De Amicitia
Cicero wrote De Amicitia at a pivotal point in his life and in history. He had spent a life devoted to Roman politics during the first century BC, a time of tremendous upheaval and civil war. By the time he had written De Amicitia in 44 BC, he was in his sixties — an old man by Roman standards — living on his farm outside of Rome removed from political power by the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. The year before, he had lost his beloved daughter, Tullia, who died from complications of childbirth.
As he was a politician, I imagined that Cicero’s work would focus on the political friendships of the sort that powerful families use to establish alliances with each other, which I know were common in Cicero’s time. Indeed, many Romans saw friendship in mostly practical terms as a relationship between people for mutual advantage. MacKendrick writes in his commentary that “The word [friendship] was then, as now, most commonly employed very loosely, the broadest use of the term a stranger might be called a friend men to show goodwill.” Instead, Cicero focuses on a deeper, innate friendship driven by goodwill — he argues we ought to value friendships for their own sake. Although friendships can bring advantages, we must not seek friendships for that reason.
But what is the relationship between friendship and political allegiance? And why does Cicero completely avoid this topic in his treatise?
# Things, people, places
Pylades and Orestes - Pylades and Orestes are captured by natives of the Crimea and are sentenced to death for trying to steal an image of the goddess Artemis.
In Pacuvius’s play, the king—who doesn’t know which man is Orestes or Pylades—orders Orestes to die, but Pylades claims to be his friend in order to save him, while Orestes maintains that he himself should die.
I’m rereading C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, and I am amazed by how much Cicero influenced his text. They both wrote their treatises toward the end of their lives in ill health, having suffered significant losses - Tullia for Cicero, Joy Davidman for Lewis. And they make similar claims: that the true kind of friendship is now largely lost in our world (Lewis lays out the distinctions between friendship and companionship), that the basis of friendship is a community of views and values, and that friendship is a necessity of life.