Friendship’s Core

"You are my friends who have come, and greatly I need you, / who even to this my anger are dearest of all the Achaians” (“Iliad,” tr. Richmond Lattimore, 9.197-8).

I’m guessing two anxieties are currently dominating the minds of the first-years, when they are thinking about their less-than-two-week-old lives here. One is about the Iliad, that tome whose pages have gone unturned in so many houses and dorm rooms since it showed up in the mail a few weeks ago, and whose significance—first college book, first college reading assignment, first text deemed worthy of a place in Lit Hum—makes it loom large in the minds of our newest little lion cubs. The other anxiety, universal among first-year college students, likely centers around friendship: How will I make new friends? What will they be like, how will I stay in touch with my old friends, etc. I doubt that many first-years will connect these two anxieties—I certainly didn’t­—but it seems that the Iliad (once/if we read it) has a great deal to say about friendship.

Achilles and Patroclus, of course, have stood as paragons of masculine friendship for centuries, but their bond does not represent the only example of friendship’s importance, or the values surrounding friendship, in the Iliad. Achilles’ reception of Phoenix and the rest of the delegation sent by Agamemnon to convince him to fight shows an example of the friend as a companion, not only in joy but also in sorrow or even anger. And this notion, more than the loyalty or the love or the devotion that characterize Achilles’ bond with Patroclus, I find very hard to translate into our modern conception of friendship. What does it mean for someone to be “dearest” to another’s anger? Does this idea resemble the modern notion that those who are closest to us see all sides of us? Or is it deeper, suggesting that true friends make us feel comfortable expressing our negative emotions, by acknowledging them as parts of our fuller selves?

For the Class of 2014, the “friendship anxiety” associated with coming to college is not about finding a Phoenix or a Patroclus to have as a lifelong friend. Principally, this anxiety is about enjoyment, and, in some ways, about distraction. We seek people to talk and eat and drink with to make our displacement from our home community (whatever it may have been like) more palatable, and at least in part to keep us from focusing too much on what we may have left behind. In some ways, this is as it should be: Like our anxiety about the Iliad, our friendship anxiety drives us to attempt to get through the first couple of weeks as quickly and as painlessly as possible. So our emotional selves skim, skip, or SparkNote our way through our first interactions in college, pulling us toward focusing on easy and diverting ways to spend our time.

This idea of friendship as distraction quickly rings hollow, though, as I’m sure it already has for some first-years. Then the carefree week of orientation parties comes to a close, the abrupt newness of the place wears off, and we start to forge our own lives away from our first homes. We begin to seek the opposite of friendship as distraction—friendship as engagement. Instead of simply looking for people to have fun with, we come to value those who can involve themselves in our lives and emotions. I certainly don’t mean to deride the relationships formed in the first few days of college­—nearly all of my closest friends at Columbia, as it happens, are people I met in orientation week or shortly thereafter.

The tone of these friendships has changed, however, and here, perhaps, the relevance of Achilles’ response to Phoenix reveals itself. Achilles is angry, and in his anger he “needs” his friends: He needs them both to witness his anger and to see that his love for them is undimmed by it, as though their presence allows him both to justify his rage and to show that it is not all-consuming. This idea may represent the classical parallel to friendship as we seek it—finding people who can be dearest to our anger as well as our laughter, our sadness as well as our joy.

Sam Klug is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. He serves on the executive board of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network. Core Matters runs alternate Thursdays.