De Amicitia Research Articles

Friendship and the Common Good in Julius Caesar

Abstract This essay proposes a new reading of Julius Caesar’s account of friendship that also illuminates Shakespeare’s broader communitarian political attitudes. It argues that the ‘quarrel’ (or reconciliation) scene between Brutus and Cassius presents a crucial turn in the play’s closely meditated account of amity. This sheds new light on Shakespeare’s response to two classical sources: Cicero’s De Amicitia and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulius, whose opening provides the model for this sequence. The significance of how Brutus and Cassius settle their differences, as well as their refusal to believe the enemy is always occulted within the friend, has been under-estimated. The high-minded ideals of Ciceronian amicitia seem wildly remote from the play’s exposure of how friendship works in political life. We witness it being made serviceable to ambitions and held in bad faith: Cicero acknowledges these possibilities too. Yet the neglected later sequences of Julius Caesar tell a different story about friendship that emphasizes its role in promoting commonalty and reconciliation. The tragedy lies in the loss of this potential.

Encounters in Friendship with Nepos, Cicero, Atticus, and Rex Stem

Abstract This article offers a critical appraisal of approaches to ‘friendship’ (amicitia) in Cornelius Nepos’s Atticus and Cicero’s De Amicitia, as found in the scholarship of Rex Stem and Grant Nelsestuen. In light of the former’s untimely passing in 2020, it uses an exchange of personal correspondence in 2019 between these two scholars – as well as John Alexander Lobur’s 2021 book on Nepos – as a basis for sketching new approaches to the role that friendship plays in Nepos’s biographies. Friendship thus turns out to be both an important aspect of Nepos’ political thought and a crucial means for advancing scholarly understanding of Nepos’ project in Atticus and his other biographies.

IL CIRCOLO VIRTUOSO: SCIPIONE EMILIANO E I SUOI AMICI NELL’IMMAGINE DI CICERONE

The image transmitted by Cicero especially in the De re publica and in the Laelius de amicitia has fueled the traditional thesis on the so-called ‘scipionic circle’: philhellenism, with more specific reference to the names of Polybius and Panaetius, would have had a profound impact in Rome already from the middle of the second century B.C. on the customs, ideals and philosophical vocation of the group of aristocrats who gather around the charismatic figure of Scipio Aemilianus. However, more recent studies have strongly questioned whether the cultural process activated by the encounter with Greek thought could have already evolved a century before Cicero, within a ruling class that still too much resembles the Horatian ferus victor; and also Cicero in other works represents the main figures of that group in a less idealized way on a cultural level, starting with Scipio himself and his friend Laelius.

Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés

Reviewed by: Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés Aliza Levenson (bio) and Ana Laguna (bio) Luis F. Avilés. Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN: 978-84-16922-04-8. Luis Avilés's title, Avatares de lo invisible, alludes to the wide range of figurative and literal spaces that manifest their weight in the fluid subjectivities (racial, ethnic, and gendered) portrayed by Spanish Golden Age literature. If some loci are unsurprising in this spatial inquiry—the house, the court, the battlefield—the nuanced analysis of how selected texts position their subjects existentially, socially, and politically results in new and refreshing revelations. Avilés illustrates the experiential consequences of these spatial appropriations, demonstrating how both physical spaces and invisible liminalities shape literary characters and topoi in the early modern cultural tradition. The interwoven relationship between self and space is revealed in the idea of "amor distante y de oídas," explored in the first chapter. Avilés reads texts like Ibn Hazm de Córdoba's El Collar de la paloma, Razón de Amor, and Don Quijote, highlighting a spatially mediated concept of love that recalls classical referents like Cicero's De amicitia. In the second chapter, Avilés leaves love behind to focus on the view of the court presented by Antonio Guevara in his Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539). Here, he deconstructs the idea of self-fashioning through a granular exploration of how the court's public and private spaces determine the internal and external selves of courtly subjects, who are painfully aware of the official processes and "invisible" machinations that might approve of, support, or betray them. For Avilés, the weight of this pressured awareness is akin to a yoke, un yugo, that severely limits the subject's freedom of movement. Avilés reads a similar environment in Guevara's idea of aldea: an external space almost as threatening to one's internal self as the court, despite the apparently greater liberties that this rural escape affords. In his third chapter, Avilés complicates the idea of an external and "prescriptive" space of conflict by focusing on the Christian and Moorish frontier of Granada, which he reads as a hybrid space shaped as much by dialogue and exchange as by conflict and warfare. In El Abencerraje, those opposing forces are manifested in the warring antagonists, Abencerraje and Abindarráez, who, despite being formidable opponents, are able to craft—thanks to the erosion of war and the vulnerability of exile—an intimate space conducive to mutual understanding, and even kinship. Contrary to historical reality, and to Covarrubias's view of the borderland as a site of clear division between lands [End Page 206] and political jurisdictions (107), Avilés sees the frontier as a porous, liminal space full of varying possibilities for dialogue and cooperation. The last chapter explores, through Lazarillo de Tormes, a much different space: the domestic environment that signifies both a shelter and a social achievement (un buen puerto). Avilés insists on the shelter dimension, since the domestic space allows the early modern subject a place to hide, to remain invisible from the social pressures or external expectations that surround him. This notion that the subject is an aspiring, autonomous entity shaped in relation to others is supported by critics like Judith Butler and Nietzsche and correlated, on a purely literary level, to the anonymity of the novel. For Avilés, such anonymity is not coincidental, as it provides the author a larger narrative autonomy, and even shelter from social and moral constraints (157). Specialists and students of the Spanish Golden Age will appreciate the wide array of literary sources and theoretical approaches employed in Avilés analysis, which includes—besides Cicero, Butler, and Nietzsche, critics like Foucault and Claudio Guillén. Through this eclectic framework, the author provides an intriguing view of early modern subjectivity in constant dialogue with its surrounding spatial demarcation. Rather than presenting a world turned into a stage, Avilés uncovers the disparate worlds of separate stages that determine...

Knight's Moves: The Son-in-law in Cicero and Tacitus

While the relationship between fathers and sons, real or metaphorical, is still a dominant paradigm among classicists, this paper considers the rival contribution of Roman sons-in-law to the processes of collaboration and succession. It discusses the tensions, constraints, and obligations that soceri–generi relationships involved, then claims a significant role for sons-in-law in literary production. A new category is proposed here: “son-in-law literature,” with texts offered as recompense for a wife or her dowry, or as substitute funeral orations. Cicero and Tacitus are two authors for whom the relationship played a key role in shaping realities and fantasies of advancement. The idealized in-law bonds of De Amicitia, Brutus, and De Oratore are set against Cicero's intellectual aspirations and real-life dealings with a challenging son-in-law, while Tacitus' relationship to Agricola can be seen to affect both his historiographical discussions of father–son-in-law relationships and the lessons he drew from them about imperial succession.

Idealizing a Life of Friendship: Cicero's De Amicitia in Nepos's Life of Atticus

This paper argues that Cornelius Nepos when composing his Life of Atticus incorporated principles articulated in Cicero's De Amicitia yet broadened them to fit his presentation of Atticus as an ideal friend. The connections between Nepos, Atticus, and Cicero are reviewed, and the correspondences between the two texts are collected and contextualized. Cicero's elevation of true friendship over transactional friendship provides Nepos the rhetorical stance and moral basis to justify Atticus's practice even as Nepos discards Cicero's ideal of paired friends and renders Atticus an ideal friend to all.

