What a lot of friends Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had! But what did friendship mean to him? Was it simply a matter of reciprocal benefits and obligations? In the ancient world, such interactions were a matter of life and death for the poor (there was no such thing as the welfare state), and of political success or failure for the wealthy and ambitious. But many thought there was far more to real friendship than such purely practical considerations.

For Aristotle, having a friend was ‘one of the greatest goods,........

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