Friends, Romans, Errors

From Montaigne’s essay “On Friendship” to popular philosophy of the mid twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves and Joseph Epstein’s Friendship: An Exposé) to scholarship of the past few decades, this chapter shows how such texts rely to varying degrees upon the binarisms true/false, correct/incorrect, right/wrong in their descriptions and evaluations of Roman friendship. This chapter asks not whether this or that modern text gets ancient Rome wrong, but rather how Rome, evaluated as right or wrong, functions as a vehicle for these texts’ meanings, and also what might be some of the implications for a topic so freighted with larger social, cultural, and political significance over the course of its centuries-long reception. Finally, although its readings of amicitia avoid applying evaluative labels, this chapter asks to what extent its readings of later readings of Roman friendship do (must?) nonetheless appeal to some concept of error.