In the Library
On Friendship
Cicero, 44 BCE
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (1900)
- Chapters
- Chapters 6
- Length
- Length 15k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
You might just as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life.
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If you like this, try
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Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne does the same thing, but inside out: one dead friend, La Boetie, and a book that keeps circling the place where he used to be.
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The Symposium
Plato
Plato's dinner party asks the same question about love that Cicero asks about friendship, but with wine, comedy and a drunk Alcibiades crashing the argument.
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Letters to Lucilius
Seneca
Seneca is doing the same thing in Latin prose, but as letters to a single friend, and he is blunter about how few friendships survive testing.
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About the book
Give a man a clear view of the whole universe, Archytas said, the beauty of the heavenly bodies, and the spectacle would be joyless with nobody to tell what he had seen. Cicero gives that thought to Gaius Laelius, days after Scipio's death, so the book on friendship is spoken by a man in the middle of losing one. He takes no medicine for it: "To Scipio I am convinced no evil has befallen: mine is the disaster." What follows is strict, not soft. Friendship can only exist between good men, and in the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self; one that has soured should rather be unstitched than torn in twain. You might just as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life. Cicero wrote it in the year Caesar was killed, sent it to Atticus, his friend of a lifetime, and the next year Antony's men hunted him down. Its last words: next to virtue, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is Friendship.