‘The friend-making table’: variety and the definition of friendship in Plutarch’sTable Talk

Abstract

Plutarch’s Table Talk asserts the ‘friend-making’ (φιλοποιός) character of the symposium seemingly unproblematically (612D, 621C). Yet it is not entirely clear how readers are to understand the dynamics of social variety in the work, or how its presentation of friendship relates to Plutarch’s formal pronouncements elsewhere on the subject. This article explores connections between Table Talk and aspects of On Having Many Friends and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. It also considers some ideas around poikilia in Plutarch in connection to discussions of complexity and simplicity in Table Talk, as a window onto the work’s presentation of amicable variety. I argue that social variety is often the implicit target in discussions of party pragmatics and gastronomic variety. Unlike the moral essays, Table Talk ultimately endorses a broad conceptualization of friendship’s and variety’s value, inviting readers to rethink Plutarchan ideas for the sympotic context.