Catilina de amicitia, or Cicero’s Homage to Rebels (63 BC–2016 AD and Beyond) (original) (raw)
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Ciceroniana On Line (COL), 2017
While amicitia in both Cicero s philosophical works and the Letters has been the subject of intense scholarly interest, it is only recently that the significance of amicitia for Roman society at large has warranted critical-historical studies. In rejecting outdated notions of amicitiae as political factions, modern scholarship has left a key question unanswered: if amicitia was not, in fact, instrumental in shaping policies and voting majorities, then what was its importance? This paper attempts to show the importance and function of amicitia in Roman aristocratic society by analyzing its influence on a variety of individual sectors of private and public day-to-day life. The rules of amicitia, as propounded by Cicero in his philosophical works, can be observed in action in his letters, where considerations of amity and friendship govern his interactions with aristocrats and non-aristocrats alike. From a close reading of his Letters (among other sources), the article draws up a catalogue of amical orthopraxy within the Roman aristocracy. What were the rules that governed friendships? In which areas of social life did they operate and how? What, precisely, were the actual benefits that Roman nobles could and did gain from them? In compiling the ample evidence for these benefits, the article contends that we can arrive at a new appreciation of amicitia and the fundamental role it played in generating and maintaining aristocratic social consensus. The amici of a Roman noble were not (only) important because of their value as political allies. They were important because almost every aspect of aristocratic life was governed by amicitiae, and vital parts of it could only function because of them.
British and American Studies, 2022
Through a close examination of the notion of friendship and its intimate connection to politics, the present study aims to discover the intricate ways in which friendship is portrayed in relation to virtue, enmity, and politics in one of Shakespeare’s most politically-charged tragedies, “Julius Caesar”. With a systematic reading of the ancient inquiries on friendship, the study particularly investigates the Shakespearean idea of friendship through the Derridean dichotomy of the friend and its inevitable bond to the enemy. Keywords: Cicero, Derrida, friendship, politics, Shakespeare
The Classical Humanism of Cicero’s Concept of Friendship
Revue Horizon Sociologique, 2011
Abstract: Cicero maintains that one should choose one’s friends carefully, choosing men of good character. One should moreover freely share all of one’s concerns, plans, and aims with one’s friends. Friendship should be based on steadfastness, loyalty and trust, with no deception or hypocrisy. Absolute honesty is thus essential for friendship, and one should be congenial and show pleasant manners to friends, treating them as equals, and being generous and helpful to them. One should also encourage one’s friends in developing virtue, reprimanding them in a tactful, gentle manner if necessary, and accepting reprimand with forbearance. One should always behave respectfully to one’s friends, maintaining particular respect for friends of long standing. He stresses that the excessive pursuit of wealth and power is detrimental to friendship. One can make concessions to friends by agreeing to do improper things if these do not damage our reputation; however, one should not do fundamentally wrong acts on account of friendship. He points out that one should not have unrealistic expectations or be too demanding towards one’s friends nor should one engage in behaviour of a flattering or sycophantic nature. One need not give more help to a friend than one is able nor is one obliged to, nor to place pleasing a friend above matters of duty. He allows that friendships can be ended if the friend behaves badly or if common interests change. In that case, one should strive to end the friendship gradually and quietly.
Virtue, Consensus, and Authority without Tradition: Cicero’s De imperio Cn. Pompei
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.