Amicitia in Roman social and international relations, (350--146 B.C.)

Friendship (Latin amicitia) was perhaps the most important informal means of organizing and mediating relations not only between individuals but also between states in the ancient world. However, Roman friendship is seldom discretely studied as a mode of social interaction or a method of mediating international relations, and the parallels between interpersonal and international friendship, in terms of attitudes, expectations and behaviors, have never been adequately explored. This study attempts to make those parallels explicit by first developing a model of friendship interaction (based on modern studies of friendship in the fields of anthropology, psychology and sociology) that allows us to examine any given friendship processually over its life course, and then integrating the ancient Roman evidence for amicitia into that model. The method adopted is comparative and textual: the evidence for the period under consideration (the Middle Republic, ca. 350–146 B.C.) is compared to the findings of modern studies of friendship, and to the evidence for ancient Greek friendship, while the evidence of the Late Republican period (chiefly Cicero's De Amicitia) is compared to that of the earlier period (chiefly Plautus and Polybius) (Part I). Part II examines (in addition to modern imperialism theory) friendship in Roman international relations, suggesting that the use of amicitia in the international sphere contributed to Roman imperial behavior.; I conclude that the attitudes, expectations and behaviors associated with interpersonal amicitia were precisely the same as those associated with international amicitia. Moreover, because amicitia was in essence a power relationship between unequals (that is, it mediated status differences between individuals or states), and because Roman society was constrained to rely heavily on informal mechanisms such as friendship to mediate social and international relations, international amicitia (and not foreign clientela, as Ernst Badian suggests) facilitated the construction of an informal Roman empire during the fourth through second centuries B.C.