2 - Cicero on Friendship

Summary

Few writers have exercised such an enduring influence on Western thinking about friendship as Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE). As a student of philosophy, fluent in reading Greek, Cicero was profoundly familiar with many of the debates about friendship that had occupied thinkers from the time of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century to the age of the great Hellenistic schools of philosophy active in his own age. Yet he was also actively involved in public life, and acutely aware of the yawning divide that could separate friendship as a noble ideal from the tawdry realities of friendship in everyday life. What makes his contribution to the Western tradition so important is that he is both a theorist and a practitioner of friendship, whose writings have been studied and imitated by generations of students throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, and, indeed, well into the modern age. In particular, his philosophical dialogue Laelius de amicitia (Laelius on friendship), written under the shadow of the political crisis of the late Roman Republic, describes an ideal of friendship as he imagined it might have been practised by the great political figures – all male – of an age that he feared was now slipping away. Cicero has also left us a vast body of letters addressed to friends, many to Atticus but also to a wider circle of intimates (familiares), that testify to the complex set of ideals and social norms evoked by amicitia in the Roman world.