CICERO'S DISTINCTIVE VOICE ON FRIENDSHIP
De Amicitia and De Re Publica
(second draft)
Walter Nicgorski
University of Notre Dame
Prepared for Delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association
Chicago, September 2-5, 2004
Copyright by the American Political Science Association
Friendship was provided by nature as an aide to virtue, not an accomplice in wickedness; so it is that no solitary virtue but only one deeply allied with the other can attain the greatest of goods. But if there be such a union, or if there ever was one or ever will be one, it must be regarded as the best and happiest alliance toward the highest good of nature; . . . . (De Amicitia, 83)(1)
Cicero, man of tutored common sense, rhetorical theorist as well as legendary orator, knew well and in fact emphasized the importance of speaking to one's specific audience and, as was often the case in his more philosophical works, thinking with his readers from their grounds and ordinary horizon. This would be reason enough in this context to approach Cicero's long and widely treasured writing on friendship, De Amicitia, by recalling the contours and great themes of Cicero's most directly political work, De Re Publica. Though a seriously fragmented work which was recovered even in that partial form first early in the nineteenth century, it is the primary source for those important themes in the history of political thought often associated with Cicero's thought:(2) the competing claims between the practical and theoretical way of life with the elevation of the practical life specifically in the form of the life of the statesman; a certain understanding of a mixed constitution or regime, the inevitable entailment of an understanding of justice in judgments of the goodness or badness of constitutions, a defense of a universal justice grounded in natural law, an understanding of dynamic development in history, as illustrated in Rome, potentially toward stability and justice, a development critically dependent on political leadership or statesmanship, this political leadership, in turn, critically dependent on
its being nourished through tradition, education and orientation to what is truly eternal.
Affinities and Explicit Links
It would be an abuse of propriety, in the form of deference to this audience, to recall such themes of Cicero's De Re Publica if there were no natural and hence easy and relevant passage to the subject at hand, Cicero on friendship. In fact on the surface, there are notable affinities between these two works of Cicero. Even if we did not have the clear example of Aristotle locating, in a richly significant way, his treatise on friendship in the heart of his practical or political philosophy, the surface affinities between Cicero's Amicitia and his major political work would invite further inquiry. Where might they lead us? Does Cicero's teaching on friendship complement and enrich that of the Re Publica? Does it help to remove or does it contribute to difficulties that have at times posed obstacles to seeing Cicero as a coherent and worthy political thinker?
What then are these affinities that cannot help but draw our attention? Both works are presented as conversations or dialogues which Cicero reports in his prologues as having been told to him by one of the minor figures actually present at the conversations. No other of Cicero's dialogues have this form of entrée into the reported conversation.(3) This form allows Cicero a quite direct connection with Publius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus the Younger and Gaius Laelius, the principal figures in each work and that attractive pair of political leaders from the previous century who before Cicero himself were thought to have endeavored to bring Greek learning into relationship with successful Roman practice. Except for very minor roles assigned to them in De Senectute, written in the months immediately preceding the writing of Amicitia, Cicero uses the personae of Scipio and Laelius only in the two works under consideration in this essay.(4)
Besides their distinction for political leadership, Laelius and Scipio were also considered legendary as exemplary friends. While being the central figures and primary interlocutors in Re Publica, their friendship is explicitly noted there and shown in operation. They too are, in a sense, the primary spokesmen in Amicitia. I must write "in a sense" because Scipio is present only virtually, having died or been murdered only a few days before the reported discussion takes place. He is present - though virtually - insofar as it is his legendary friendship with Laelius, a friendship now disrupted by his death, that provides the occasion within the dialogue for taking up its main topic. Scipio is present in the discussion in another more direct way, for at several points Laelius reports, as a friend would be inclined, what Scipio said in earlier conversations with him. So in effect, Amicitia presents a discourse of Laelius on friendship that likely is informed by his conversations as well as his experiences with Scipio and that explicitly incorporates certain views and observations of Scipio. Note must be taken also that the two younger men actually present with Laelius in Amicitia are his sons-in-law who have come in concern for his well-being and to comfort him in these days after the loss of his dearest of friends. These sons-in-law, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the augur, were also in the circle of friends gathered earlier around Scipio and Laelius in Re Publica.
Perhaps it just happens that Cicero for his account of true friendship and all that entails turns to the two same historical figures utilized in his earlier account of the best or true constitution. Ten years and several major writings intervened between his completing Re Publica (54 B.C.) and his writing Amicitia which occurs in those prolific last years of his life. There are good Ciceronian grounds for his having selected the same spokesmen for what might be regarded as essentially distinct topics: the privileged spokesman or teacher on any topic is that person who has notable experience with what is to be discussed. That principle was brought forward strongly in both his prologue to and within the dialogue of Book I of Re Publica. As Cicero's own as well as Scipio's political experience gives them claim for attention, especially over against Greek talkers and theorists held suspect by Roman audiences, so when Cicero turns to treat friendship these same historical figures, having the reputation of exemplary experience in friendship seem the right ones for central roles.(5) Perhaps there is nothing more to be said about the fact of the central roles for Laelius and Scipio in these two works.
The affinity, however, between the works seems to be drawn tighter and becomes more interesting when we notice the dramatic settings of these creations. It then becomes at least somewhat less plausible that Cicero's employment of the same central figures is simple coincidence, as one might, under the American republic, use George Washington in a story about truth-telling on one occasion and use him on another occasion as an exemplar of self-restraint with respect to the holding of power (e.g. the two-term tradition). Re Publica's discussion of the best constitution and all that entails is set in the year 129 before the mysterious death of Scipio; Amicitia, as already noted, is set just days after his death. It would not be unreasonable to say that what joins the two occasions in Cicero's narrative of that year is the last and long-treasured part of Re Publica, the Dream of Scipio.
