The Renaissance friendship tradition two sharply differentiated
philosophical sources - in Plato and Aristotle - and a number of
contributing raisons d'être. The dullest and
most often repeated cliché in friendship literature is
the "catalogue of famous friends" that originates in
the eighth fragment of Bion, in which he praises the men who have
found mutual love: Achilles & Patroclus, Orestes &
Pylades, and Theseus & Pirithous. Marsilio Ficino in his
Commentary on Plato's Symposium lists
three pairs of famous friends: Achilles & Patroclus, Damon
& Pithias, and Orestes & Pylades; these legendary pairs
are used as parallels of Phaedrus & Lysias, Phaedrus &
Socrates, and Phaedrus & Plato.
Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier
lists Orests & Pylades, Theseus & Pirithous, and Scipio
& Lelius. The unknown writer of "Of Friendship" in
Tottle's Miscellany (1557) lists Damon
& Pithias, Orestes & Pylades, Theseus & Pirithous,
Scipio & Lelius, Euryalus & Nisus, Gesippus & Titus,
Achilles & Menetus, and Cicery & Atticus. Richard
Barnfield in The Complaint of Poetrie
lists Damon & Pithias, Orestes & Pylades, Theseus &
Pirithous, and Hercules & Hylas.
Robert Greene is particularly fond of this catalogue: in
The Second Part of the Tritameron of
Love (1587) he lists Damon & Pithias, Orestes
& Pylades, and Ephemus & Eueritus; in The
Debate Betweene Follie and Love (1587) he lists
Damon & Pithias, Orestes & Pylades, David & Jonathan,
Gesippus & Titus, Castor & Pollux, and Darius &
Zopires; in Ciceronis Amor (1589) he
lists Orestes & Pylades, Theseus & Pirithous, and Tully
& Lentulus; in Mamillia (1593) he
lists Orestes & Pylades, Thesus & Pirithous, and Euralus
& Nisus. Christopher Marlowe in Edward
II gives the typical catalogue:
The typical catalogue of famous friends - a rhetorical set-piece
- lists about five pairs. The first three pairs are the core of
the list, and usually consist of Oretes & Pylades, Damon
& Pithias, and Theseus & Pirithous; the fourth pair
usually illustrates one friend who laments the death of the other
(writers with a Christian preference usually select David &
Jonathan, while writers with a classical preference select either
Achilles & Patroclus or Hercules & Hylas); the fifth pair
is usually more obscure than the others, and given as a display
of the author's erudition.
The story of Orestes & Pylades is a late invention, and the
"purest" of these friendships. Their story seems to
have been a cliché from the very beginning, and there
is no extant narrative of how they interrelate with one another
as distinct and separate persons. They are simply "fast
friends" since childhood, and perform many tasks together,
such as the slaying of Clytemnestra, Orestes' mother. Pylades,
the younger of the two, is clearly Orestes' alter ego, almost his
twin-brother.
Several of the other pairs of famous faithful friends are
compiled from the relationships of historical figures, for whom
there is evidence of at least latent homosexual relations - such
as Scipio Africanus the general and Caius Laelius the consul and
orator (celebrated in Cicero's De
Amicitia), Cicero himself and Titus Pomponius
Atticus the wealthy book-seller, Darius the Persian king and
Zopires his eunuch. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who liberated
Athens from the tyranny of Hipparchus (who himself was
homosexual), became eponyms of homosexual love as well as
political comradeship.
Euryalus and "his heart's love" Nisus, though
frequently listed, do not exist outside the pages of Virgil's
Aeneid, but therein the Roman poet
attempts to immortalize the "happy pair" at least for
the duration of the temporal sway of the Empire:
The friendship of Theseus and Pirithous acquired homoerotic
undertone in Attic comedy, for which Hercules attempted to free
them from the rock to which they had been bound together in the
underworld (for having tried to carry off Persephone), he
succeeded in freeing only Theseus, and left behind his buttocks
attached to the rocks - from which Theseus came to be called
hypolispos, meaning "with hinder parts rubbed
smooth." Obiviously this is meant as an obscene upon on how
his buttocks had been "rubbed" the wrong way. (The myth
was possibly retrospectively constructed in order to account for
the obscene phrase.)
