Roman amicitia is a slippery concept. The English word ‘friendship’ covers some of the conceptual territory, but its supposed Roman equivalent is applied to everything from hard-nosed political alliances to the loving kisses exchanged by Fronto and Marcus Aurelius. Earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the tactical, as in Syme's declaration that ‘amicitia was a weapon of politics, not a sentiment based on congeniality’ (R. Syme, The Roman Revolution [1939], pp. 157). Syme was challenged for this narrow interpretation on his home territory of politics and prosopography by Brunt (P. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic [1988], pp. 351–81). More recent work has developed a broader view, taking in the relationship of amicitia to patronage (P. White, Promised Verse [1993]), its emotional dimensions (D. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World [1997]) and its place in the Roman economic system (K. Verboven, The Economy of Friends [2002]).
W.'s book is a welcome extension of these more recent trends, though in a different direction. As he makes clear in his introduction, he is less interested in drawing definitional boundaries, or even recreating an experience, than in following the contours of the textual evidence to understand how various terms were used. W. addresses some inevitable questions, such as the degree to which amici were merely allies. He even proposes a tentative schema, suggesting we think about amicitia as the opposite of inimicitia (p. 23, returned to briefly at pp. 128–9, 238). But overall he avoids stamping down this flattened earth. Instead, within his textualist orientation (Bakhtin is invoked on discourse registers), he turns his focus to issues of gender and sexuality in a set of evidence approached synchronically.
Chapter 1 contests Cicero's constriction of amicitia to men only. In a typically engaging use of cross-cultural comparanda, W. invokes Nietzsche, Montaigne and others to show that Cicero's bias endured, before proceeding to deconstruct it at its roots in the Roman world. Working around the dearth of female voices in Latin literature, W. identifies amicae in Plautus, Propertius, Martial, Juvenal and Petronius. His best direct evidence comes from the second-century c.e. letters between Claudia Severa and Sulpicia Lepidna from Vindolanda. Finding more than glimmers of meaning in these small gems is a challenge, given that the words amica and amicitia do not appear. But here and elsewhere W. is circumspect in evaluating the evidence, rightly allowing that other terms (karissima, soror as equivalent to amica) and style (copious terms of endearment) signal a relationship that bears comparison with amicitia among men. W. is equally careful in advancing the novel observation that, despite the common use of amica in literary sources to indicate a man's lover, in epitaphs men and women appear to have friendly, non-erotic relationships as amicus and amica (pp. 97, 336).
In a more expansive Chapter 2, W. explores the overlapping spheres of love and friendship. If a man's amica was often his lover, why could not a woman's amica be her lover? W.'s investigation suggests this possibility was latent in the broader notion of amicitia (p. 132). On the other hand, while amor is often found in Roman marriage, its linguistic derivative amicitia is lacking: husbands and wives did not conceive of themselves as ‘friends’, it would seem (p. 134). Another useful negative conclusion is that amicitia and pederasty were apparently not conflated (p. 140). W.'s exploration of amor and amicitia (pp. 143–8) in a triangular relationship structure benefits from his ability to follow terminology into the emotional and social spaces it cannot completely account for. Likewise we learn that the terms ‘brother’ (frater) and ‘sister’ (soror) could be used to refer to either friends or lovers (pp. 162–5), or left playfully ambiguous. For Chapter 3, W. shifts from thematic exploration to a survey of amicitia in a selection of canonical texts. While some of W.'s short sections seem dutiful (W. cannot do much with the scarce instances of amicitia in Virgil), for authors where W. finds more purchase, the strategies developed in previous chapters lead to enlightening readings. For Catullus, amicus or amica could indicate a sexual partner, a friend or a less differentiated relationship taking in aspects of both (pp. 174–85). When Propertius spies on the erotic tussles of Gallus and his amica, the resulting love triangle amounts to another concoction of the values and practices of friendship and sexual partners (pp. 197–214; similarly in Petronius at pp. 214–18). In his letters, Cicero never calls Tiro an amicus, but does profess his love (p. 232). As he conducts political negotiations with powerful citizens like Pompey and Caesar, Cicero even flirts with the notion that his amor towards them could be construed as erotic eros (pp. 234–5). W. closes the chapter by taking on various modern interpretations of the strikingly intimate amicitia of Fronto and Marcus Aurelius. The earlier discussion of Cicero's letters allows W. to show that some highly demonstrative language in their correspondence was unexceptional, but that the orator and emperor also exceed these bounds in ways that suggest a more fluid amor (p. 258).
A final chapter on Roman epitaphs continues W.'s close-to-the-ground survey of amicitia, but otherwise stands apart from previous chapters in approach and structure. He begins with a reconstruction of an intricate set of relationships attested by a tomb complex outside the Porta Nocera at Pompeii. This is a tale worthy of a short story, involving a female patron, her freedman and the freedman's friend, who becomes estranged. W. tells it with a brio that enlivens our generally static understanding of Roman social roles. These opening examples are followed by an orientation to basic features of epigraphical evidence, laying the groundwork for the bulk of the chapter, a typology of relationships involving amici commemorated in funerary inscriptions. The typology is likely to be most useful as resource for its assembly, classification and commentary on epitaphs relevant to amicitia. But it also leads to significant new understandings, such as the highlighting of the rare but meaningful instances of amici who were erotically or Platonically dedicated enough to one another to be buried as pairs (p. 349).
A strength of W.'s book is its broad survey of the social, emotional and erotic dimensions of amicitia, taking in canonical literary sources, fragmentary ones (Domitius Marsus, p. 167) and epigraphical evidence. Others are W.'s thought-provoking modern comparanda, his graceful and economical phrasing and copious thought-provoking examples. There is a certain amount of repetition (e.g. the unreliability of reportage from members of a culture at pp. 19, 27; the TV shows Seinfeld and Friends on pp. 64 and 118), and one might have hoped for a concluding chapter that would synthesise W.'s observations. But overall W. has produced a broad-ranging and subtle volume that will serve general and scholarly audiences as an introduction, guide and sourcebook for central aspects of friendship in the Roman world.
