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From Helen of Troy to Augustine of Carthage, love and friendship were central to ancient life and thought. After a targeted selection of mythical narratives about the divinity and power of eros, we focus first on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, where poetic and rhetorical praise of eros leads on to many-sided reflections on sexuality, creativity, knowledge, the soul’s immortality and destiny. We turn then to various theories of friendship, in Plato’s Lysis, the Cynics, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, but most of all Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics where philia becomes both the culmination of the individual life and a transition to the communal life of the polis. In the final weeks, we glance at the New Testament and St Augustine’s Confessions, with their introduction of a seemingly new conception of love that has been central to Christian culture ever since—divine agape.
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PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE & FRIENDSHIP IN ANCIENT WORLD
