Friend, Roman, Philosopher
A new book on Cicero offers many good reasons for getting to know him better, especially in these troubled times.
Some years ago a friend recommended that I read Cicero. I duly bought On the Good Life and after skimming it put it on a bookshelf to be read when I had more time and leisure. Needless to say, other books came and went and poor old Cicero sat there unread. Until a few weeks ago, that is. When the ‘Classics Now’ festival here in Dublin advertised an onstage interview with Vittorio Bufacchi, author of a new book entitled, Why Cicero Matters, 1* I took it as a sign that Cicero’s day had arrived. I’m mighty glad to have at last made his acquaintance.
I began with Robert Harris’ Imperium, the first of his trilogy based on Cicero’s life and moved on to the man himself. I attended the interview with Bufacchi on Saturday night, and left convinced by his argument that Cicero deserves our attention today more than ever. By coincidence, Bufacchi, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in University College Cork (Ireland), and a Roman by birth, came to Cicero via Harris too.Â
Bufacchi begins by asking why Cicero2 is less well-known than Julius Caesar. He makes the point that Shakespeare wrote plays about two of Cicero’s enemies, Caesar and Marc Antony (Antony and Cleopatra) but none about the man himself. One crucial moment in Caesar’s assassination is missing from Shakespeare’s play, for, having delivered his treacherous blows, Brutus turned to the crowd, bloodied knife aloft, and cried out, ‘Cicero, Cicero’, much to Cicero’s amazement and discomfiture. Drama generally prefers men and women of action to philosophers. Â
Yet there was drama enough in Cicero’s life. In Imperium Harris shows us Cicero the lawyer, and the centrepiece of the novel is a court scene. In Roman times court sittings were held in the open and the public flocked to high profile cases, proof that our appetite for courtroom drama has a long history (See What’s the Story? 9 January 2024). Cicero’s writings are radical in their own way and influenced many subsequent writers and thinkers, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. There are six towns named for him in the United States, but none for Caesar. (Bufacchi dreams of making a road-trip documentary visiting each of the towns and talking to their inhabitants. Watch this space!)
Cicero’s On Duties could be a handbook for politicians, and citizens, everywhere. Discussing this title Bufacchi emphasises Cicero’s declaration that ‘The foundation of justice is trust, in other words consistency and truthfulness in declarations and compacts.’ (We wish.) Interestingly for the writer, this seminal work is cast in the form of a letter to Cicero’s son who was supposedly studying in Greece. Shades of Polonius to Laertes there.
Important as this is, the chapter in Bufacchi’s book that caught my imagination was his discussion of On Friendship. Starting from the famous line sine amicitia, vita esse nullam, (life without friends is not worth living), Bufacchi continues: ‘Today the best place to look for a meaningful enquiry into friendship is fiction’. The examples he cites are the Neapolitan quartet by his fellow-Italian, Elena Ferrante, and the novels of Sally Rooney. Well, there is matter for thought indeed.
Returning to Cicero I find that he too looked to fiction for an example of friendship, relying often on myth and story to illustrate his points. His essay takes the form of a dialogue between Gaius Laelius Sapiens and his sons-in-law, who ask Laelius about his friendship with the late Scipio Africanus. Early in the discussion Laelius refers to a play by Pacuvius, unknown now but apparently similar in plot to Euripedes’ Iphigenia in Taurus.
Two men face the king, who seeks Orestes’ death. One, Pylades, claims to be Orestes to protect his friend but Orestes insists on declaring his real identity, foreshadowing Sydney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The point Laelius makes, however, is that the audience stood and cheered at this scene. ‘People were applauding in others what they had not been given an opportunity to achieve for themselves.’ (Trans. Michael Grant, Penguin Classics, 1971).
Thus, the vicarious experience of fiction, on the stage and page, can be morally edifying, without preaching. In Ferrante’s novels the friendship between Lenu and Lila spans fifty turbulent years in Italy, and traces the changing status of women during that time. The friendship is tinged with rivalry and it is this which gives the novels their edge.
Cicero says true friendship depends on honesty to ourselves, and that we should neither encourage nor follow our friends into what we know to be wrongdoing. Fictional friendship allows us tease out these dilemmas, for example, in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) a group of mixed-up would-be aesthetes goad one another into murder. Similarly, in Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) a group of friends commit a crime as a political protest. In both cases the group think is taken to justify the crime. Certainly a no-no in Cicero’s book. Yet as we read we are seduced into the protagonists’ point of view, despite our moral repugnance, showing how easy it is to be drawn to act against our better judgement out of mistaken loyalty to our friends or wrong-headed ideology.
Cicero cites too the case of people who went over to the side of the traitor Coriolanus, better known to us as another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. When we watch the play we begin to sympathise with the protagonist, who has been wronged, and lose our moral bearings.
Fictional friendships also come in the form of the rich man/poor man contrast, think Charles Ryder and Sebastian Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) or Nick Guest and Toby Fedden in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). In these stories the friendship rests on the poorer man’s fascination with the wealthier, and his ultimate disillusionment. In these cases the man of humble origins is adopted, for want of a better word, by the wealthier, which contravenes Cicero’s advice:
. . .the stronger partner must place himself on an equal footing with the weaker. And the latter for his part ought not to be distressed because the other man surpasses them in talents or possessions or rank.
 How different these novels would be if the patronising element were removed from their central relationships.  Conversely, friends should avoid the mistake that Timon of Athens made in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. Here, Timon lavishes his friends with gifts and hospitality and in praising them says:
. . . what need we have any friends if we should ne’er have need of them? They were the most needless creatures living should we ne’er have use for ’em; and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keep their sounds to themselves. (Act I (ii) ll 89-94).
This is the rock he perishes on. In his generosity he racks up debts and his friends melt away. The latter part of the play is a long misanthropic whinge, which maybe explains why it is not often performed.
It is in this character that Cicero refers to Timon, the recluse in the woods shunning company, distrusting all who approach. Timon suffers because he broke another cardinal rule of Cicero’s
The reason why we count friendship as a blessing is not because we are hoping for a material return. It is because the union is quite enough profit in itself.
Finally, in thinking of stories of friendship my mind flew immediately to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) where six friends grieve the death of their friend, Percival, their thoughts and feelings about him, and about mortality, overlapping like waves. More recently Hanya Yanagriha’s A Little Life (2015) follows the lives of four friends, centring on their relationship with the troubled Jude. And would it be a stretch to call Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) a play about friendship, where Didi and Gogo share the agony of waiting, and mourn for their old days? Their plight echoes Cicero’s line that: ‘Nature abhors solitude . . . For any human being the best support of all is a good friend.’
I’m sure I have missed out on many fictional friendships - I’m depending on you to fill the gaps. Please share your thoughts and examples of the topic.
This is part of a series on philosophy addressed to the lay person, free of academic jargon.  The series is published by Bloomsbury and includes the title Why Iris Murdoch Matters. Some What’s the Story? readers may recall we discussed her novel The Green Knight on 24 October 2023.
I am grateful to Bufacchi for the curious information that Cicero is a cognomen or nickname for Marcus Tullius. Cicer is the Latin for a chickpea and Tullius earned the name because, apparently, his nose resembled a chickpea!
I've just ordered a copy of Imerpium - thanks for the recomendation.
lovely piece Aisling.
You set me to wondering what Cicero's review of Saltburn might have looked like....