Amicitia
amicitia
For Cicero, *amicitia* is not a transaction of services but the perfect harmony of two souls united by mutual affection, and its sole foundation is virtue: without it, there is no true friendship. It does not arise from our weakness—it does not fill a void—but from a natural inclination that recognizes integrity in another. Hence his formula: a friend is “another self,” and true friendship, because nature does not change, is eternal.
L'amitié n'est autre chose que le parfait accord de deux âmes sur les choses divines et humaines, avec une bienveillance et une affection mutuelles.
The Latin amicitia stems from amare, to love: “the word for friendship comes from loving,” Cicero notes. The term thus first denotes affection, not an alliance of interests. Its object, the amicus, is conceived as an alter idem—another self, a second I in whom one recognizes oneself. “To have a friend is to have another self”: the phrase makes the friend a part of the lover, not a useful adjunct set beside them.
What founds such friendship is virtue alone. Cicero states this plainly: “without virtue, there can be no true friendship.” Friendship has “its principle in nature rather than in our weakness”: it does not remedy a lack but unites those who, already finding their resources within themselves, are precisely the most capable of love. From this origin comes its stability: “If interest formed the bond of friendship, interest, once changed, could not fail to break it. But since nature cannot change, true friendship is eternal.”
Three things a single word may encompass, which must be kept distinct. Ciceronian amicitia—born of virtue, where the friend completes life to the point that losing them would be “to take the sun from the world”—is not the friendship of interest, that “bargain” which ends when the advantage that gave it birth vanishes. Nor is it quite the friendship of the Stoic sage, who suffices for their own happiness and makes friends only to exercise virtue—here, the friend does not complete but overflows an already full soul (see apatheia, beatitudo). Friendship-as-virtue ≠ friendship-as-interest ≠ friendship-as-surplus of the sage: one word, three ways of loving.