Scipio's dream which he shares with Laelius and other friends at the climax of his political inquiry presents him, ascending through heavenly spheres from this earth in the manner of one who has earned liberation from this earth and reward above. In the course of this ascent and gaining of perspective, he is instructed by his ancestors in the way to eternal happiness and the nature of that happiness available in the afterlife. Beyond awe and delight, Scipio's understandable reaction to what he beholds is to want to move promptly from this world to the state now revealed to him. Even as earth and its achievements seem so small and insignificant, he is restrained by the image of his father with words about duty to the political community on this earth where Scipio and Laelius still live:
Thus Publius [Scipio] you and all good men (piis omnibus) must maintain the soul in the custody of the body, and only at the command of him who granted it to you, ought you be drawn away from human life lest the human duty (munus humanum) assigned by god be neglected (Rep. 6:15).
It was then not long after and not through his own pious will but, it seems, in accord with his deepest yearnings that Scipio's life ends. That this was to happen is, of course, a fact known to the reader Re Publica and a fact that produces the large looming physical absence as Amicitia begins.
Cicero does not leave the role of the Dream between the two works simply to the readers' noticing. He is explicit in bringing it to mind early on in the first extended speech of Amicitia, what has fairly been called Laelius's "encomium" on friendship.(6) Reflecting on Scipio's death at a peak in a life of noble accomplishments, and expressing confidence that he has gone to join the gods rather than infernal beings, Laelius indicates that he cannot assent (using the terminology of the skepticism of the New Academy, Neque enim assentior . . . .) to the view, relatively new in the history of human experience, that the soul dies with the body, and this death brings total destruction (13). In the course of noting that the ancestral view of life after death is contrary to this clearly Epicurean view, Laelius mentions that he stands on the matter of immortality and reward and punishment after death with that man deemed wisest by Apollo's oracle. In Amicitia this is already the second reference, the second of three, to Socrates, without direct mention of his name but in association with the oracle's assessment of this Greek. Socrates' opinion was that of Scipio, reports Laelius, and he offers as some evidence of that claim the Dream of Scipio which he locates as following upon Scipio's discussion of the political community (disseruit de re publica).
Shortly after this direct link to Re Publica's Dream of Scipio, at the end of Laelius's encomium though still at the stage when this "dialogue" is being set up and launched, there is a second explicit link to Re Publica (Amic. 25).(7) The reference is to Laelius's defense of justice (justitia) rooted in nature. It occurs in this way: Laelius's sons-in-law suggest there is something about his character that gave his encomium on friendship a special "feel" (aliud quoddam filum); his defense of justice in Re Publica is pointed to as having the same character which is then explained as being related to Laelius's being a just man.(8) Might not then a man who is an exceptional friend speak most wisely and effectively about friendship? Such a suggestion, already noted as a familiar theme in Cicero, namely the notion that experienced achievers in any realm of human endeavor are especially to be heard, does not really seem to exhaust the tie between friendship and justice that is suggested.(9)
What sense then might we make of these two explicit ties of Amicitia to Re Publica, ties that entail direct references to Scipio's likely story or dream about immortality and Laelius's defense of justice. Is the prominence given those two important parts of Re Publica a strong suggestion or pointer that those two ideas are as important to the nature of true friendship as they are to a good constitution? And perhaps in addition, are justice and immortality critical concepts to integrating friendship with politics? This seems to be where we are left after an exploration of the surface affinities and explicit links involving Amicitia and Re Publica.
A Notable Difference: "Suppression of the Greeks"
Besides affinities and links between these two works, there is a notable surface difference. This is one instance of a general fact about Amicitia that has caught the attention of some commentators. What has been generally noted is that in contrast with other philosophical works of Cicero Amicitia makes no direct reference to Greek treatments of its topic, friendship. No philosopher is named, much less explicitly engaged while being in an overall sense imitated and deferred to as is Plato in Re Publica. There is no Carneades invoked, as he is when skeptical challenges are put to the very idea of justice in Re Publica; there is no Polybius or Panaetius singled out as Greek teachers of and Greek sources for the thinking of Scipio and Laelius as is done in Re Publica.
What we find in Amicitia is a form of "suppression of the Greeks," a suppression comparable, as Powell has observed, to what happens in Cicero's orations and suggesting that Amicitia is something other than or less than fully a philosophical work.(10) This is not to claim that there is no evidence at all of the immense Greek learning and knowledge of the Greeks which Cicero possessed. Yet what is allowed to emerge in this work, aside from all the indirect references to philosophers and the philosophical schools of Greece, is clearly subdued or very limited, what would seem to be a minimum one might expect from educated Romans, that is, some knowledge of Greek history, literature and mythology.(11) In this respect, it is worthy of note that Cicero does not explicitly name the "three or four" legendary friendships into whose company he wishes to place that Roman exemplar of the friendship between Scipio and Laelius.(12) These other classic friendships are all those of Greeks, and when at another point in Amicitia (24) Cicero's Laelius wishes to illustrate a point with a tale about one set of these legendary Greek friends, Orestes and Pylades, he does so by explicitly crediting for the tale the Roman playwright Pacuvius, identified as a friend of Laelius.
