Abstract

The aim of this article is to show a social role of friendship (filia) in Classical Greece and to discover why, as Aristotle thinks, is filia the greatest good for the polis. The author bases his analysis on a comparison between Plato’s dialogue Lysis and Aristotle’s Politics (namely the book 1 and book 3). He distinguishes four types of filia, and shows the social role played by each one of them: the love of parents to children, the friendship between teenage boys of the same age, the love of elder men to boys, and the friendship between free adult citizens.