Цицерон и Сенека о пријатељству
Cicero and Seneca on friendship

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the views of Cicero and Seneca on the nature and origins of friendship. By comparing their views and thoughts on friendship, we notice the similarities and differences between these two Roman writers. Cicero and Seneca wrote the most important classical Latin texts on friendship. Cicero’s dialogue Laelius de amicitia is partly praise of friendship and partly a discussion of various questions that deal with friendly relations. While Cicero wrote this work in 44 BC, the fictional settings of the dialogue between Gaius Laelius and his two sons-in-law, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola, took place many years earlier in 129 BC. Scaevola revealed to a young Cicero decades later (88 BC) what he learned from Laelius about the nature and value of friendship. The definition and practice of friendship are treated in only several letters of Seneca’s Epistulae morales ad Lucilium. Letters 3, 6, and 9 deal with the theme of friendship. In addition to these letters, letter 109 is usually also considered a friendship letter. The primary difference between the two writers is that Cicero’s dialogue belongs to a different literary genre from Seneca’s philosophical letters addressed to his friend Lucilius. Cicero’s work deals more broadly with friendship in political life and devotes considerable attention to the questions around the (in)stability of friendship. Besides diverse philosophical sources, in particular, Peripatetic and Stoic, Cicero adduces his own insight. In Laelius de amicitia he defines true friendship (vera amicitia) as an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection (omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate consensio, 20) with its basis in virtue (nec sine virtute amicitia esse ullo pacto potest, 20). Therefore, Cicero asserts that only virtuous and good people (viri boni) can be true friends. He distinguishes true friendship between boni and friendship between Stoic sages (18‒9). Seneca, as a Stoic, speaks of the consummate Stoic sage, namely in letters 9 and 109. According to Seneca, the basis of true amicitia is a shared will to achieve and maintain virtue (cum animos in societatem honesta cupiendi par voluntas trahit, 6.3). Both Cicero and Seneca agree that true friendship requires people who possess or pursue virtus (Amic. 92; Ep. 109.16). Seneca goes further and, dealing with the relation between friendship (amicitia) and self-sufficiency (ἀυταρκεία), emphasizes that the ideal sage who is self-sufficient naturally wants to have friends, not so they can help him in his need, but so he can help his friends. Therefore, the main element of Seneca’s view of friendship is the importance of amicitia for one’s progress towards, and the development of, virtue. Accordingly, Seneca links moral progress to friendship asserting that by training the other in virtus, he exercises his own virtus (109.12).

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