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D. Konstan: Friends and Lovers Friends and Lovers in Ancient Greece1 For Robyn Sprigg David Konstan My purpose in this paper is twofold. I shall begin by examining some elementary story types involving love and friendship in order to see what attitudes or conventions they presuppose, and how these attitudes are shaped into narratives. This preliminary analysis will serve as the basis for the interpretation of a more complex tale, which combines and varies the simpler patterns. I have selected texts dating chiefly to the period of Roman hegemony over the Greek world. These works have been largely neglected by classical scholars, though recently they have begun to receive some critical attention. They reward study both because they indicate a continuity of values concerning love and friendship in Greek culture, and because they represent a highly sophisticated reworking offamiliar themes. I shall start with stories of friendship, in part because it is the less modem topic. Any bookstore provides copious materials on love, and columnists offer daily or weekly advice in newspapers and magazines. By contrast, fully a fifth of Aristotle's writing on ethics is devoted to friendship, while he barely mentions erotic attraction at all. This is not a sign of prudishness, of course, but of a Greek's sense of the importance offriendship in social life.2 There survives from the pen of Lucian, the comic essayist of the second century A.D., a dialogue on friendship. The speakers are a Greek, named Mnesippus, and a Scythian called Toxaris, for whom the essay is named. The Scythians were conventionally the model ofa nomadic, tribal people, without settled homes, agriculture, or cities~the very opposite of Greek life, centered as it was on the city, the household, the farm. In Lucian's dialogue, the two speakers engage in a debate over which of the two cultures, Greek or Scythian, places the higher value on 1 Versions ofthis paper were presented at Bates College and at Princeton University in the spring of 1992. I am grateful to audiences at both institutions for their comments, and to Patricia Rosenmeyer, who kindly read the typescript and made many helpful suggestions. 2 For discussion of Aristotle on friendship and passionate love, see A. Price, Love andFriendship in Plato andAristotle (Oxford 1989) 247-49. 2 Syllecta Classica 4 (1993) friendship. The contest takes the form of an exchange of anecdotes, five on each side, designed to illustrate exceptional examples of loyalty and sacrifice between friends.3 The controversy is initiated by Mnesippus, who teases the Scythian for the reverence that he and his countrymen pay to Orestes and Pylades, to whom they offer sacrifices as though they were heroes. According to a tradition represented, for example, by Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris, after Orestes killed Clytemnestra, he and Pylades traveled to Scythia, slew the Scythian king, kidnapped the priestess of Artemis (who turns out to be none other than Orestes' sister Iphigeneia), plundered an image of the goddess, and made a mockery of the Scythian people. Strange figures for the Scythians to idolize. But the Scythian Toxaris replies that while their courage is reason enough to revere them, it is their loyal friendship to one another that has inspired worship: "for they seem to us to have been the most noble friends of all, and to have assumed the position of lawgivers to the rest, ruling that one must share in all the fortunes of one's friends." Thus, a stele was set up, celebrating in word and picture the solidarity between Orestes and Pylades. Indeed, "there is no greater reproach among us than to be deemed to have been a traitor (p??d?t??) to friendship" (7: 227.12-13). Toxaris' language is revealing. Orestes and Pylades are regarded as lawgivers or legislators (?/?ยต??^ta?, 5: 226.3); desertion of a friend is called treachery. The bond between friends is analogized to duty to one's country, or rather, it is elevated beyond political duty to the status of a supreme obligation. To a Greek, it might have seemed natural that the Scythians would hold such a view, since they were imagined as having only rudimentary political institutions and a minimal sense of obligation...

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