οἰκίαδ' ϵστί τις Φιλία: Love and the Greek Family

????a d' est? t?? f???a: Love and the Greek Family David Konstan Brown University Thephrase, ????a d' est? t?? f???a, taken fromAristode's.£«¿¿S7#¿Z» Ethics (1242a.26), defines the subject, or rather the problem, that I address in this paper. What didAristode mean by this apparendy straightforward claim, and how maywe best translate it? Does it in fact encapsulate in some important sense the essence ofthe ????? in classical Athens , and, ifso, is it informative about the emotional bonds that united the Greek family? Historians of the family commonly speak of the difficulties of recapturing the quality ofsentiment among kin in earlier societies. Sarah Pomeroy, for example, has recendywritten (1997, 3): "I am pessimistic about our ability to discover very much about the emotional experiences ofthepast, andwhetherthey changed over time."1 The difficulties A version ofthis paper was presented in November 1998 to the History Seminar at Cambridge University at the invitation ofPaul Cartledge, Lene Rubinstein, and Dorothy Thompson. I should like to thank them, and all those who participated in the seminar, for stimulating discussion and commentary. Alan Boegehold read the present version, and was generous with advice and encouragement. 1 cf. Segalen (128): "There is no more problematic area than that ofthe history of sensibility." KONSTAN: LOVE AND THE GREEK FAMILY1 07 attaching to such an enterprise in regard to classical Greece are well known. For one thing, the private lives offamilies were normally hidden , ifpossible, from public view. Tragedy and comedy do not permit the audience to peer inside the houses of die characters on stage, and orators only rarely describe events or conversations that have occurred within the home. Historians are even more chaste in this regard, despite an occasional glimpse indoors, like Herodotus' account ofCandaules' wife. Norwere the Greeks inclined to give public expression to intimate sentiments; Cheryl Cox (72) points out that some authors "consider it in poortaste to displaytoo much affection forone'swife," since itmight lead to gossip that she was a hetaira. As a consequence, one does notencounter manyoccasions in which Greeks in the classical periodare recorded as saying, "I loveyou" (I leave aside erotic poetry, since the ruling emotion in diat genre is ???? rather than f???a). A search of the TLG from the eighth through the third centuries B.C.E. produced 63 occurrences of the first person singular, f??? (or f????), over a third of which are found in comedies, and twenty—for what that is worth—in Euripides alone. Sometimes, the verb is merely auxiliary, in the sense of"be wont to"; in the negative, it may mean litde more than "I don't like that." When it is employed in emotive contexts, however, it is often in reference to one's children, one's family, one's city, or oneself. In a fragment ofEuripides' Erechtheus, Praxithea exclaims, "I love my children, but I love my country more" (f??? te??', ???a -pat??d' eµ?? µ????? f???).2 In an erotic, or better, perhaps, domestic context, die soldier in Menander's Misoumenos exclaims : "I received you as a virgin, I was the first to be called your husband , I cherished you, I still cherish you, I love you, dearest Crateia" (????t?s? se, ??a?t?, f???, ???te?a f??t?t?).3 In Aristophanes' Knights, the Paphlagonian and the Sausage Seller vie in expressing their devotion to Demos with protestations such as f??? s', ? ??µ', e?ast?? 2 So attributed in Snell's supplement (7) to Nauck's edition, where it is given as Euripides fr. 360a*; in Nauck's original edition, the same fragment appears as adespota 411. 3 307-08 in Sandbach's OCT edition (revised 1990)= 708-09 in Arnott's Loeb Classical Library edition (vol. 2, 1996). The motive that drives lovers in New Comedy is generally figured as ????; cf., for example, Pataecus' advice to the love-lorn 1 08SYLLECTA CLASSICA 1 1 (2000) t' e?µ? s?? ("I love you, Demos, I'm your lover," 769, cf. 770, 134142 ), but such demonstrative exhibitions are obviouslyto be understood as comic. Epitaphs on tombstones are personal, but both verse and prose examples tend to be spare and formulaic, reflecting the conventions ofthe genre as much as the...