Books by David (Brown University Konstan

In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized.

This book - the only history of friendship in classical antiquity that exists in English - examines the nature of friendship in Greece and Rome from Homer to the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century AD.