How to be a friend with Cicero

Part XV of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship, by Cicero, translated by Philip Freeman. Full book series here.]

Hopefully, you have a best friend. Or, even better a few people you consider your best friends. If so, you are both lucky and virtuous, and in possession of a treasure that you ought to guard carefully and cultivate assiduously. (There is ample scientific evidence for this advice.)

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the first century BCE Roman orator, public advocate, statesman, and philosopher, had many friends and acquaintances, but one stood far above everyone else: Atticus, so nicknamed because he spent much of his life in Athens, and whose real name was Titus Pomponius. Titus and Marcus met when they were very young, and remained intimate friends until Marcus’s death in 43 BCE.

We are fortunate to have a large number of letters written by Cicero to Atticus, and they are a pleasure to read not just because they shed much light on the thinking of one of history’s most consequential figures, as well as on the turbulent times in which he lived, but because they are a moving testimony—two millennia later—to the depth and tenderness of their relationship.

How to Be a Friend, newly translated by Philip Freeman for Princeton Press, was originally entitled De Amicitia, and was, in fact, dedicated by Cicero to Atticus. It has been described as the best book ever produced on the topic. It was written in the year 44 BCE, during a very dark period in Cicero’s life. He was in political exile because of the rise of Julius Caesar and the consequent fall of the Roman Republic. Moreover, his beloved daughter Tullia had recently died in childbirth.

In order to console himself and relieve his distressed mind, Cicero wrote an astonishing number of philosophical treatises in the span of just a couple of years. One of these was De Amicitia. It’s written in dialogue form, as a conversation set in 129 BCE (before Cicero was born) featuring three characters: the then aged Roman general and orator Gaius Laelius and his two young sons-in-law, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Laelius had just lost his best friend, Scipio Aemilianus, and this loss was the occasion for the conversation on friendship among the three of them. Many years later, a young Scipio studied law with Scaevola, who told him about the episode. (Whether this is historically accurate or a literary invention by Cicero is beside the point.)

Plenty of people, of course, had written about friendship before, including both Plato and Aristotle, who greatly influenced Cicero. Yet, De Amicitia is special because of both its depth of feeling and its practical utility. Freeman, the translator, summarizes the take home messages in ten points:

I. There are different kinds of friendship. We make friends with people at different levels and for different reasons, from casual acquaintances to colleagues at work to buddies with whom to watch football on tv. But, hopefully, a small number of these people will belong to the highest category of friends, that of virtue. They are rare by necessity, because it takes time to find them and a lot of energy to cultivate the relationship. But it’s an effort well worth making.

II. Only good people can be true friends. If you don’t believe me, just watch the Sopranos. Friendship requires trust, wisdom, and basic goodness, otherwise it’s just a relationship of convenience.

III. We should choose our friends with care. A real friendship is a major investment, not just of time and effort, but emotionally. It can be very painful to break up with a friend, so we should take our time before deciding to commit.

IV. Friends make you a better person. Human beings are fundamentally social animals and we learn from each other. Modern scientific evidence clearly shows that good people do significantly influence their friends in positive manners, truly making them better individuals.

V. Make new friends, but keep the old. Old friends are important because we share a large number of memories and experiences with them. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be open to new friendships, including with younger people, to create a series of binding bridges across generations.

VI. Friends are honest with each other. This is really a corollary of (II) above. It’s easy to find people who will flatter you for their own advantage, but only a true friend will be willing to look you in the eyes and let you know when you are about to make a mistake or behave unvirtuously.

VII. The reward of friendship is friendship itself. Friendships of virtue are not a business transaction, you do not engage in them because you want some material gain out of the relationship. You do it for the same reason you engage in a relationship with your partner or spouse: because you care about the other and because the connection you establish is intrinsically worth it.

VIII. A friend never asks another friend to do something wrong. Again, see the Sopranos. If a “friend” asks you to engage in unvirtuous acts then you ought to have serious doubts about the value of that friendship. Someone who wants you to lie, cheat, or do anything else shameful is likely not who you thought they were.

IX. Friendships can change over time. As Heraclitus put it, panta rei, everything changes. This includes relationships and friendships. This is normal in life and to be expected, and hopefully you and your friend will grow together, rather than apart.

X. Without friends life is not worth living. To make the point, Cicero presents us with a thought experiment:

“Suppose a god carried you far away to a place where you were granted an abundance of every material good nature could wish for, but denied the possibility of ever seeing a human being. Wouldn’t you have to be as hard as iron to endure that sort of life? Wouldn’t you, utterly alone, lose every capacity for joy and pleasure?” (87)

The following are some highlights from How to Be a Friend, with accompanying brief commentaries:

“You see, I don’t believe that any evil has befallen Scipio. If anyone has suffered a loss, I think it is me. Still, if you let your sorrow overwhelm you, you’re not showing how much you loved your friend, only how much you love yourself.” (10)

Laelius is talking to his sons-in-law about his recently departed friend Scipio. I find it interesting that he at the same time acknowledges his loss and yet reminds himself that friendship is about the other person, and that too much grief really springs from an unhealthy preoccupation with oneself rather than with our friend.

