Friendship and Friends in the Stoic Theory of the Good Life

Abstract

This chapter is about how the Stoic philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity investigated the notion of friendship and about what they understood by a truly good friend. To introduce the inquiry, I ask readers to set aside the modern use of stoicism as a name for uncomplaining endurance of life’s sorrows and disappointments. We moderns do not associate stoicism with friendship, but that is because stoicism, in its modern usage, has largely lost touch with the original ideas of the philosophical school called Stoicism. Friendship actually was a central component of the ancient school’s ethical theory, which, in turn, was the most influential component of a once mighty philosophical system. The ancient Stoics were the major intellectual force in the Greco-Roman world from about 300 BC to AD 200. The numerous books that they wrote have largely perished, but we are well informed about their doctrinal content, especially in the field of ethics.