Precarity of Friendship in Times of Crisis:
Amicitia
After Caesar
Authors: Baraz Yelena 
Published: November 2024

This chapter considers the intense negotiations around the meaning of friendship, or rather the Latin concept of amicitia,

Essential discussions of amicitia in Roman society are Brunt 1988, Konstan 1997, Williams 2012. In connection with Amic., see also Götter 1996, Habinek 1990 on candor. Verboven 2011 provides an excellent overview, including a concise history of scholarship on the subject. I use the two terms somewhat interchangeably in this paper, opting for amicitia when emphasizing the Roman institutional sense and friendship when discussing individual relationships and when affection is more prominent.

in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar in March 44 BCE. Among the many consequences of this event, the fact that among the assassins were several close and long-standing associates of the dictator occasioned discussions of amicitia and, in particular, when it was appropriate to discontinue an existing relationship and when to reconcile after a rupture. We have partial, and no doubt skewed, access to these discussions through a number of treatments in the contemporary texts in different genres composed by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who himself participated in such relationships with a number of the main players. The challenges to the rather superficial amicitia between Cicero and Marc Antony are apparent in the First Philippic, a speech in which Cicero addresses Antony’s accusation that his behavior constituted a breach of amicitia between the two men, as the well as in the letters they exchanged. The correspondence between Cicero and the Caesarian Gaius Matius, who was apparently widely criticized for his continuing adherence to Caesar’s memory, tackles the limits of the obligations of amicitia where they come into conflict with the interests of the state. Finally, the short ethical treatise Laelius, On Friendship explores many of the same issues on a number of different levels, from the pragmatic to the philosophical. The treatise might appear at first glance to be of universal, rather than topical interest, and that is certainly the way in which many later readers generally received it. The undeniable appeal of Cicero’s treatment is well attested by the work’s influence and lasting popularity. The dedication of the work to Cicero’s closest friend Atticus seems to mark it as a work arising out of personal rather than political concerns.

The work’s formal similarity to Cato, De Senectute, also dedicated to Atticus, is in this sense misleading, as the death of Caesar is a crucial dividing line between the two texts and their relationship to current concerns; cf. Zetzel 1972, 177–178. On the date of Sen. see also Powell 1988, 267–268.

My goal in this chapter is to read the exchange between Cicero and Matius as a window onto contemporary issues and contemporary debates and then use what we learn from the letters to understand how Cicero treats the same questions in the more generalized context of the treatise,

No clear relative chronology can be established for the letters and the treatise. The Matius correspondence used to be dated to August, following Cicero’s absence from Rome, but Kytzler’s suggestion of mid-October (1960, 102 n.1), after a time back in the city, has been accepted by many, including Shackleton Bailey in his commentary on the letters (1977, 486). The composition of Amic. itself can only be located by placing it between Caesar’s death on the Ides of March and the mention of it in the second book of Off., finished by November (Hellmann 1976, 72–74 offers a summary of a scholarly back-and-forth proposing a series of rewrites and additions to account for the internal inconsistences, on which see below; see also Zetzel’s 1972, 178–179 argument for a summer date). It is tempting to see the treatise as a response to Matius’ complaint (cf. Lintott 2008, 359, Schofield 2021, 213; Hellmann 1976 reads the exchange to argue that Cicero revised the treatise in response), but arguments can be made for either sequence and, ultimately, it is more important to see the two texts as part of the same intellectual and social space, also broadly shared with the securely dated Phil. 1, delivered in September. Cf. Powell 1990, 5–6, Griffin 1997, 89.

and how the topical concerns affects his literary, rhetorical, and philosophical choices.