De Amicitia: Love, Death, and a Friendship to Come

Abstract Dramatically placed as a follow-up to De Re Publica, although composed ten years later in a flurry of philosophical activity after the assassination of Julius Caesar, De Amicitia presents Laelius reflecting on his friendship with the recently deceased Scipio. This sequel to Scipio’s dream of ascending to the music of the spheres is a reflection on death, loss, and the meaning of a passion called friendship. What we will see is that, while enjoyment and oratory ultimately encompassed philosophy, the rational, and the true in De Oratore, and De Re Publica’s prioritization of human action, of virtus as performance, over the strictly rational was expressed as a vision of immortal transcendence in the figure of the dream, the end point of this trajectory is both loss and yet the continuing desire for a fulfillment only the other can provide (De Amicitia), which is expressed as love, friendship, and community. Passion and enjoyment are in these dialogues never subordinated to pure abstraction, to the bloodless concepts of philosophers. The rational arguments for the truth of these positions cannot be separated from the passions that gave rise to them. It is because of this ideal fusion of the universal and the particular, of the rational and the pathetic, that these arguments have their force: first at the level of conviction and persuasion; then as embodied in political organization and history; and finally, as lived in our interpersonal relations with the other who is the exemplar of the self.