Given the subdued and, one might say, almost Roman character of Amicitia's Greek references, one might indeed suspect, as Powell suggests with his comparison to Cicero's speeches, that Amicitia (and possibly Senectute) is to have a public character somewhat different from Cicero's longer and more elaborate philosophical writings. Perhaps there is some reason for this work being even more sensitive than Cicero usually is to the apparent political liability and pedagogical obstacle caused by a manifest indebtedness to the Greeks.(13) What can for sure be concluded from this seeming "suppression of the Greeks" in Amicitia is that there is more evidence of it and apparent effort at it than in Re Publica written ten years earlier and in Officiis written at roughly the same time. It does not seem a specific moment in Cicero's political career that causes or provides occasion for a greater circumspectness regarding the Greeks.
Left, perhaps, at the limits of reasonable speculation on the general treatment of the Greeks in Amicitia, let us look more closely at what must be considered the most remarkable type of the suppression of the Greeks in this work. This is with respect to Greek philosophers; the contrast of this dimension with Re Publica was already highlight above. What makes this especially remarkable is that Amicitia takes the form of a philosophical dialogue focused on a classically formulated philosophical question: what is friendship? It is a question to which Greek philosophy from Socrates/Plato if not earlier to the schools of Epicurus and Stoa in Cicero's own day have spoken, usually quite directly. Though one recognizes in Amicitia points and observations that have appeared in the extant work of Plato and Aristotle(14) and though some scholars speculate that Amicitia's chief source is a lost work of Aristotle's successor as head of the Peripatetic school, Theophrastus, and some note his quite direct dependence on words from Xenophon's Memorabilia,(15) there is no naming of any Greek philosopher or source or school of thought in Cicero's text. There is neither direct engagement of any thinker nor explicit deference to any in any respect at all. Rather indirection is always the mode used even in those three distinct references (7, 10, 13) to Socrates where, each time, he is described as the man "judged the wisest of men" by the oracle of Apollo. In none of those instances is any direct Socratic/Platonic teaching on friendship involved.
What sense, if only provisional, can be made of this stand of Cicero on the philosophical heritage regarding the topic of friendship? Perhaps the Roman practice of friendship, as opposed to theorizing about it and as exemplified in Scipio and Laelius and now by Cicero and Atticus, is a level of achievement which brought to analysis is quite adequate for a teaching on friendship, and even is in some ways preferred. Powell sensibly remarks that what is striking to him is Amicitia's
exemplification of Cicero's often-proclaimed independence of judgement: what matters to Cicero in the case of any philosophical idea about friendship is not whether it is Stoic or Peripatetic, but whether it will stand up to analysis and examination on its own merits.(16)
Earlier another student of Amicitia, Thomas Habinek, concluded a study of the dialogue by warning those hunting and scavenging in the writings of Cicero for sources in Hellenistic philosophy that "the characteristic feature and, I believe, greatest virtue" of Cicero's texts is "their deep engagement with Roman culture."(17) I proceed then from these initial investigations with every effort to be open to Cicero's distinctive voice, a voice not reducible to Greek sources or mindlessly eclectic in utilizing them. There is already ample reason to be expecting to discern a voice reflecting Cicero's deep engagement with Roman culture as well as his reputed allegiance to the New Academy, the school of Socratic Academic skepticism with its commitment to the testing of alleged truths, whether of Greek or Roman origins, at the bar of experience.
What Then Is Friendship?
Do the surface affinities, explicit links, and the notable difference between Amicitia and Re Publica amount to anything significant? Might they be leads to a larger thematic unity between the two works and thus to a greater understanding of the mind of Cicero respecting politics? These are the leading questions as I turn to the direct and presumably more substantive treatment of friendship in Amicitia. Here a methodological note is appropriate: whatever Cicero may have intended or not intended regarding the relation between these two works, a matter on which we can only speculate, reading the works together or, more precisely in respect to the case at hand, interpreting Amicitia against the background of Re Publica, can be the occasion for that greater understanding of Cicero's thinking.
Upon being asked directly to give his view of the nature of friendship and guidelines concerning it, Laelius (16) backs away from anything like a philosophical discussion or disputation, the characteristic approach, in his words, of learned men and Greeks. This move along with the brevity and sweep of what immediately follows warrants that first speech being called a "generalized encomium." Laelius clearly then starts off in this direction, saying that all he is capable of doing is urging his listeners to put friendship first among all human things, nothing being more natural (aptum naturae) or more useful in both the favorable and unfavorable developments of life (17). These words and what follows in the next six paragraphs (also, in this case, the next six traditional sections of Cicero's works) might well be viewed as a phenomenology of friendship, different facets of how it appears and thus a wholly appropriate way - appropriate to entering upon a philosophical inquiry - into the topic of friendship. Perhaps, what is being undertaken is not so unphilosophical after all. In fact but two paragraphs after his initial refusal to undertake a philosophical discussion, Laelius is found offering a definition of friendship (20), thus responding directly to the key question put to him and one in the form of a classic philosophical question, "what is this thing called friendship?"
Once Laelius launches forth, it is clear that we do not have in this work anything like a philosophical disputation in the sense of an encounter marked by the pressing give and take of dialectic. Nor could we call what now unfolds a rhetorical dialogue in which opposing speeches are made as in Cicero's De Finibus. Instead Laelius speaks quite continuously to the end of Amicitia. The interventions by his sons-in-law are very brief and are not at all in the form of objections or challenges to Laelius. They are rather requests and exhortations for Laelius to go on and to say more, and in each case Laelius responds positively at once. In effect, Amicitia can hardly said to be a dialogue at all; it has some of the trappings but none of the substance of real exchange or conversation. The body of Amicitia can be seen to consist in one long speech which in successive waves reveals ever more of the basis of what Laelius (and Scipio) thinks about the nature of friendship and the implications of striving to live in friendship. Thus what is called the first speech or encomium might be regarded as the introduction or overview to one long speech, an introduction in which the phenomenon of friendship as seen by Laelius is put before the reader to be further explored in the remainder of the speech. The introduction or overview touches upon all important aspects of what Cicero through Laelius has to say about friendship and thus becomes a convenient way, as in a prospectus, to gather together a summary of the overall teaching that pervades the whole speech.