By this time in my life I have lost a few very close people, beginning with two grandparents with whom I grew up, as well as my mother and father. What Cicero has Laelius saying here resonates a great deal with me: in all those cases I felt grief, but I tried to direct my thoughts toward the people that had died, rather than, self-indulgently, toward what I myself had lost.

“If it’s true that the souls of the best men most easily escape the bondage and chains of the body after death, who can we imagine had an easier journey to the gods than Scipio? Therefore I fear that grieving at his death would be more of a sign of envy than of friendship. But on the other hand if it’s true that the soul and body perish together and no consciousness survives death, then it follows that although there is nothing good in death there is also nothing evil. Because if sensation passes away, it’s the same as if we had never been born. But we do rejoice that Scipio was born, as will our country as long as it exists.” (14)

Cicero here considers the two options as far as death is concerned: either we somehow survive as disembodied souls, or there is no existence in the afterlife. Cicero was inclined to believe the first, and I’m pretty firmly convinced of the second. But as he puts it, it doesn’t matter, since either way death is not an evil.

On this point several Greco-Roman schools of philosophy agreed. If you believe, with Plato, that the soul is immortal then death simply frees it from the encumbrance of the body. If you think, with both the Stoics and the Epicureans, that when death is here we are not, then there is nothing to worry about anyway.

“How can life be worth living, as Ennius says, unless it relies on the mutual goodwill of a friend? What could be sweeter than to have someone you can dare to talk to about everything as if you were speaking to yourself? … Wherever you turn, there it is. No door shuts it out, no time is wrong for it, and never is it in the way. … I’m not speaking now of ordinary and common friendship—as pleasant and useful as that can be—but of true and pure friendship, such as that which exists among the best of friends. … You see, whoever looks upon a true friend looks, in a sense, at an image of himself.” (22-23)

Quintus Ennius (239-169 BCE) was an earlier Roman poet much admired and often quoted by Cicero. It may seem a bit of a stretch to claim that life wouldn’t be worth living without friends, but the thought experiment mentioned above certainly makes you appreciate the point.

Double herm with the portrait of the Roman poets Virgil and Ennius. Image from Wikimedia.

A friend, Cicero says, is like an image of ourselves. Aristotle had claimed something similar, characterizing a friend of virtue as a mirror to our soul. True friendship is precious and rare precisely because it isn’t easy to find (and keep!) the sort of person being described here. Someone we can rely on in both good and bad times, who is there to help us in any way and at any moment, with whom no subject of conversation is off limits, as if we were indeed speaking to ourselves.

“I wonder if there isn’t a deeper and more beautiful reason for friendship than this, something that comes to us from nature herself. For it is love [amor] from which the word “friendship” [amicitia] comes, and this is the origin of goodwill. … We can see the beginnings of friendship even in certain animals, which for a certain time love their offspring and are so loved by them that the feelings are clear. It is even more evident in humans, first from the love between children and parents—which nothing but the most outrageous evil can destroy—and then from the sense of affection that arises when we meet somebody whose ways and character are aligned with our own. In such a person we see as it were the light of goodness and virtue shining forth.” (26-27)

This is a fascinating example of what I think of as the evolutionary / naturalistic account of virtue and human relations that characterized the Stoics. Even though, of course, they had no concept of evolution as we understand it after Darwin.

The Stoics thought that human nature is the guidance for our behavior. We are naturally prosocial animals capable of reason, from which it follows that a good human life is one in which we act reasonably and prosocially. Here Cicero sees the beginning of cooperative behavior in other animals, just as modern biologists do. Moreover, he lumps together kinship and friendship, correctly guessing that they are both reflections of a nature inclined toward positive relationships with others.

I also appreciate his etymological note about the common root, in Latin, of the words “love” and “friendship.”

“Is there anything more absurd than to take delight in a multitude of empty things—such as honor, glory, buildings, clothing, or bodily improvement—and yet not delight in a living soul endowed with virtue who is capable of being loved and, if I may say so, loving in return?” (49)

Splendid reference to the distinction between external material goods and what really matters in life: meaningful relationships with other people. Honor, glory, buildings, clothing, or bodily improvements are, for the Stoics, preferred indifferents, meaning that they have value and yet are not necessary for a virtuous life.

While friendship also, technically, falls under the broad category of preferred indifferents, both Cicero and Seneca emphasize its crucial importance. And since we are talking about friendships of virtue (as distinct from those of convenience or pleasure) then for everyone except (perhaps) sages having friends means a higher likelihood to stick to the path of virtue and to improve as human beings.

[Next in this series: How to think about war with Thucydides. Previous installments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV.]