In his dialogue Laelius On Friendship, which explores the friendship and the self-understanding of two noble Roman statesmen, Cicero expounds a more promising variant of Montaigne's view of friendship as both noble and unsurpassably good. Cicero has chosen Gaius Laelius, a respected leader and devoted friend to his colleague Publius Scipio Africanus the Younger, as the aptest vehicle to set forth a rich and pleasing but also revealing praise of friendship. The dialogue was written in 44 b.c., after the Republic had fallen and Cicero had been driven into retirement, in a world in which great friendships among eminent leaders of a thriving political life had become impossible. It is set in 129 b.c., when the Republic was still vibrant and full of brilliant leaders, if not wholly healthy: The troubles that were eventually to bring it down were already in evidence, as Cicero reminds us with hints throughout the dialogue, and especially with the story of Tiberius Gracchus.

This is the same Gracchus whose loyal friend Gaius Blossius is praised with such unreserve by Montaigne. Montaigne's source for the story is Cicero's dialogue, although what Montaigne does not report is that Laelius himself bitterly condemns Gracchus for his sedition and Blossius for his loyalty.

In opening his thematic discussion of the relationship of justice to friendship, Aristotle says, “It seems, then, just as we said at the beginning, that friendship and the just deal with the same things and involve the same persons” (1159b25–26). In fact, what Aristotle said at the beginning of his treatment of friendship was somewhat different: “When men are friends they have no need of justice, but when they are just they need friendship in addition, and justice in the highest sense seems to involve an element of friendship” (1155a26–28). The first clause of this earlier statement is ambiguous, for although it might be taken merely to mean that successful friendship must include justice, it encourages the more pleasing thought that friendship dispenses with the need for justice altogether, or at least that it automatically produces justice without effort. Aristotle's new formulation of the relation of justice to friendship suggests that these more hopeful readings would be unjustified. Friendship would automatically include justice if mere goodwill were enough to secure justice, but Aristotle has shown that even the most ardent goodwill is not enough to equalize benefits where capacities are highly unequal, and that goodwill alone is often too thin a reed to rely upon.

In the Lysis, Socrates' dialogue with two young friends about friendship, Socrates pursues the unsettling idea that all friendship is rooted in human neediness and defectiveness and is treasured only because and only to the extent that we hope to get from others things that we are unable to provide for ourselves. “He who is good … be[ing] to that extent sufficient for himself … would be in want of nothing,” Socrates argues, and hence would neither treasure nor love anything or anyone else. The radical claim advanced in the central section of the dialogue is not merely that human love begins in need – this alone would be a rather unremarkable claim about human development – but that love begins and ends and is wholly driven by need. Moreover, the Lysis explores the possibility that the most important needs that cause us to love are not needs for the pleasures and activities of friendship as such, but are directed to other things that act as remedies for our defects in the way that medicine does for the defects of the body, and to which the human beings we call our friends are merely the means.

In the remaining chapters of Book 9, Aristotle will spell out in detail the implications of his concept of friendship as extended self-love that he introduces in 9.4. In 9.5, he will analyze the elements of friendship that consist in wishing for the friend's life and well-being, or goodwill, and discuss how this crucial root of friendship comes into being. In 9.6, he will turn to friends' agreement in practical choices, or concord, and the resulting common activity and sense of solidarity that promote goodwill and that form the core of political friendship. In 9.7, he will explore the roots of benevolent activity and the ways in which it strengthens goodwill and affection. After taking up again the question of self-love in 9.8, Aristotle then in 9.9, 9.10, and 9.12 discusses the desirability and best conditions for friends' spending their days together, and in 9.11, he gives his final reflections on the possibilities of friends' sharing their sorrows and joys.

Goodwill

Aristotle makes a fresh beginning in 9.5 with the theme of goodwill, the utterly indispensable basis of friendship, the necessary beginning that is barely a beginning, the critical impulse of selflessness that remains, when left to itself, passive, idle, and weak, but without which none of the beauty and none of the joy of friendship could ever exist.