Most famous friends, like Theseus and Pirithous, "ratify
their friendship by oaths." They enter into a formal bond
or union which parallels the union of heterosexual marriage. One
of the earliest means of swearing this solemn oath of friendship
seems to have been the placing of their hands upon each other's
testicles, from which was derived the early Hebrew legal practice
of taking an oath (see Genesis 24.2; 47.29), the origin of our
modern terms testify and testimony. Another
method of swearing friendship, still practised in modern times,
is Blutbrüderschaft, the rite of wrestling
followed by pressing together two thumbs which have been cut with
a knife. This ritual underlies the folktales of the fights of
Robin Hood & Little John, and Davy Crockett & Mike Finn,
and the common popular notion that two men become "fast
friends" after they gain mutual respect by fighting with
each other.
Most of the conventions concerning the nature of friendship are
derived from Plato's Phaedrus and
Symposium (and Marsilio Ficino's
commentary on them). Most modern critics of Renaissance
friendship theory try to suppress the fact that these conventions
are concerned exclusively with an older man's love for a
beautiful boy around seventeen years of age). For a Platonic
friendship relationship to exist, there must be at least a half-
generation disparity of age between the lover and the beloved;
the boy must have an exceedingly beautiful body (in the same way
that Oscar Wilde said he would never kiss an ugly boy); and they
must feel as though they possess one soul between their two
bodies (Aristophanes in the Symposium
identifies friends/lovers as the two halves of a primal being).
Cesare Gonzaga in Castiglione's Book of the
Courier, with sly humour, aptly points up the
anachronisms of the Platonic friendship tradition:
The friendship themes in Aristotle's Nichomachean
Ethics and Cicero's De
Amicitio - those themes that are most often
discussed in regard to Renaissance friendship theory - are
imitated in a great many prose tracts and essays during the
Renaissance, but they appear infrequently in its more imaginative
literature and poetry. Aristotle conceives of friendship in a
utilitarian and socially beneficial manner. The men involved,
usually of about the same age, are clearly conceived as dutiful
members of a state rather than mutual worshippers of beauty. They
are advantageous to each other because they give each other wise
council. Aristotle would not have admitted that "sage
advice" originated in pederastic pedagogy, although he was
himself homosexual. The typical usage of this tradition in poetry
is found in doggerel about the difficult but necessary
differentiation between the "faithful friend" and the
"flattering foe."
Aristotle viewed friendship as a relationship among several men
of good will, men in a club serving the government. For Plato the
relationship existed between only two men, who served universal
abstract ideas more than local state politics. Whenever any hint
of strong emotion, as opposed to mere admiration or respect,
begins appearing in the work in question, it is likely that the
Platonic friendship tradition rather than the Aristotelian
friendship tradition is the source. Modern critics try hard to
subsume it all under the Aristotelian banner.
Cicero, a rather grave personage, regarded friendship as a
consolation, the bright hope of the future, a sweet sharing of
mutual interests, the enjoyment of discussing the good life with
a trusted companion, a partnership in virtue leading to
tranquillity of mind. Again, the level-headed Cicero stands in
sharp contrast to Plato's ecstatic theory. To look for
Aristotelian/Ciceronian conventions in Shakespeare's
Sonnets - and in many other Renaissance
works - is to search in the wrong direction. Romantic love rather
than philosophical friendship is more often the theme of
Renaissance friendship literature.
Much of the Renaissance friendship tradition originated not in
the texts of the ancients, but in the hearts and experiences of
real-life friends. Michel de Montaigne, the master of simple,
realistic honesty through the written word, accuses the
philosophers of mystifying this most true and perfect of
emotions.
Montaigne agrees with the ancients that the sacred tie of
friendship cannot occur between a man and a woman, for several
reasons. First, heterosexual love is more of a frenzy rather than
a constancy, "a fever subject to intermissions and
paroxysms" rather than the temperate fire of friendship,
"a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth."
