โ Scribed by Philip S. Bashor
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In the larger picture, friendship in classical culture occupies the significant transition stage between the predominance of custom law in primitive society and the predominance of contract law in modern society. Here are a few exaggerated examples of this fact.
Our commercial motels and hotels are large, specialized establishments which are more than adequately prepared to meet the desires of individual travelers in a highly mobile civilization. Primitive man had to migrate with the whole tribe, carrying all of his property with him, or not go anywhere at all. In classical times the practice of "guest-friendship" was extensive. The stranger before the gates invoked widely respected but nevertheless perilous "sacred" bonds of mutual obligation, based on a human recognition -an intuition? a learned expectation? -which no written law covered nor any earthly court would enforce.
Classical military apprentice-education shows a similar contrast. The warrior's son was attached to the friend of his father in order to learn the manly arts. This relationship was both a part of a friendship between two older males (one of whom may have died) for the education of their sons, and a part of a friendship between a younger male and an older one, the apprentice and his master. Such semi-institutionalized, semi-individualized learning patterns functioned broadly somewhere between the spontaneous group fighting practices of primitive tribes and the highly specialized training of present day military service organizations.
Consider also the emergence of the social-political hetaireia (association, club) as an attempt to find security with others and to assert a common will, perhaps regardless of the law, in the midst of very turbulent events of Greek city-state life. The hetaireia may remind us again of the men's communalinitiation-religious societies of, say, the American Indian tribes, or of the modern American political party where representatives of various interests meet together to make deals in the legal struggle for control of the government apparatus.
Thus the friendship theme in classical literature has a special meaning. It discussed a voluntary relationship but one that was not wholly so, a highly but not completely organized practice, a very personal matter (sometimes abused) which also served essential societal functions (often exploited). More than is readily apparent to the modern man, "friendship" represented vital tensions of individual and community, of an appeal to nature, freedom, religion, morality, and law. Greek imagination had already poetized the companionship experience, its greatness and its hazards. Here was a challenge for the humanistic philosophers also: Could friendship dynamics be success-
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