In Chapter 9 of Book 9, Aristotle gives his deepest reflections on the relationship of friendship to human neediness. As he does so, he brings his discussion of friendship onto a new plane. He mentions happiness for the first time in Books 8 and 9, and mentions it repeatedly. In connection with the new focus on happiness, several other themes now come prominently to the fore, including those of nature, pleasure, human self-sufficiency, and the philosophic life. Gently but persistently, Aristotle presses the question of why a truly happy man will need friends, clearly implying that if he feels no such need, he will not love. This need may not be a need for anything separable that arises out of friendship; it may be a simple need to love, an inclination to concern oneself with and contribute to the happiness of others. We have hitherto regarded this inclination or need as an irreducible part of human nature. But Aristotle now asks how such a need can be explained, and how its satisfaction fits together with the satisfactions of the other wants and needs that collectively constitute human happiness.

The question becomes important at this point because of Aristotle's argument in 9.4 that good men can be their own best friends and especially because of what he has shown in 9.8 about the self-love of noble souls.

When we return to Aristotle's discussion of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics after examining the Lysis, we are able to see the ways in which Aristotle engages and responds to the arguments of the Lysis, at once silently conceding some of Socrates' central contentions and, at the same time, offering in Chapters 2 to 6 a sustained counterargument to Socrates' thesis about friendship and the good. Most prominent among Aristotle's tacit concessions is the fact that he nowhere attempts to argue that in friendship one can ever simply leave behind the concern with one's own good. To the contrary, Aristotle identifies the three sources of affection or types of objects that are loved or lovable (φιλητόν) as the good, the pleasant, and the useful, adding that the useful is loved only as a means to the good, and that the good that each man loves is not everything good but what is or what seems to him good for himself. Also striking is Aristotle's silence about the noble or beautiful as a fundamental and separate root of or inspiration for love.

Aristotle's account of the three objects of love differs in this important respect from his account of the three objects of choice in Book 2, which he lists as the noble, the beneficial, and the pleasant (1104b30–31).

In Chapter 8, Aristotle provides the capstone of the argument he has been building that the best friend is not another but oneself. He thereby demonstrates that the most important thing for happiness is not to have a good friend in another but to have the right stance toward oneself and the capacity to secure what is good for oneself, especially for one's soul or mind. Aristotle does not bend his efforts to making the case that all men in fact love themselves most of all, although he clearly indicates that they do. For showing that all the actual men that we know love themselves most would not prove that the rarest and best man, leading the best possible life, might not love others more. Instead, he makes the more radical claim that the greatest self-love is characteristic of the very best people, even or especially in their moments of seemingly greatest self-sacrifice; and what is more, that the truest form of self-love, in the best individuals, does in fact take precedence over everything and everyone else. In the process, Aristotle illuminates the difference between the self-love of ordinary people and that of the most moral citizens, while prompting some reflections upon the self-love of a third group, the philosophic souls who possess complete self-understanding.

The Goodness of Self-Love

Aristotle begins from the obvious truth that self-love is almost universally an object of reproach.

Friendship was a great subject of stories and of philosophical reflection in classical antiquity. Friendship was associated in the popular mind with courage, with republicanism, and with the spirited resistance to injustice and tyranny. The Greek poets celebrated the stories of such famous pairs of friends as Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Pirithous, and Orestes and Pylades. Festivals were held in honor of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who were stubbornly credited in folklore with unseating the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, despite the efforts of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle to prove that popular memory had gotten the story wrong. Most famous of all friends were of course Achilles and Patroclus, but equally revealing is the story of Damon and Phintias, who were said to have lived under the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius. Phintias had been discovered plotting against the tyrant and was condemned to death. When he asked leave to return home first to set his affairs in order, Damon offered to stand as pledge for his safe return. Dionysius consented, though he marveled at Damon's simplicity. But when in fact Phintias returned on the appointed day to take his place on the scaffold and save his friend, so moved was the tyrant by the friends' mutual constancy that he commuted the sentence and begged to be accepted as a third in their friendship. In the proud, unshakable loyalty and mutual trust of two men such as Damon and Phintias, we see classical virtue at its most impressive but also its most appealing, for it is the special charm and fascination of a great friendship that it seems at once so noble and so delightfully desirable.

