It is hard to see through the veils of history, but one of the things that always strikes me is that if you sit down and really try to put all the pieces together, what you find is an alien world, far more alien than most supposedly alien worlds of science fiction, especially if we're talking about going back all the way to Ancient Greece. What we think of in our bones as civilization doesn't exist then. The closest thing that might get you there is farming communities in the Midwest... with no power, or cell phones, or cars, or houses, with dangerous wild animals still roaming about, no medical treatment, no firearms, and no prior 21st-century civilization thought patterns, and you're still only sort of glimpsing it. Friendship wasn't an affectation, it was a <i>necessity</i>; humans are effectively incapable of surviving as an individual with no social support, and these people were, by modern standards, in a constant state of just barely scraping by. Even wealthy people were still just one bad fall or cut from a lingering death. When reading about the ancient past one must always be sure to keep this backdrop in mind, and not surreptitiously sneak in a modern setting for the drama in your head.<p>As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too. History doesn't make any sense at all unless you learn to stop seeing it through 20th/21st century preconceptions about ethics or civilization. (And I'm not saying I've got a grasp on the older preconceptions, I've just observed that using my "default set" certainly doesn't have much explanatory power for why people do what they do in the past.)<p>I'd submit for your consideration the idea that what we see in ancient friendships is more like what we'd today call the "war buddy" bond, because life was a lot more like a war back then. As we move through history and more and more people are no longer engaged in war with Nature just to survive, we see that level of bond fade because we see the conditions that give rise to that level of bond fade. Personally, I would say this is cause for celebration more than sadness.