As the title of my Master's thesis makes clear, my focus in this text is on the forms of love in ancient Greece and Rome. Love is not just an emotion, but a broad and changing concept that evolves under the influence of the zeitgeist. That is why we understand love differently today than it was understood in the ancient world. The following chapters deal, through an analysis of the philosophical and poetic works of ancient authors, with two branches of love – friendship and the erotic or romantic love – taking as their starting point four key terms: philía, éros, amicitia and amor. I first present the Greek philosophical ideal of friendship, which I then compare with the findings of the Roman authors. The second part of the thesis focuses mainly from a literary perspective on erotic and romantic love and on the multilayered and complex notions of éros and amor. In the last part, I briefly present some key insights into the Christian notion of love known as agápe.
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