In Nicomachean Ethics 8.13–8.14, Aristotle returns from a discussion of friendship in politics and the family to his broader theme of friendship and equality. Here, in the course of examining the reproaches and quarrels that arise in certain confused or deceptive forms of utilitarian friendship, he in fact offers his most profound reflections on the critical question of the relation of friendship to justice. Aristotle opens 8.13 with an explicit return to his threefold classification of friendships as based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. The sympathetic concern that grows out of kinship or similarity, which had come to appear as a fourth and crucial root of friendship, and which figured prominently in the previous chapters, now recedes again from the picture. Instead, Aristotle focuses attention on the difficulties of establishing and maintaining equality between friends, especially when their capacities differ greatly, reminding us of the unsolved questions of what motivates benefactors to act as they do, and how most unequal friendships can ever really be balanced to everyone's satisfaction.

Quarrels

“Complaints and reproaches arise solely or chiefly in friendships of utility, and with good reason,” Aristotle says (1162b5–6). But the reasons he goes on to give to explain why complaints and reproaches do not arise in friendships of virtue and pleasure in fact indicate just how unusual these friendships would have to be to be perfectly free of grievances:

Aristotle's discussion of the different types of friendship has so far been confined to friendships between equals, and his analysis has shown many reasons why equality is important in friendship. To the extent that the friendship turns upon utility, it is of course essential that the friends have something of more or less equal value to offer. To the extent that it turns upon pleasure, they must have similar capacities to please, and since the greatest pleasure in friendship is the pleasure of companionship and shared activity with a kindred spirit who has similar aims and feelings and desires, equality and similarity contribute enormously to the pleasantness of friendships. And Aristotle has stressed repeatedly that the perfect friendship of virtue will be a friendship of equals, each fully worthy of the other's confidence, trust, and generous support.

In 8.7, Aristotle turns to friendships between unequals, such as father and son, elder and youth, husband and wife, or ruler and subject. Not only do these unequal friendships differ as a class from those discussed previously, but each of them also has its own peculiar character and problems, and indeed each contains within it, as it were, two different friendships. For Aristotle says the superior and inferior have different virtues and functions and different grounds for their affection (1158b17–19). Thus, he explains, the partners do not receive the same thing from each other and should not expect to receive it.

In his long discussion of friendship and equality in 8.7 to 9.3, Aristotle has uncovered much self-interest at work in even the most virtuous friendships. But even if each man does love his own good “most of all” (1159a12), Aristotle has nowhere retracted his insistence that true friends also love one another for their own sakes. How are these two different concerns connected in one soul? Aristotle will suggest now that the love for the friend for his own sake is an extension or expansion of self-love.

The Elements of Friendship

Aristotle begins afresh in 9.4 with a new and fuller definition of friendship, specifying the elements that are universally acknowledged to constitute friendship. Ordinary opinion tends to think of true friendship and self-regard as altogether different, the one springing from noble generosity and the other involving qualities that are base or at best morally neutral. By taking common opinion as his starting point, however, Aristotle shows that the same elements that are agreed to be essential to friendship are found primarily and most completely in a good man's relation to himself: “The features of friendship that are found in friendship toward one's neighbors, in accordance with which the various friendships are defined, seem to come out of those that one has toward oneself” (1166a1–2). In the process, he proves again that the virtuous man is the one most capable of being a good friend to others.

The various functions of dialogue form considered in the last chapter are all complementary and mutually reinforcing. And all are inextricably bound up with Plato's use of characterization. By this I mean simply his discursive strategies for the representation of persons, which may be summarized as what they say and what others say to them or about them, together with the dramatic context in which they are situated through the discourse as a whole. The entire text of a Platonic dialogue may thus be understood as a vehicle for characterization. In this chapter I hope to substantiate this claim, as well as exploring several related matters concerning various conceptions of “character.” I begin by examining the various components of a person's “character” and the distinction between this meaning of the word and “character” as dramatis persona. In the next section I look in greater detail at the “maximal” Sokrates who emerges from Plato's dialogues overall. Finally, I outline some ancient Greek attitudes towards the construction of character in and through dramatic representation, as a matrix for considering how Plato may have expected his characters to influence his audience, and a context for understanding some of the dramatic strategies to be considered later in more detail.

“character”

When Aristotle says drama represents “people doing things,” he adds that these people are “necessarily” of good or bad character (ēthos). One might object that some representations of persons endow them with no moral qualities.