Chapter 1 - Augsburg Fortress

20 | Eros and the Christ
increases and, as Laberius, after his own manner and in his own
peculiar style, says of love, “Your love (amor) as fast as any onion
grows, as firm as any palm.” This then is what he says of love (de
amore), I apply to my longing (desiderium) for you. 39
Laberius likely meant his lines for the praise of bride and groom. 40 Marcus’s
redeployment of them amplified his friendship with amor and transfigured the
teacher and friend into his longed-for Fronto. 41
Fronto, however, took a cooler approach toward Marcus. He used letters
to increase friendship to be sure, as epistolary theory required, but he did so
without the eroticism of poetic allusion. Preferring philosophy to poetry and
reason to emotion, Fronto creates a better friend, a figure less romantic than the
parted lover Marcus had invented for Fronto.
I have received your letter, most charmingly expressed, in which
you say that the intermission in my letters has caused a longing for
them to arise in you. Socrates was right, then, in his opinion that
“pleasures are generally linked to pains,” when in his imprisonment
he held that pain caused by the tightness of his chains was made
up for by the pleasure of their removal. Precisely so in our case the
fondness which absence stimulates brings as much comfort as the
absence itself causes affliction. For fond longing comes from love.
Therefore, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and this is far the
best thing in friendship. 42
From Fronto’s perspective, then, what the epistolary situation of their separation
calls for is philosophic theory about balanced pleasure and pain, not poetically
expressed erōs. 43 Yet, in their early correspondence, Fronto was swimming
against the strong current of Marcus’s longing.
Marcus’s use of Laberius indicates how important poetry was for the
introduction of erōs into letters of friendship. While Laberius was a minor
player, Sappho’s influence on longing letters was immense. The pseudonymous
letter of Julian to Iamblichus opens with two Sapphic quotations. The first
nicely states the letter’s promise of presence: “‘’Thou hast come! well hast thou
done!’ You have indeed come, even though absent, by means of your letter. .
. .” In the second we see once again the double effect of the letter to comfort
and to reinvigorate longing: “‘And I was yearning for thee, and thou didst set
ablaze my heart, already aflame with longing (καιομέναν πόθῳ) for thee.’” 44
Sappho helped Julian create an amatory narrative within the letter for himself