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[Illustration: MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO]

De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream

By Cicero


Translated, with an Introduction and Notes

By Andrew P. Peabody



SYNOPSIS.

*       *       *       *       *

DE AMICITIA

1. Introduction.

2. Reputation of Laelius for wisdom. The curiosity to know how he bore
the death of Scipio.

3. His grounds of consolation in his bereavement

4. He expresses his faith in immortality. Desires perpetual memory in
this world of the friendship between himself and Scipio.

5. True friendship can exist only among good men.

6. Friendship defined.

7. Benefits derived from friendship.

8. Friendship founded not on need, but on nature.

9. The relation of utility to friendship.

10. Causes for the separation of friends.

11. How far love for friends may go.

12. Wrong never to be done at a friend's request.

13. Theories that degrade friendship

14. How friendships are formed.

15. Friendlessness wretched.

16. The limits of friendship.

17. In what sense and to what degree friends are united. How friends are
to be chosen and tested.

18. The qualities to be sought in a friend.

19. Old friends not to be forsaken for new.

20. The duties of friendship between persons differing in ability, rank,
or position.

21. How friendships should be dissolved, and how to guard against the
necessity of dissolving them.

22. Unreasonable expectations of friends. Mutual respect necessary in
true friendship.

23. Friendship necessary for all men.

24. Truth-telling, though it often gives offence, an essential duty from
friend to friend.

25. The power of truth. The arts of flattery.

26. Flattery availing only with the feeble-minded.

27. Virtue the soul of friendship. Laelius describes the intimacy of the
friendship between himself and Scipio.


*       *       *       *       *


SCIPIO'S DREAM.

1. Scipio's visit to Masinissa. Circumstances under which the dream
occurred.

2. Appearance of the elder Africanus, and of his own father, to Scipio.
Prophecy of Scipio's successes and honors, with an intimation of his
death by the hands of his kindred.

3. Conditions on which heaven may be won.

4. The nine spheres that constitute the universe.

5. The music of the spheres.

6. The five zones of the earth.

7. Brevity and worthlessness of earthly fame.

8. All souls eternal.

9. The soul to be trained for immortality. The fate of those who merge
their souls in sense.




INTRODUCTION

DE AMICITIA.

The _De Amicitia_, inscribed, like the _De Senectute_, to Atticus, was
probably written early in the year 44 B.C., during Cicero's retirement,
after the death of Julius Caesar and before the conflict with Antony.
The subject had been a favorite one with Greek philosophers, from whom
Cicero always borrowed largely, or rather, whose materials he made
fairly his own by the skill, richness, and beauty of his elaboration,
Some passages of this treatise were evidently suggested by Plato; and
Aulus Gellius says that Cicero made no little use of a now lost essay of
Theophrastus on Friendship.

In this work I am especially impressed by Cicero's dramatic power. But
for the mediocrity of his poetic genius, he might have won pre-eminent
honor from the Muse of Tragedy. He here so thoroughly enters into the
feelings of Laelius with reference to Scipio's death, that as we read we
forget that it is not Laelius himself who is speaking. We find ourselves
in close sympathy with him, as if he were telling us the story of his
bereavement, giving utterance to his manly fortitude and resignation and
portraying his friend's virtues from the unfading image phototyped on
his own loving memory. In other matters too Cicero goes back to the time
of Laelius and assumes his point of view assigning to him just the
degree of foresight which he probably possessed and making not the
slightest reference to the very different aspect in which he himself had
learned to regard and was wont to represent the personages and events of
that earlier period. Thus while Cicero traced the downfall of the
republic to changes in the body politic that had taken place or were
imminent and inevitable when Scipio died he makes Laelius perceive only
a slight though threatening deflection from what had been in the earlier
time [Footnote 1]. So too though Cicero was annoyed more than by almost
any other characteristic of his age by the prevalence of the Epicurean
philosophy and ascribed to it in a very large degree the demoralization
of men in public life with Laelius the doctrines of this school are
represented as they must have been in fact as new and unfamiliar. In
time Laelius is