Reading Roman Friendship

A comprehensive study of friendship in ancient Rome attentive to gender and social status, language and the commemoration of the dead.

Craig A. Williams (Author)

9781107003651, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 October 2012

390 pages, 14 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.69 kg

'Williams is an exceedingly capable scholar, and he has produced a cogent study of Roman friendship that will enrich and challenge the way that we read, and have read, the past. One that will in turn, no doubt, also make us question our present.' Arctos

This book invites us to approach friendship not as something that simply is, but as something performed in and through language. Roman friendship is read across a wide spectrum of Latin texts, from Catullus' poetry to Petronius' Satyricon to the philosophical writings of Cicero and Seneca, from letters exchanged by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his beloved teacher Fronto, to those written by men and women at an outpost in northern Britain. One of the most innovative features of this study is the equal attention it pays to Latin literature and to inscriptions carved in stone across the Roman Empire. What emerges is a richly varied and perhaps surprising picture. Hundreds of epitaphs, commissioned by men and women, citizens and slaves, record the commemoration of friends, which is of equal importance to understanding Roman friendship as Cicero's influential essay De amicitia.

Introduction: reading Roman friendship
1. Men and women
2. Love and friendship I: questions and themes
3. Love and friendship II: authors and texts
4. Friendship and death: the culture of commemoration.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]