The definition of friendship, as indicated early in this first speech or overview, seems an appropriate ground from which to proceed; it is never abandoned or significantly revised in what follows in Amicitia; it is simply elaborated or "unpacked" as some would say. "Friendship," says Laelius, "is nothing other than an agreement (consensio) on all things human and divine, an agreement accompanied by good will (benevolentia) and affection (caritate); . . . ." It seems helpful to recall at this point from the Re Publica (Rep. 1:39) the definition of the republic or political community (res publica) as a "joining of many people through an agreement on right and common interest" (juris consensu et utilitate communione sociatus).
The second part of the very sentence in which friendship is defined contains Laelius's observation that friendship is the greatest gift of the gods to humankind save for wisdom (sapientia). This observation in such a prominent position is especially notable in three respects: first, it echoes Cicero's statement elsewhere that philosophy is the greatest gift of the gods to humans; secondly, it seems to be the most fundamental statement by Laelius as to the ranking of friendship among human goods and should govern interpretations of other statements of praise for friendship. In one such statement already noted here, Laelius said friendship should be put first among human things, but this and other such statements can be seen to assume what is made explicit at this moment, that philosophy and wisdom are excepted and not among such merely human things. Third, it should be said that there is simply good sense in the exception for or elevation of wisdom. How could one possibly praise friendship among all human things if one did not reflect upon friendship and in fact upon the human condition! Wisdom in some form is the condition of any assessment of friendship.
Friendship is so elevated because, as noted, it is both in accord with nature and very beneficial in good and bad times. That it is natural in a sense of fulfilling and delighting rather than being useful or expedient in satisfying our ordinary human needs and wants is one of the great themes of this work as it is of Cicero's overall understanding of human sociality. For Laelius and Cicero, good human beings seek to follow nature, and with respect to human relationships (19), nature brings us first into families and nations and appears to create a certain but infirm bond of friendship in these communities. Laelius remarks that these relationships will persist even if they are without good will and thus do not sustain the level of a true friendship. In accord with this view, Cicero in his De Officiis has indicated that friendship is the most satisfying of human relationships, but our highest human duties are with respect to the familial and political communities in which we are embedded.(18)
It is nature, according to Laelius (26-27), that points from the beginning beyond our biological origins and need for physical security toward something deeper and nobler (antiquior et pulchrior). The truly first thing that brings people together is more an attachment or attunement of the soul to what is good than need or weakness (imbecillitatem atque inopiam) of any kind. Laelius says it is love, after which friendship is named (amor - amicitia), that primarily brings people together in a relationship of good will. Strikingly he describes those who explain friendship solely or chiefly in terms of needs and utilities as taking the sun from our world (47). As for the stealers of the sun, Cicero has in mind in a special way the Epicureans, never explicitly named by him but experiencing a revival all around Cicero in the Rome of his time.
The parallelism with Re Publica continues, for there (1:39) the primary cause of humans coming together is not so much weakness (imbecillitas) as a certain sociality implanted by nature. At this point in Re Publica, just as the extant text fractures and some fifteen lines are lost, Cicero's Scipio is making the point, heard repeatedly from Laelius in Amicitia, that man is not a solitary being (non singulare nec solivagum), but rather is so born that even in great prosperity and with all needs clearly satisfied, he would seek out companionship. The delights of such companionship that could be called friendship are spelled out at one point by Laelius. His claim (22, 31) is that insofar as we find ourselves embedded in the mutual good will of friends, we have a capacity to live life to the fullest, to experience the sweet delight of talking openly with others who are, as it were, other selves, and to find the pleasure of sharing good fortune with such souls and having their support in adversity. Friendship not only brings those fruits but also serves in attaining all the ordinary things people deem useful such as wealth and political office.
Never does Cicero deny the powerful role utility or mutual advantage plays in human relationships. Recall that as Laelius begins his discourse the second reason he gives for ranking friendship highest among human goods - after saying it is in accord with nature - is that it is beneficial in good and bad times. Though denying that true friendship is rooted in deficiency and concomitant need, and though never denying that the occasion of friendship might be provided by association in mutual utility, Cicero's Laelius stresses that a true or genuinely grounded friendship does come to yield advantages, but a concern for these, a calculation focused on them or to maximize them, would undermine such a friendship. As Laelius succinctly concludes (51, 22) at one point, "friendship does not spring from utility; rather, utility follows upon friendship."
This statement presumably includes low or crass utilities, our ordinary needs. This dimension of friendship and even of associations or alliances that are but pseudo-friendships is no doubt the basis for the unanimous agreement on the value of "friendship" throughout mankind and across all schools of thought (86). We understand this overwhelming agreement better when Laelius indicates that it includes those who prefer "friendship" even to virtue. From the other side of "friendship's" range and, as it were, reminding us not to scorn our ordinary ways of dependency, Laelius observes (29) that even a good or true friendship not only yields benefits but requires nourishment through mutual presence and interchange of kind acts (beneficio). Scipio, according to Laelius, claimed (33) that nothing was more difficult than to maintain a friendship to the very end of one's life.(19)
Beyond the difficulty of maintaining even a true friendship, it appears to Laelius that the coming-to-be of such a friendship is rare and its bond is usually quite limited in extent. In one sense, it seems to be Laelius's insistence that true friendship can exist only between good people that limits its extent and makes it rare. It would be, then, the rarity of virtue in the world and the low incidence that virtuous people would encounter one another in circumstances favorable to friendship that limits the scope and instances of friendship.(20) Cicero's Laelius, however, also seems to be resisting too much selectivity and too narrow a range for friendship. He seems interested in bringing forward a flexible and potentially extensive model of friendship.
