K.’s monograph on non-erotic love (philia) in Greek and Roman thought is an impressive addition to his influential work on emotions in the ancient world. K. argues that understanding the classical conception of philia is crucial to understanding closely implicated sentiments that ‘lie at the margins of emotions proper’ (p. 19), specifically friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief and civic solidarity. This is especially because love, being an emotion, differs from these sentiments as a motive for actions and because in the classical world ‘love was deemed to play a larger role in the way people accounted for motivation’ (p. 31). The book addresses the tension, common to love and therefore to these related sentiments, between the egoism entailed in reciprocity (involving an expectation of affection or an equivalent deed in return) on the one hand and genuine altruism on the other.
K.’s method is similar to his The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006), with close readings of ancient literary and technical texts revealing classical conceptions of the emotions and related sentiments. Here a delicate balance is required, as he investigates sentiments frequently explored in the modern era, but either not fully defined or entirely omitted by Greek and Roman authors. Thus, K. aims to respect ‘each culture's range and register of emotions’ and to ‘examine critically their values … without betraying their native meanings’ (p. 21). Two important concepts highlighted are egoism and altruism, which, although coined in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, are evident in ancient concepts of acting for one's own or another's benefit.
The book consists of five chapters, each focusing on one of the sentiments listed above: ‘Love and Friendship’, ‘Loyalty: the Missing Virtue’, ‘Gratitude and Liberality’, ‘Grief and the Self’ and ‘Love and the State’. In Chapter 1 K. explores Aristotle's definitions of philia (love in friendship) as a ‘merging of identities’ (p. 35). He untangles two slightly differing definitions from the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics to conclude that Aristotle considers friendship as one soul residing in two bodies, and as an individual loving and being loved by someone, and being fully aware of this mutual affection. K. convincingly relates the former to modern theories of ‘distributed cognition’, by which identity can be formed between as well as within people – a concept considerably more familiar in classical Athens than today.
Chapter 2 addresses loyalty as an intrinsic part of love. K. explains that loyalty is problematic as a virtue, since loyalties can be divided between, for example, family, friends and the state (without clearly defined rules for which should come first) and since one might, contrary to virtue, commit a crime out of loyalty. Examples are taken from Menander, Plautus and Euripides to show that, in the classical world, to be trustworthy (pistos) is to be a friend and a disloyal friend is no friend at all. Such presentations are contrasted with characters from modern drama who display loyalty in lieu of feelings of love. This, K. argues, would seem impossible to ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom loyalty was not a distinct virtue, and diminished loyalty intrinsically signified diminished friendship.
Chapter 3 utilises extracts from Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca to explore concepts of gratitude and liberality, arguing that gratitude is only truly felt in response to a favour – carried out solely for the sake of the benefactor – and not to liberality, whose motive is the pursuit of to kalon (virtue). The selfless affection involved in a favour engenders gratitude in the beneficiary, and this reciprocity constitutes both a duty and ‘a unique kind of debt that is repaid without loss to the debtor’ (p. 106). Similarities arise between doing favours and philia, since each act is viewed and responded to accordingly by the receiver. Again, K. effectively shows the ‘interference between ideas of selfless affection and the regime of reciprocity’ (p. 128) prevalent in Greece and Rome, with philia the connection holding the two together.
In Chapter 4 K. turns to the emotion of grief and how it embodies affection previously felt for a lost loved one. Having earlier explored Aristotle's theories that friendship is one soul residing in two bodies and proximity is necessary to sustain friendship, K. now considers death as the irrevocable breaking of the bond of philia. Using examples from Homer's Iliad alongside consolation literature by, among others, Plutarch and Seneca, K. concludes that grief arises partly from the natural instinct (shared with animals) of sadness in response to loss and partly from rational analysis – such as a woman feeling vulnerable after her husband's death, the realisation that one's love will no longer be reciprocated and the delicate balance between remembrance and grieving excessively or for too long. The latter explains why consolation literature exists as a genre, since grief, being based in reason, is open to persuasion by argument. K. successfully highlights in grief the same tensions between ‘altruism and reciprocity, self and other, emotion and reason’ (p. 154) evident in philia.
K.’s discussion of civic affection in Chapter 5 explores the extraordinary lengths to which the Athenian polis went in fostering a sense of philia between citizens, whether social equals or not – borne out in religious festivals, dramatic choruses, the phalanx and the trireme crew. Such affection, K. argues, was modelled on friendships between upper-class citizens, but modified for the purposes of democracy. In contrast, civic affection in Rome was expressed by the term societas (connected by Cicero with caritas), which ‘lacks the personal intimacy associated with friendship’ (p. 178). A likely reason for this, K. suggests, is that civic relationships operating on a vertical plane in Rome did so within the patron–client relationship structure, which, unlike the fluid structure of Athenian democracy, did not easily allow for philia between non-equals. In this way philia is again shown to underpin an important classical sentiment.
In this volume K. successfully identifies philia operating behind five distinct sentiments in the classical world. Evidence is harvested from a wide range of texts, each chosen for the way they ‘evoke the more subtle aspect’ (p. 188) of each sentiment. This enables K. to get to the heart of ancient philia in an insightful way. Special interest arises from frequent comparisons with modern theories on emotion, cognition, virtue and interactions, which, contrary to many theoretical approaches to classical scholarship, serve to emphasise the differences, rather than the similarities, between classical and modern thought. At times modern theory could be foregrounded, especially in Chapter 4, where the ‘ur-emotion’ of immediate grief, as experienced by humans and animals, might be placed in clearer contrast with the long-term human grief targeted by consolatory literature. A second minor criticism is that, by presenting the evidence of Greek and Roman authors side-by-side, K. (presumably accidentally) implies that their opinions of the sentiments discussed were homogeneous. One wonders if the approach of the excellent Chapter 5, which argues that the differing socio-political surroundings of Athens and Rome impact directly on each society's views of civic solidarity, could be fruitfully applied to the other chapters. Overall, however, K. has provided compelling evidence that for Greeks and Romans several types of sentiment were viewed and experienced in conjunction with notions of philia and that philia was an overwhelmingly strong motive for actions in many and varied contexts, while strengthening the notion that they experienced emotions and interactions differently than we do.
