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Shifting and Permanent Philia in Thucydides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

John R. Wilson
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Extract

As an ethical principle, philia represents a continuum of attachment that extends in a stable system of relationships from the self to one's immediate family and friends and then outwards to one's polis and one's race. Furthermore, shared attachment or philia also involves shared hostility or echthra, which can be as permanent as philia. But already in Sophocles' Ajax the idea of such fixed relationships is seen as old-fashioned and incompatible with practical life. In his pretended transformation from a rigid adherence to the principles of permanent philia and permanent echthra (particularly the latter) to the flexible morality of an ‘organization man’, the hero realizes that ‘we must hate our echthros only so far, since he may become our philos again later, and I am only ready to do so much to aid and assist aphilos, since he may not remain a philos forever…’ (672–81).

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , October 1989 , pp. 147 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1989

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References

NOTES

1. For philia in Ajax Knox's, Bernard ‘The Ajax of Sophocles’, HSCP 65 (1961), 1–37Google Scholar is still the best discussion. See recently Goldhill, Simon, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 85–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. These twin self-justifications are considered by Andrewes, Anthony (A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. 5 ad 8.50.2 and 5)Google Scholar as a mark of Thucydides' own unease at the high praise of his intelligence. There is, however, no reason to think this. There is no reason, either, to think that Phrynichus' second treachery is somehow pretended (so Grote, Brunt, Delebecque, and others, but see Andrewes ad 8.50.5). Plutarch (Alc. 25.9), whose account is clearly based on Thucydides, calls Phrynichus' second approach to Astyochus an attempt ‘to cure one evil by a greater evil’.

3. See de Romilly, Jacqueline, ‘Amis et ennemis au cinquième siècle avant J.C.’ in Philias Charin … Festschrift E. Manni, vol. 3 (Rome, 1980), pp. 741–6Google Scholar.