Immediately after Laelius's asserting that friendship can only exist between or among good people, he is quick to raise a disclaimer that he does not mean "good" in that full and complete sense associated with the Perfect Wiseman of the Stoic tradition; in that concept, goodness and virtue are bound up with complete knowledge or wisdom. Laelius concedes that such refined analysis of human perfection may capture a certain truth (fortasse vere), but it is not very useful for ordinary purposes and with human beings as we know them. Laelius draws attention to such Roman ancestors as Marcus Curius, commonly regarded as wise but not of course "wise" in the tradition of such philosophers as the Stoics. Let us, says Laelius (18), attend to such models of goodness as are part of common experience (in usu vitaque communi) and not fix on what is merely imaginary or hoped for (quae finguntur aut optantur). If those we look up to need not be perfect models, and Cicero is constant throughout his writings in critiquing the unreality of the Stoic Wiseman, then of course friendships cannot be unions in perfect goodness but only at best unions of good people pointed to and striving for even greater goodness. Both the models of human virtue and those of friendship are for Cicero to be sufficiently proximate ideals that they can be seen as realizable.
Students of Re Publica will recognize a manifest parallel and nearly exactly the same words between the reasons for Laelius setting aside the Stoic model of human perfection and Scipio's explanation of his decision to turn from Plato's model city as merely imaginary and hoped for, to the real and more proximate ideal of Rome, or, to be more precise, Rome at various stages of her history. Cicero, while learning from abstract analysis and pure models, is ever seeking an understanding of the good that might inform his models in a way that opens to ordinary patterns of development and levels of attainment. Friendships, persons, and cities, however good, are never complete (perfecta) and home-free as it were; those that are, are imaginary ones. The real ones are needing constant maintenance and nourishment. As suggested in large part by the opening segment of Book 5 of Re Publica, and anticipatory of a dimension of the conclusion of this essay, there is a manifestly evident interdependence of friendships, persons and cities in the dynamic development that is moral development. Good persons make good friends and need good friends to remain in their virtue, and it is through such persons that the ways of good cities are progressively made. Such cities in turn nourish and support good persons and true friendships.
True friendship and good men are then not to be understood too restrictively. What then keeps genuine friendships to two persons or just a few seems for Laelius to be related to the inherent limits of the necessary affectivity, one of the conditions of friendship in the definition given, rather than to there being a shortage of good and worthy people for potential friendship (20). Love (caritas) is seen as necessarily intense and narrowly focused (contracta res est et adducta in augustum) on one or a few persons. Perhaps, one might add, this is especially so to the degree that it is true good or virtue rather than ordinary benefits and utilities which is drawing friends together. One can have many professional associates, be a great networker at the APSA or in other heady venues, and still have at best one or a few good friends. One can have an extensive and extended family with multi-generational ties and responsibilities and still have at best one or a few friends. And in politics, of course, one can have a multitude of allies and be well-connected and almost surely one will have no friends. This, I assume, is why observers have noticed the high frequency of dog-owners and dog-lovers in Washington D.C. and throughout and around the Beltway. Yet Cicero's Laelius, though consistently intent on distinguishing relationships that have at least the spark of attraction to goodness as their primary cause from those that are primarily narrowly utilitarian, clearly does not want the standard of full friendship marked by caritas to delimit the range of the applicability of the idea of friendship to communities and relationships that are no larger than just a few. He talks of friendship, as has the tradition of classical political philosophy, as if it is in some way a helpful measure of a good citizenry, and he even draws attention to how humans disposed to the good recognize it in others across the great divide of friends and enemies.
Cicero's Laelius sees possibilities of the requisite kind of attraction and hence of a sort of friendship horizontally throughout the world community as well as vertically with esteemed ancestors such as Cicero feels toward Scipio and Laelius, and also with those younger and potential successors marked by the necessary virtue. This "sort of friendship" is, of course, an attenuated friendship. It is, it seems and even to those blessed with Judaeo-Christian Revelation, beyond our ordinary capability to have the affection (caritas) for distant sisters and brothers of the Sudan or Bangladesh. It is, of course, also the case that whatever goodness attracts those well-disposed across the distance of space or time, those relationships cannot be nourished and maintained by personal presence and mutual acts of kindness.
Where then has Cicero's Laelius left his listeners and us readers? He has offered a flexible and potentially extended notion of friendship after seeming to restrict friendship to the good and to those one-on-one or small circle relationships that allow a sufficiently intense caritas. The more flexible and potentially extensive notion is clearly more applicable and hence useful in ordinary experience. He has rendered the concept more applicable and useful by rejecting as "out of this world" and too restrictive a Stoic understanding of goodness as incorporated in the Stoic Wiseman. At the same time he has recognized the affective dimension of friendship can be more or less intense in the light of proximity and the opportunities it provides. In those cases of "less," one might say that a sort of or attenuated friendship is possible. Cicero's opening up of the concept of friendship makes it, of course, more politically applicable. As already emphasized, friendship's growth along with personal and community development toward justice and stability are always efforts in progress in the best of circumstances. Human experience and specifically Roman history serve to teach all this truth.
