Damon and Pythias

Damon and Pythias

Very loyal friends. In Greek mythology, Damon and Pythias are two such friends. After Dionysus sentenced to Pythias to death, Damon took his friend's place in jail so that Pythias could settle his affairs—on the condition that, if Pythias did not return, Dionysus could execute Damon instead. Pythias returned in time to save Damon's life, and Dionysus was so impressed with their loyalty that he let them both live. Of course Allie offered to serve Dina's punishment—those two are like Damon and Pythias.
See also: and
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

Damon and Pythias

two faithful friends.
Phintias (the more correct form of the name) was condemned to death for plotting against Dionysius I of Syracuse. To enable Phintias to go to arrange his affairs, Damon offered to take his friend's place in Dionysius' prison and to be executed in his stead if he failed to return. Phintias returned just in time to redeem Damon, and Dionysius was so impressed by their friendship that he pardoned and released Phintias as well.
See also: and
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • make friends
  • make friends (with one)
  • make friends with
  • fast friends
  • bachelor
  • bachelor party
  • friends in high places
  • high places, friends in
  • no new friends
  • all over the place
References in periodicals archive
For his part, Jonson exploits the intersections of arbitrary law making, gender, sex, and species we find in Marlowe's and Nashe's texts to undermine the ideal Edwards offers in Damon and Pythias. Whereas "amity" had been corrupted by Olympian and Crown politics in Marlowe's and Nashe's translations of Hero and Leander's affair, Jonson's densely intertextual puppet show explodes the concept into a cloud of vapors and direcdy implicates Jacobean authority.
Yet Cokes's affiliation is at the same time painfully superficial and grounded in the arbitrariness of desire that Jonson, following Nashe, exploits to expose the hypocrisy of consumer-driven "amity" through his conflation of Hew and Hander with Richard Edwards' translation of Damon and Pythias. (46)
Jonson's synthesis of Damon and Pythias with Hero and Leander emphasizes the superficiality of alliances determined not by love, but mutual enmity.
Unlike Edwards' version, wherein Damon and Pythias' only quarrel is who will die for whom out of devout friendly love, Jonson's "friends" fight about which of them lay with Hero.
Some might argue that Quarlous' caution that Overdo must remember that he is "but Adam, flesh and blood," converts the Justice much as Edwards's Dionysius is converted by the show of friendship between Damon and Pythias (5.6.97).
Telescoping Translation: Hero and Leander, Lenten Stuffe, and Bartholomew Fair
(59) In this account, Damon and Pythias 'refuse' to admit Dionysius into their exclusive friendship.
Edwards, Damon and Pythias, in The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England, ed.
'Receyving of Freendshipe': Senecas de benificiis and early modern amicable relations