Cicero: "On Friendship"

Cicero's dialogue "On Friendship" examines the unique value of friendship and connects the idea of being a caring and compassionate person with being a good friend. After all, if someone cared only about themselves, how could they ever be a good friend?

About the author: Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum in 106 BC. Cicero was a contemporary of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, although Cicero was a lawyer and a scholar, not a military leader. The years in which Cicero lived were tumultuous and chaotic, with Rome ravaged by a civil war. In this civil war, ambitious military generals fought each other to be the absolute master of Rome. Cicero is famous for trying to save what he could of Rome’s republican constitution, one that guaranteed certain freedoms to all people, before the rise of the Empire and the one-man rule of the Emperor.

Cicero was not only a capable politician and a famous public speaker, but he was also a philosopher. He wrote many books on topics like friendship, virtue, and philosophy. The following is a sample from one of Cicero’s work, titled De Amicitiae, or “On Friendship.” In the work, Cicero examines the nature and value of friendship, a bond between people that Cicero ties to the idea of virtue. Virtue, in the old Greco-Roman sense, meant “habits of moral excellence” and a commitment to doing as much good as one could, regardless of the odds against you.