Progress in any meaningful sense always depends on a guiding sun, and because Cicero's Laelius is insistent on that orientation to the good rooted in human nature as the primary motivation for and hence form of true friendship, his teaching on friendship can be said to be not only practical but also ennobling. To note this is to recall his decisive rejection of any approach to friendship in which the calculation of benefits or utilities whether in the form of quid pro quo or some kind of maximizing utility is to be primary cause of a "friendship." Such Epicurean approaches were said to steal the sun away while those of the Stoics assert that the sun's light is there only for a few - we can add, only for a hypothetical perhaps simply imaginary few. Neither of these approaches is adequate to the human experience of friendship. These potent schools of thought in Cicero's time, now largely in Roman garb but with a heritage of Greek founders and Greek teachers, represented dogmatic comprehensive systems that Cicero finds, throughout his writings, inadequate to experience.
Ever concerned with human things and the ordinary horizon, namely, philosophy brought into the homes and everyday lives of people, Cicero clearly has associated himself with the Socratic tradition as carried on in the school of the New Academy which Cicero and others had traced back to Socrates. It is in the larger fold of the Academy that Cicero would have and did learn from both the Platonic and the Aristotelian traditions, and this appears to be reflected, if not explicitly acknowledged in his treatment of friendship. It is, however, specifically in the tradition of Socrates that is found a more chastened approach to philosophy and its claims. Knowing one's ignorance and knowing well, if anything, love, love of the beautiful and the good: these hallmarks of Socrates are the inspiration of the practical yet ennobled view of friendship given by Cicero's Laelius. We recall that three times in Amicitia Socrates, unnamed but referred to as "the wisest of the Greeks," is cited favorably.
In the tradition of the limited skepticism of Socrates, Laelius in rejecting the comprehensive Stoic claims to full knowledge and virtue, does not lose all ability to discern goodness and badness and hence to discriminate between good and bad in character as well as between genuine and pseudo-friendships. It appears that Laelius's teaching, presented in his almost continuous discourse, has already assimilated an Academic critique (customarily given through dialectical exchanges) and is thus marked by appropriate, experientially-based limits on the understanding of friendship offered. In Re Publica, Book 3 presents openly, though for us in fragmented form, the Academic critique of a notion of justice rooted in nature. It is, of course, a critique where all of virtue is at stake. Laelius's defense there of the notion of justice appears to have been scaled back and adapted in the light of the critique, but it yet holds to a law of right rooted in nature and in doing so maintains the ability to discriminate between better and worse constitutions. In the Amicitia, Laelius could not discriminate better or worse friendships without a reliance on a sense of the good and virtuous to which humans are drawn in the very nature of things. This orientation and rootedness in nature constitute a Socratic claim that allows moral and political inquiry to be potentially fruitful.
Students of modern political analysis and the history of political thought might especially notice that without anchoring friendship in humans' naturally given attunement to an objective good in the nature of things, two important passages we have considered in this essay's inquiry would likely draw readers in another direction. The very definition of friendship as "agreement on all things human and divine, an agreement accompanied by good will and affection" leaves open in one plausible interpretation the possibility that any bond of persons with a spirit of comradeship would fit the descriptive, value-free definition and hence be truly friendship. The definition would then encompass Epicurean friendship as well as a union of thieves who share a debased understanding of human and divine things yet a spirited internal comradeship and attachment to one another. One need not determine that such bondings are without all real good as part of their glue or just what capacity they have for persistence in order to recognize that the definition of Cicero's Laelius, if it is to capture the genuine friendship moved primarily by the human good, must load the terms "good will and affection" in the definition in a way that implies that it is only a truly grounded good that can in any significant way elicit good will and caritas. Scipio's definition of the political community as an agreement in right and the common interest had the same capacity to be read in a value-free descriptive way, and St. Augustine thought it would be best read that way rather than as an agreement in true justice which left all real political communities, even Rome at its best, falling short of meeting the definition of a republic.
In another notable passage employed earlier in this essay and also paralleled in Re Publica, Laelius stresses that in judgments of human character we should look to our own and common experience and not to models merely imagined and hoped for. Such passages in Cicero could be seen as clear anticipations, if not inspirations, of Machiavelli's famed injunction from Chapter 15 of The Prince where he urges attention to the "effective reality" of political matters rather than resting "content with mere constructions of the imagination."(21) Cicero's turn, as opposed to Machiavelli's turn, does not entail the loss of the sun, the anchoring in the good of nature to which humans are drawn. Rather than abandoning such a good, his turn is to more proximate and realizable goals in friendship and political life, goals nonetheless made possible and illumined by the true good of human nature and its supportive communities.
Applications and Conclusion
The immediately preceding paragraphs have focused on two instances where Laelius's observations require the anchoring of the good in nature if something less than an ennobling view of friendship is not to emerge in Amicitia. The meaning of the very first claim of Laelius for friendship, namely, that it is in accord with nature, is progressively filled in as Amicitia unfolds. Friendship is not just a behavioral pattern, natural in the sense of a common and predictable way of acting, though it is surely this too. Friendship is presented as part of the very happiness or good we seek. Laelius says more about specifically how friendship works with virtue in their interaction as mutually supportive elements. As the epigraph to this essay draws to attention, virtue and friendship are friends within a bonding that constitutes human happiness. It is not, for Laelius, a union without precedence between the elements. Though Laelius explicitly acknowledges that there are those who put "friendship" even ahead of virtue in seeking happiness, his determination of precedence between the elements is decidedly the opposite. Friendship is to follow goodness; this is the right reading of nature (20, 61, 100, 104). This does not mean, however, that friendship is merely instrumental to virtue or simply an offspring of it, though it might appear in both these ways; the critical observation here is that it is "not merely" either of these. Laelius presents friendship as a constitutive element in a happiness that is truly human and rightly sought (83). Virtue's precedence is consistent with his statements that friendship is between good people and that the way to this true friendship starts by endeavoring oneself to be good (18, 81-82). That endeavor to be good includes self-examination and striving to understand the self in the context of the whole of nature, responsibilities Cicero addresses in other writings and responsibilities that are especially laid on potential political leaders and exemplified in Scipio of Re Publica.