Romantic heterosexual love is self-defeating, for it requires
"a frantic desire for that which flies from us," while
friendship is "a concurrence of desires" whose fruition
is not subject to satiety. Second, friendship is a voluntary
bond, while heterosexual marriage is "a convenant, the
entrance into which only is free, but the continuance in it
forced and compulsory." Third, women are not capable of
sustaining the constancy of mind required for friendship. Ideal
friendship for Montaigne is in fact strictly homosexual:
Montaigne's love for Boetie did not follow the antique
authorities, and was more of an infatuation than a gradually
confirmed constancy. The two men literally obey Marlowe's precept
that love is instantaneous ("Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not
at first sight?"):
Sir Philip Sidney personfied for his contemporaries both the
beautiful boy and the faithful friend. The ideal Renaissance
courtier, he died in the battle of Zutphen in 1586, and English
poets poured forth their grief in epitaphs upon him as the ideal
faithful friend, and in elegies on the loss of "the wonder
of the age." For Spenser, in
Astrophel (1595), Sidney died the death
of Adonis, and was even metamorphosed into a flower. Lodowick
Bryskett adopted a female persona in "The Mourning Muse of
Thestylus," and lamented his death just as did Venus for
Adonis. Matthew Royden, in "An Elegie, or Friends Passion,
for His Astrophill," compared Sidney to the resurrected
phoenix. Sir Walter Raleigh, in "An Epitaph," called
him the "Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time." The
best epitaph is by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who clearly loved
Sidney as more than a conventional friend. Greville foregoes the
mythologizing and allegorizing conventions of consolation, and
sincerely expresses his grief:
For the close interrelationship of homosexual love and the
rhetorical friendship tradition we must turn to Hubert Languet's
love-letters to Sir Philip Sidney, which began when Languet was
fifty-five years old and Sidney was nineteen. They quote Cicero's
De Amicitia: Sidney writes to Languet
on 15 January 1574, "I shall read Cicero's works diligently;
but I shall also learn some things about the Greeks of which I
have had only superficial knowledge for a long while. I shall
find the summum bonum (next to eternal bliss) in the
cultivation of true friendship, and here you will unquestionably
hold first rank" (trans. Charles Samuel Levy [the letters
were written in Latin]). And Languet replies, "As the
speaker in Cicero says, `Friendship is the salt and spice of
life'."
Sidney abides by his quotations from the authorities, and remains
a rather aloof faithful friend, but Languet is as infatuated as
a Socratic pedagogue. Sidney broke his promise to revisit
Languet, and this prompts a series of missives on constansy.
Languet reproaches Sidney for forgetting him. Sidney protests his
innocence and affirms his constancy:
Like the writing of Montaigne, what the correspondence between
Sidney and Languet reveals is the reality of friendship, with all
its vagaries and semi-suppressed homoeroticism, that exploits the
conventions of friendship theory, not always successfully, in
support of its own desires.
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The strictures against an uncritical acceptance of the
superficial conventionalism and innocence of the beautiful boy
motif apply with equal force against an uncritical acceptance of
the superficial and "purely virtuous" themes of the
Renaissance friendship tradition. Nearly every praise of
friendship in Renaissance literature, be it trite and stale or
genuinely moving, allots a line or two for an allusion to the
friendship of Achilles and Patroclus. Yet in the view of
Shakespeare himself, the relationship between these two men was
that between a bugger and his catamite. Thersites says to
Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida,
"Thou are thought to be Achilles' male varlet."
Patroclus queries, "Male varlet, you rogue! What's
that?" and Thersites answers, "Why, his masculine
whore."
The mightiest kings have had their minions:
Richard Edwards in his play Damon and
Pithias (1564) says that "scarce four couple
of faithful friends have been since the world began": he is
referring almost certainly to the basic set of Orestes &
Pylades, Theseus & Pirithous, Achilles & Patroclus, and
of course Damon & Pithias. During the Tudor period Thomas
Dekker in Satiromastix could
satirically refer to Damon and "Pithyasse" with a pun
on "asse." By the seventeenth century this catalogue
had been fairly well standardized to coincide with the list given
by Robert Burton in his discussion of friendship in the
Anatomy of Melancholy: Damon &
Pithias, Orestes & Pylades, Theseus & Pirithous, David
& Jonathan, and Nisus & Euryalus.
Great Alexander loved Hephestion;
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;
And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped;
And not kings only, but the wisest men:
The Roman Tully loved Octavius;
Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades.
. . . if aught my verse avail,
It is unfortunate that their friendship has almost been
forgotten, except as part of the famous friend catalogue. We
first meet the friends engaged in a footrace, foremost amongst
all the contestants:
No lapse of hours from time's recording page
Shall e'er erase you, while Aeneas' house
Dwells on the Capitol's unshaken rock.
