Cicero on friendship and falsity
/Kevin D Williamson, in his newsletter today, has a trenchant examination of disordered priorities. Specifically, when we mistake “second things” for “first things” we fail to attain either, as in discarding principles for political expediency. He reflects at length on lying and invokes Cicero’s De Amicitia, “On Friendship,” from which we get the principle Esse quam videri—To be rather than to seem. Cicero, speaking through the main character of the dialogue, Laelius:
“Many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue. Such men delight in flattery, and, when a complimentary remark is fashioned to suit their fancy, they think the empty phrase is proof of their own merits. There is nothing, therefore, in a friendship in which one of the parties to it does not wish to hear the truth and the other is ready to lie.”
Those who don’t want to hear the truth, and those who are prepared to lie—a familiar arrangement, but not friendship. It’s more akin to prostitution, as Cicero makes clear in an allusion to a comedy by Terence, in which a prostitute uses hyperbole to praise the prowess of a recent john. The same example was picked up Dante, who placed the prostitute in the circle of the flatterers in Inferno.
These are perversions of friendship. Elsewhere in De Amicitia, Cicero, through the speaker, Laelius, writes prescriptively:
“Therefore, let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.”
Truth is both the basis and the fruit of real friendship, which is founded on virtue. “Virtue,” Cicero writes, “both creates the bond of friendship and perserves it,” but can’t be gotten by a mercenary pursuit of either virtue or friendship.
“But [friendship] is nothing other than the great esteem and affection felt for him who inspires that sentiment, and its is not sought because of material need or for the sake of material gain. Nevertheless even this blossoms forth from friendship, although you did not make it your aim.”
Williamson also invokes CS Lewis in this passage of his newsletter, and while he did not mention this particular line of Lewis’s, the following from Mere Christianity inevitably came to mind:
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation along as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.
Be, don’t seem, and you might find that, simply by being, you begin to seem.
The translation of De Amicitia above is that of WA Falconer, from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. You can read the whole thing here. An excellent recent translation is that of Philip Freeman for the Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. Read the entirety of Williamson’s newsletter here. Come for the dachshund puppy story, stay for the razor sharp Cicero-inspired examination of the sacrifice of truth for political gain. It’s worth your while.
