Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought

3. Cicero’s Distinctive Voice on Friendship: De Amicitia and De Re Publica

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 [friendship] 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) The model of friendship, so beautifully described in these words of Cicero,1 could be seen as a rival to politics. Politics in the classical sense was especially oriented to “the highest good of nature.” Aristotle, who systematically articulated the dominant classical understanding of political life, located his treatise of friendship in a richly significant way at the very heart of his practical philosophy. The obvious places to turn in 84 3 Cicero’s Distinctive Voice on Friendship DeAmicitia and De Re Publica Walter Nicgorski 010 pt 1 (19-112) 3/20/08 12:48 PM Page 84 pursuing how Cicero understands friendship and its relationship to politics is to his two writings explicitly devoted to friendship and politics or justice, De Amicitia and De Re Publica.2 One can, of course, ask about this relationship from the side of politics. Does Cicero’s teaching on friendship (assuming for now that there is one to be found) complement and enrich what might be learned from De 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? A notably fragmented work that was lost sometime during the fifth or sixth century, Re Publica was first recovered in that partial form early in the nineteenth century. It is the primary source for those important themes in the history of political theory often associated with Cicero’s thought.3 Re Publica can be described as presenting the macropolitics of Cicero, the large question of right political form and the necessary moral underpinnings of a justice anchored in nature. Not only is Cicero’s writing this work along with De Legibus (Leg.) broadly and consciously imitative of Plato’s project in his Republic and Laws, but Cicero also confesses that he takes his fundamental principles about politics from Plato.4 Re Publica takes as its starting point the question of the best constitution, a topic at least suggested by a dominant motif of Plato’s Republic. Yet 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 from a model or best constitution to the model statesman, and with that shift all that pertains to the preparation and education of such a statesman becomes centrally relevant.5 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 writings. 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 De Officiis. It is less clear that friendship’s role in nurturing statesmen—and thus friendship itself—received any specific treatment in the lost portions of Re Publica. Thus Amicitia, the explicit treatise on friendship that follows approximately a decade later,6 may be intended as a significant Cicero’s Distinctive Voice on Friendship T 85 010 pt 1 (19-112) 3/20/08 12:48 PM Page 85 step 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. Furthermore there are ties between the works that invite an effort at interpreting each in the light of the other. Affinities and Explicit Links On the surface, there are notable affinities between Amicitia and Re Publica that suggest a special relationship between these works. Both are presented as conversations or dialogues that Cicero reports in the prologues as having been told to him by one of...