(trans. James Rhoades)
Euryalus famed for beauty and fresh youth,
Euryalus is another formosus puer modeled upon Virgil's
own Alexis: "no comelier youth / Clave to Aeneus, or donned
Trojan arms - / Whose smooth boy-face showed faint the budding
man." Nisus is a warrior, and significantly older than
Euryalus. Both die in battle, Nisus throwing himself upon the
body of his lover. All the later writers who involke them never
mention the disparity in their ages, or the pederastic nature of
their love, or even the boyish beauty of the latter. But, on the
authority of a single line - that "These had one heart
between them" - they are involked as the ideal and
prototypical faithful friends and comradely age-mates. It is
puzzling that although Renaissance writers were familiar with the
Aeneid, they never acknowledge the real
nature of the relationship between Nisus and Euryalus in their
frequent references to them: is it because Renaissance readers
were equally familiar with the Aeneid,
and needed no overt prodding of their sly understanding?
Nisus for the fair love he bore the boy.
I am far more certain about it than you or anyone else can be
that Alcibiades always got up from Socrates' bed like a child
leaving the bed of its parents. And indeed it was a strange place
and time - in bed and by night - to contemplate that pure beauty
which Socrates is said to have loved without any improper desire,
especially since he loved the soul's beauty rather than the
body's, though in boys and not in grown men, who happen to be
wiser.
Castiglione recognized the ambiguity, so he simply recast the
classical concepts of homosexual love into Renaissance concepts
of heterosexual love - by the simple trick of substituting
feminine pronouns for masculine pronouns while closely
paraphrasing Plato. Plato had written
The beloved, when he is found in any disgraceful
situation, will be pained at being detected by his lover. If
there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army
should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the
very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all
dishonour . . . For what lover would not choose rather to be seen
by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his
post or throwing away his arms. . . . Or who would desert his
beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?
Castiglione completely subverts the meaning of this passage about
an army of male lovers, and writes:
A lover always wishes to make himself as lovable as
possible, and he always fears lest some disgrace befall him which
can make him less esteemed by the woman whose esteem he craves;
. . . Indeed, if anyone were to recruit an army of lovers, to
fight before the eyes of the women they love, it would conquer
the entire world.
There is logic in Plato's account, for each warrior would fight
beside his boyfriend, who could therefore see his every advance
or retreat. Castiglione's theory that men are conscious of their
women watching them in battle from a distance is a nonsense, a
patent distortion of his source in order to accommodate it to a
heterosexual view. Plato's theory about permitting sexual love
as long as it strives upward on the ladder of love is concerned
solely with the relationship between two men; the passage (from
the Phaedrus) is taken over wholesale
by Castiglione, who substitutes a mistress for one of the men.
Just as the physical attributes of the beautiful boy have been
usurped by the mistress in Renaissance literature, so now have
the ethical and aesthetic philosophies of homosexual love been
usurped by the courtier for the seduction of his lady.
The sciences treat of things too refinedly, after an artificial,
very different from the common and natural, way. My page makes
love, and understands it; but read to him Leo Hebraeus and
Ficinus, where they speak of love, its thoughts and actions, he
understands it not. I do not find in Aristotle most of my
ordinary motions; they are there covered and disguised in another
robe for the use of the schools.
Montaigne knows of friendship because he has a friend in Etienne
de la Boetie, not because he reads learned discourses: "Even
these discourses left us by antiquity upon this subject, seem to
me flat and poor, in comparison of the sense I have of it."
Most Renaissance prose essays on friendship resemble schoolboy
exercises in which Aristotle rather than Virgil has been selected
for rhetorical imitation and practice in linguistic study. But
Montaigne's scholarship is everywhere supported by his devotion
to Etienne.
Doubtless, if without a formal marriage contract, there could be
such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where not only
the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also
might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the
friendship would certainly be more full and perfect.
Montaigne disapproves of the Greek concept of pederasty not
because it was homosexually erotic, but because it involved a
significant disparity of ages. If one falls in love with "a
springing and blossoming youth," one may waste one's ardours
on a lad who may have a less-than-generous soul, who may grow up
to be unworthy of one's love. Pederasty is acceptable, however,
if the youth does indeed become noble and then reciprocates the
love. Montaigne approves of the pederasty that develops into
amicitia, as in the cases of Harmodius & Aristogiton
and Patroclus & Achilles, "who was in the first flower
and pubescency of his youth, and the handsomest of all the
Greeks." He quotes with approval Cicero's view that love is
based firmly upon the senses: "Love is a desire of
contracting friendship arising from the beauty of the
object" (Tuscalanae Disputationes,
4.34).
At our first meeting, which was accidentally at a great city
entertainment, we found ourselves so mutually taken with one
another, so acquainted, and so endeared betwixt ourselves, that
from thenceforward nothing was so near to us as one another.
