Philosophers and Roman Friendship

Abstract This chapter focuses on Cicero’s essay De amicitia (On Friendship), as the major Roman contribution to the topic. Cicero, through his mouthpiece, Laelius (the friend of Scipio), distinguishes between the view that friendship is desired on account of weakness and poverty, and an older and finer theory that holds that love (amor), etymologically related to friendship (amicitia), is the primary cause of goodwill. Laelius’s lecture is an attempt to adapt Stoic conceptions of virtue and the friendship of the wise to the political realities of Rome’s ruling class. But the problem with love is that it outpaces judgment and may result in loyalty to the wrong people and causes. This risk requires that limits be placed on the duties of a friend; yet constancy is a value in itself and may sanction some deviation from the true path, although how far is hard to determine. Exhortations to choose one’s friends carefully, like advice to break off friendships in such a way as not to generate rancor, are all well and good, but virtuous people, Laelius insists, are an extremely rare breed, and so no amount of circumspection is likely to safeguard one against unworthy friendships. Yet friends are indispensable for happiness, and nature itself has planted in human beings, as in other animals, the impulse to love others.