On Friendship

Gaius Laelius — consul in 140 BCE, remembered chiefly for his closeness to Scipio Aemilianus — is made to speak here to his two sons-in-law, a few days after Scipio's funeral, about what he has just lost. The distance does real work: an old Roman of the generation Cicero admired says the things Cicero wants said, and the grief on the page is genuine without being the author's own. Friendship in the full sense, Laelius argues, is possible only between people of good character, because what holds them together is what the other is and not what the other gives — which makes it far rarer than the word suggests, since most of what passes for friendship is a trade in usefulness that ends when the usefulness does. Against the Epicurean case, that friends are sought for the security they supply, he sets a test: whether the person would still be wanted with nothing left to gain. Then he works through the hard cases — what may be asked of a friend, what must be refused him, whether one follows a friend into treason, how to let a friendship end when it must without turning it into an enmity. Medieval schools taught it with On Old Age, and the pairing held all the way into print: the English Of Friendship that William Caxton issued at Westminster in August 1481, in John Tiptoft's translation, came in the same volume as the English Of Old Age, and between them they were the first works of classical antiquity printed in England. Cicero wrote it in 44 BCE for Atticus, with whom he had by then been exchanging letters for about a quarter of a century. Scipio had been dead eighty-five years.