Friendship and the Greeks

The ancient Greeks had a word for most things; in fact they had several that we regularly and more or less accurately translate as ‘friend’. But they had no word that covered exactly the same ground as ‘friend’ does in our culture. Philos , the commonest and widest-ranging of all the Greek terms, was applied, when used as a noun, to any of one’s ‘nearest and dearest’, irrespective of whether they were kin, affines or other people unrelated by blood, with whom one had personal or familial ties. Used as an adjective philos meant ‘dear’; in our earliest texts its meaning often oscillates between ‘dear’ and ‘own’ (see Hooker 1987 for discussion of the word’s history). This suggests the fundamental importance and value of having people one could call one’s philoi (plural): being aphilos (without a philos ) is imagined as a desperate plight, as bad as being apolis (without a city).