘he took comfort in this fact alone, that he had learned that even there men were mortal’.

A great many people have assisted me in the writing of this book, and I wish to take this opportunity to thank them. Peter Garnsey was an exemplary supervisor of the Ph.D. thesis on which it is based, unfailingly providing encouragement, advice, ideas and obscure pieces of bibliography whenever appropriate; I am also grateful for his continued support since submission. As my examiners, Dominic Rathbone and Jeremy Paterson offered many invaluable suggestions as to how the thesis might best be turned into a book; it is undoubtedly much improved as a result of their comments.

I have benefited greatly from the opinions of people who have read sections of the work or heard versions of it in seminars. I particularly wish to thank John Patterson for his extensive comments and encouragement; Keith Hopkins, for necessary criticism of my grasp of demography and for lending me his unpublished piece on the city of Rome; Wim Jongman, for introducing me to recent work on early modern metropolitan cities and for the loan of another unpublished article.

The bulk of the work of revising the thesis for publication was carried out in the Department of Classics at the University of Wales, Lampeter; I wish to thank everyone there for their help and support, especially Geoff Eatough and Anne Gwilym. I am also very grateful to Pauline Hire at Cambridge University Press for all her encouragement and advice to a first-time author.