Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias, first performed in 1564 and published in 1571, is an early example of a play that registers the increasing awareness of the ubiquity of the intelligencer in its metadramatic devices. As an instance of how the early modern theatre responds to the shifting paradigms of power, the play offers a typology of the kinds of illegitimate oversight associated with the informers and intelligencers of the day. It also suggests its own solution to this perceived abuse of authority, in the form of classical Ciceronian amity, a subject close to the heart of the Erasmian programme of humanist education in the grammar schools of the day. ‘Amity’ is defined by Cicero in De Amicitia as ‘an accord in all things, human and divine’ and is a quality than which, the author claims, ‘with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods’. Thomas Elyot's enormously influential educational treatise The Governour (1531) devotes three whole chapters to the concept of amity, set in the context of the manual of training for statesmen. Joseph Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608) attests to the persistence of this ideal throughout the period, referring to the friend's willingness to ‘lift up his friend to advancement, with a willing hand, without envie, without dissimulation’. The faithful friend's ‘charitie’ in Hall's description serves to ‘cloake noted infirmities, not by untruth, not by flattery, but by discreet secrecie’. In relation to each of these descriptions, the friend serves as the diametric opposite of the popularly understood figure of the intelligencer, who is typically characterised by anything but the constancy and unswerving faithfulness we see here. It is easy to understand why this plain affirmation of the ‘virtue associated with mutual trust and friendship’, as Quentin Skinner terms it, should be offered as an antidote to the vicious scheming and promotion of self-interest which was felt to be tainting contemporary social relations in the latter half of the sixteenth century.