ABSTRACT
Aristotle's world and horizons were significantly different from those of the Christian and post-Christian West. 'Peace institutes' and 'peace studies' were things unknown to Aristotle's Greece. There were calls for wars of conquest against non-Greek 'barbarians'. That lawgivers should care for these forms of household philia 'even more than for justice', is a conclusion that Aristotle does not draw explicitly. But it remains in the background elsewhere when he draws analogies between household relations and the more properly political relations between rulers and ruled. In fact, Aristotle does have many tantalizing suggestions about the continuity and qualitative differences between the natural and human realms. Aristotle makes much of the Platonic theme that one can love in the friend only what is good. But a friend's good character is not an accidental quality of the friend, but is the friend himself, and so friendship of character is the true friendship, in which one really loves the other as other.