Friendship too, while being good in itself and a constitutive element of happiness, is not only elevated to true friendship in the company of virtue but also assists the seeds and sparks of virtue toward their full development. Virtue again is always in progress; it is never simply there as in the case of the imaginary Stoic Wiseman. What friendship does for virtue is to give it encouragement of every form, and especially insofar as friends are alike, friendship facilitates self-examination. The epigraph to this essay which first brought to attention the friendship or union between virtue and friendship continues with Cicero's Laelius observing (84) that this union "contains everything humans regard as worthy of seeking - integrity (honestas), glory (gloria), and a mind both at peace and in delight (tranquillitas animi atque jucunditas). That glory is mentioned here reminds the reader of Cicero what he has said directly in Re Publica and exemplified in Officiis, namely, that true glory follows virtue as its shadow.
This essay began by noticing certain affinities and direct links between Amicitia and Re Publica and by letting ourselves being drawn by these into interpreting Amicitia in the light of and in tandem with Re Publica. Perhaps at least a down payment on the fruitfulness of this approach has been made. There is, however, more that is suggested by the linking of these works and that illumines in important ways the political theory of Cicero. What follows is a sketch of where we seem to be led in this next step, a sketch presented under two topics: the special significance of friendship for politics and the importance of intergenerational friendship with respect to political development.
Cicero's Laelius highlights at one point (39-41) the alliances of wicked men, factions we might say, which have and do threaten the Roman republic. Later, he in effect comments on the capacity of such genuine friendships as that of himself and Scipio to counter such faction. Politics seems a real testing ground of friendships chiefly because it is a testing ground of character or goodness. Most are said to fail this test. Politics then is a sphere where you rarely find true friendships, and if they are ever budding there, they do not generally survive.(22) One senses a special poignancy in Cicero's writing these parts of Amicitia in what turned out to be the last year of a life so troubled, as we are especially reminded in his letters, by finding trustful relationships and appropriate alliances while he and events bounded from crisis to crisis in the late Republic.
Despite the almost insurmountable obstacles the temptations and stresses of political life pose to goodness and to genuine friendship, Cicero seems to hold up such friendship as something of a last and best hope for securing and sustaining the type of leadership that might protect and further develop the Republic. This friendship is not, however, as tenuous as the diffusive good will or proximity to friendship alluded to earlier and that one might seek in binding any community's citizens and people together. This is specifically the more intense form of friendship exemplified in the unions of Scipio and Laelius and Cicero and Atticus. Such friendship seems to be a critical element in the micro-politics of Cicero's teaching about politics.
Re Publica presents the macro-politics, the large question of right constitutional form and the necessary moral underpinnings of a justice anchored in nature. In these matters it is absolutely essential that the Greeks be engaged and, when appropriate, deferred to. Cicero confesses there that he takes his fundamental principles about politics from Plato. But if Re Publica is seen as moving the focus, in the light of the Roman experience of political development, from the large question of right form to the agents of that development and of potential development, a shift of attention occurs to the model statesman, and with that shift all that pertains to the preparation and education of such a statesman becomes centrally relevant.(23) There are clear indications in what little remains of the missing Books 4 and 5 of Re Publica that the kind of family life and education requisite for statesmanship was a major concern in these books. What is missing here on education might plausibly be found in what we have on the education of the orator in Cicero's De Oratore and in the direction Cicero later gives his son and other young men in Officiis.
It is less clear that friendship's role in nurturing statesmen - and thus friendship itself - received any treatment in the lost portions of Res Publica. Thus Amicitia, this explicit treatise on friendship that follows ten years later and also utilizes the Scipio/Laelius union, may be intended as a significant element toward the completion of Cicero's political theory. Though friendship may not have been a topic treated in the lost portions of Re Publica, the operation and example of friendship is everywhere in evidence in both these works under consideration. It is not just the horizontal friendship, above all that of Laelius and Scipio that is witnessed to in both actions and words, but there is also the vertical intergenerational friendships that are highlighted.
Recall that Cicero's Laelius had specifically opened the possibility to the attraction to the goodness of persons outside of our time and thus to the idea of vertical friendships in some form. Such friendships might be something more than merely vertical ones; they might gain something of the intensity of the one-on-one friendship when there are personal links from present horizontal circles of friends to those exemplars of the past. They are called friends, seemingly the younger friends of Scipio and Laelius, who are gathered for the discussion on the best constitution and the nature of justice. The account of the gathering has come to Cicero himself from one of the younger listeners in the circle. So it is, as we have noted earlier, that the discussion, more properly the discourse, in Amicitia gets started: it was brought to Cicero by Scaevola, one of the sons-in-law who heard Laelius speak, and within the speech of Laelius are the words of the late Scipio, now being heard by the two young men and later to be passed to Cicero.
A closing epilogue (100 ff.) to Laelius's discourse specifically sings the praises of horizontal friendships, naming specific circles of friends and elevating the ties of affection and friendship between the young and the old. This but sets the scene for Laelius observing that the "law of our life and nature" is such that one generation follows upon another, that generations do not in their entirety drop away at once and that rather they interpenetrate through the friendships of the young with the old. Immediately after those observations, Scipio's absence through his sudden snatching by death is recalled (102), and Laelius insists that for himself Scipio yet "lives and will always live," for it is the "virtue of that man" which he loved and which remains alive and will be heralded into future generations. Scipio's Dream, that was seen as possibly linking the two texts before us, brought Scipio into renewed contact with father and grandfather. The contact served both to fortify a virtue of dedication to the political community and its leadership and to impress Scipio and those who would hear his tale with the relative insignificance of politics and this world's affairs.