Montaigne rationalizes that, since they both were full-grown
adults, "there was no time to lose, nor were we tied to
conform to the example of those slow and regular
friendships." The quintessence of a thousand considerations
"seized my whole will, [and] carried it to plunge and lose
itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it
back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge, and lose
itself in mine." These are the metaphysics of being head
over heels in love. Where Aristotle had said that friends have
one soul in two bodies, Montaigne is more expressive:
'Tis not in the power of all the eloquence of the world, to
dispossess me of the certainty I have of the intentions and
resolutions of my friend . . . Our souls had drawn so unanimously
together, they had considered each other with so ardent an
affection, and with the like affection laid open the very bottom
of our hearts to one another's view, that I . . . knew his as
well as my own.
This union of two male souls is the ideal upon which heterosexual
marriage is modeled. Montaigne goes on to point out that in some
countries the lawgivers, "to honour marriage with some
resemblance of this divine alliance," forbid man and wife
to exchange gifts, as an indication that each already has all
that the other possesses. Montaigne is Boetie's other
"half," his "double". After Boetie's death,
Montaigne led a "languishing" life, in which pleasure
could not console, but only magnified his loss. Compared to their
four years together, the rest of his life "is nothing but
smoke, an obscure and tedious night."
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the worlds
delight.
Here indeed we find the principles of the Renaissance friendship
tradition, but how the platitudes have been transformed by the
reality. And this reality is not rhetoric, but homosexual love.
. . .
Farewell to you, my hopes, my wonted waking dreames,
Farewell, sometimes enjoyed joy, eclipsed are thy beams,
Farewell selfe pleasing thoughts, which quietnes brings
foorth,
And farewel friendships sacred league, uniting minds of woorth.
As to your implied charge that my affection for you is waning,
affection which was and always will be my tribute to your
surpassing virtue, I acknowledge your kindness; but I very
earnestly beg you always, no matter how great the distance
between us, to retain the conviction that I am not so full of
childish stupidity, womanly fickleness, or brutish ingratitude
as not eagerly to seek the friendship of such a man, once having
acquired it not to cultivate it, and, having cultivated it, not
to show myself thankful for it. O that I had skill enough in
Latin, or you in English! [Languet was French.] Then you would
see what a scene I would have made about those doubts of yours.
(5 December 1573)
Languet retreats into the protective security of convention, and
consoles himself that the hiatus in their relationship is still
well within the tradition:
Promises which are made to friends, like the one you made to us
about returning, can be broken without violating the laws of
friendship if something happens in the meantime to make it
inconvenient to keep them. Therefore, if you changed your plans,
that would not subject you to the charge of inconstancy. (12
December 1573)
Sidney does not reply. Languet becomes frightened, and attempts
an apology:
I feel that your silence is meant to punish the frankness with
which I wrote. Perhaps you do not accept what I write in the
spirit in which I write it. I wished only to jest with you, as
is the custom among friends. . . . But do not be angry with me
again for this boldness of mine; my great affection for you
exacts this of me. . . . You can be sure that I do respect and
admire the brilliance of your lineage and the other blessings
which natue and fortune have indulgently bestowed upon you. . .
. But if I came upon a poor youth who resembled you in behavior
and character, I would certainly adopt him as my son and make him
heir to my belongings, and I would not be at all concerned about
his parentage. (18 December 1573)
Sidney still does not reply. Languet goes on to fully reveals not
merely his great affection, but the fact that his passion goes
well beyond the conventions of friendship theory:
I have formed very rewarding and gratifying friendships with more
than a few persons. But my afection for you has entered my heart
far more deeply than any I have ever felt for anyone else, and
it has so wholly taken possession there that it tries to rule
alone, and, as it were, to practice tyranny. (24 December 1573)
The tyranny of love comes not from Cicero, but from Cupid. The
faithful friend has unmasked himself to reveal a doting lover.
While Sidney writes of his "tribute to your virtue,"
Languet writes that "my affection for you has somehow come
to bewitch my soul." While Sidney commends the social nature
of friendship, Languet records his heartfelt emotions: "If
I wished to please myself, I would write you about nothing but
my affection for you." Sidney was a man of easy grace who
lacked the fundamental Renaissance virtue of magnanimity. He was
the proverbial ill-chosen beloved of a wise man's affection.
Languet suffered the disillusionment common to those idealists
who would seek in their lovers the impossible dream of equally
intense reciprocation.
Return to The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition
Rictor Norton, "Faithful Friend and Doting Lover",
The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition, 20 June 2008 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/pastor07.htm>.
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