ABSTRACT
The ancient Greeks had a word for most things; in fact they had several that people regularly and more or less accurately translate as ‘friend’. 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. Greek ethics from Homer onwards approved the notion that one’s duty was to help the one group and harm the other: the poet Theognis is expressing a perfectly traditional and acceptable sentiment when he asks for the great heaven to fall on him if he fails to help his philoi and bring pain and harm to his echthroi.