For Cicero, friendship's meaning is not exhausted in some kind of service to politics; it is a good in itself and a possible aid to even greater things. Yet clearly friendship is perhaps the most important instrument in the micro-politics of Roman life where constitutional development and leadership turn on political alliances and the give-and-take of personal interactions and relationships. Those alliances and interactions seem to have become terribly corrupted in the late Republic into forms of servile clientelism, bitter factionalism, and outright conspiracies for power and control. Perhaps that is not peculiar to Rome but an ever present possibility and reality especially where political life is essentially free. The counterweight of friends in such a politics and their cross-generational enrichment and sustenance seems for Cicero truly the last and best hope. Friendship then, as Cicero life winds down, is to be praised and honored, but the nature of genuine friendship must also be understood. Above all, Cicero sought in De Amicitia to contribute to such an understanding.
1. I take responsibility for the English translations of Cicero used in this essay. With respect to the De Amicitia (Amic.), I have benefitted frequently from J.G.F. Powell's fine translation in his bilingual edition, Cicero: On Friendship and The Dream of Scipio (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1990). I have also consulted at times the earlier bilingual edition in the Loeb series. Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (London and Cambridge: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1959).
2. De Re Publica (Rep.), even over the centuries when largely lost, played through its parts and concepts evident and acknowledged in the work of Saint Augustine and others a role in associating Cicero with certain topics in political theory.
3. Whether historically true or not, Cicero chooses to give these conversations an aura of having actually occurred. In De Senectute (3) Cicero explicitly confesses to Atticus, to whom he dedicates this work as well as Amicitia, that he has simply created this conversation and has sought to enhance the authority of its teaching by putting words in the mouth of an esteemed ancestor. Amicitia (see 3-4) appears to have more of a historical basis.
4. In Senectute, Scipio and Laelius say little and simply facilitate the elder Cato's beginning his discourse.
5. As he opens Amicitia (3-5) and addresses his life-long friend Atticus to whom he dedicates this work, Cicero draws attention to his own experience with friendship. He is more forceful in Re Publica in asserting his record of experience in politics.
6. Powell, 12; also Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 106.
7. The only direct or even indirect references to other writings of Cicero in Amicitia are these two links to Re Publica and several ties to his immediately preceding De Senectute.
8. At this point in the text, it is claimed that Fannius was not present for the discussion in Scipio's garden related in Re Publica; this does not square with what is claimed in that work, Rep. 1:18. Though reported as present, Fannius does not speak in the extant portions of Re Publica. Powell (83-84) explores the state of scholarship on this discrepancy and offers an explanation.
9. It is in the context of treating the virtue of justice that friendship emerges for consideration in Cicero's De Officiis, a work he was likely writing either simultaneously with or in close proximity to his writing Amicitia. Officiis was apparently completed later in the year 44 than Amicitia; Cicero at one point refers the reader of Officiis to Amicitia for a more complete treatment of friendship (Off. 2:31). Officiis presents friendship as a richer and better relationship than one that is merely just; yet it is to be ruled and thus constrained by justice (see esp. Off. 1.55-57).
10. Powell, 16, also 7.
11. What is to be found are seemingly stock references to Themistocles (42), Neoptolemus (75) and Timon of Athens (87). Observations of Bias, one of the ancient seven sages, and of Archytas of Tarentum are also cited (59, 88). Three of these five are presented as speaking foolishly or acting wrongly.
12. Amic. 15. One of these friendships is given explicit and extensive attention by Cicero in Book 3 of Officiis.
13. Plutarch in treating Cicero in his comparative lives makes note of the hostility directed at Cicero because of his being perceived as a Graecophile.
14. Pangle (104) quite properly observes that much of Cicero's treatment of friendship is in "a thoroughly Aristotelian spirit."
15. Powell, 2-3; Falconer, 106. Also, Paul MacKendrick, The Philosophical Books of Cicero (New York: St. Martin's 1989), 220.
16. Powell, 20.
17. Thomas N. Habinek, "Towards a History of Friendly Advice: The Politics of Candor in Cicero's de Amicitia," in The Poetics of Therapy, Martha Nussbaum, ed., Apeiron 23, no. 4 (1990): 185.
18. See note 9 above.
19. Consider the glow this at once puts upon the friendship of Scipio and Laelius in the light of the dramatic circumstances of Amicitia.
20. Since Cicero has Laelius confess the role of fortune or luck in sustaining a friendship over various obstacles that usually arise, one supposes that he would readily acknowledge luck's role in finding a true friend, a "soul-mate" as current dating services say in their self-proclaimed effort to replace luck with the control of computer-aided data collection and matching.
21. The phrasing here is from the translation of A. Robert Caponigri. Machiavelli, The Prince (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), 84.
22. Amicitia opens by Cicero reporting that the occasion for his hearing the discourse of Laelius from Scaevola was a widespread concern over the falling out in the heat of politics between Publius Sulpicius and Quintus Pompeius; they fell into bitter enmity from the closest and dearest friendship one might imagine (2-3).
23. This interpretation of Re Publica is explored and defended in my essay, "Cicero's Focus: From the Best Regime to the Model Statesman," Political Theory 19, no. 2 (May, 1991): 230-251.