A Matter of prudentia: Atticus and His Friends in Nepos and Cicero

In Life of Atticus, Nepos offers amicitia as a defining feature of his subject’s remarkable life, yet a critical re-examination of the biography and a recognition of the terms of its intertextual engagement with Cicero’s De Amicitia and De Republica reveal that, for as much as Nepos valorizes Atticus’s practice of friendship, he also offers up a subtle critique of it. In so doing, Nepos presents Atticus as an exemplum of a new “prudential” form of amicitia—one that aids some friends and benefits himself at the expense of core Republican political values and civic virtues.

Rosalind and Celia

This paper focuses on the relationship between Rosalind and Celia from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The study investigates a hitherto undiscovered link between their friendship and that of David and Jonathan from the Bible. Both friendships are analysed in the context of the classical and Renaissance discourse on amicitia perfecta, highlighting the most important features of idealised friendship from Cicero’s De Amicitia and Montaigne’s essay On Friendship. Furthermore, amicitia perfecta is proposed as a new, alternative framework to understand the relationship of Rosalind and Celia, which is often discussed in the context of homoerotic desire. Finally, the essay emphasises the significance of the fact that the ideal friends presented in Shakespeare’s comedy are female in a culture when women were thought to be excluded from, and incapable of, true friendship.

El destino del alma en el pensamiento de Cicerón (con una apostilla sobre las huellas ciceronianas en Dante)

In his philosophical works, Cicero rationally considers death to be either the end of man or the passage of the soul to a better state. Though he sentimentally fells closer to the latter idea. The Consolatio takes a special position, in that it unconditionally accepts the immortality of the soul and eternal retribution, the alternative now concerning rewards and punishments. He seems to consider his daughter’s survival as depending from his efforts to this effect, and does not appear to expect a reunion with her after his own death. In the Divine Comedy Dante takes advantage of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis to describe his view of the universe from the Heaven of Fixed Stars, and in his Convivio uses the De amicitia and specially the De senectute in order to prove the immortality of the soul. To do so, he presents as the absolute truth the arguments employed by Cicero to illustrate the positive side of the Socratic alternative.

Con Cicerón por los caminos (zigzagueantes) de la amistad

Considerations about the evolution of the concept of "friendship", just as Cicero understands it, along the history (individual, social, political and religious friendship). Repetitions and interpretations of his definition and of other ciceronian texts. His influence on several authors (such as Augustinus, Isidorus Hispalensis, Rabanus Maurus, Petrus Venerabilis) and, above all, on the mediaeval treaties De amicitia written by Aelredus Rievallensis and Petrus Blessensis.

Avatares de lo invisible: espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés

Reviewed by: Avatares de lo invisible: espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro by Luis F. Avilés Alicia R. Zuese Avilés, Luis F. Avatares de lo invisible: espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2017. 227 pp. Luis F. Avilés's Avatares de lo invisible: espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro starts from the notion that the texts studied conjure "spaces" that may be inaccessible or imperceptible: the beloved, the court, the frontier, and the home. Avilés details how characters enunciate strategies to grapple with their subjectivities in these spaces, and how these discourses enable readers to perceive the effects of their sociopolitical contexts. Avilés focuses on a wide range of primary texts, reaching beyond the title's announced Golden Age to include some classical and medieval works. Several chapters revise previous publications dating from as far back as 2001, whereas others, such as chapter four on Lazarillo de Tormes, represent new areas of inquiry. It is refreshing to see Avilés weave his studies together so carefully, to the point that he revises conclusions of previous publications in light of his new insights, specifically regarding El celoso extremeño (208). Avilés engages throughout his book with a range of theorists, including Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, in addition to well-known Hispanists. He seldom dialogs with scholars of visual or spatial studies such as Fernando R. de la Flor, whose approach he rejects due to "su excesiva defensa de lo visual" (9), or Enrique García Santo-Tomás, who is, however, cited briefly and acknowledged for reading the manuscript. Avilés also infrequently enters into debates surrounding gender or ethnic studies, as might have been expected given the spaces on which he focuses. Instead, he interrogates the works through close readings and attention to key words ("adamado," "casa encantada"). The book [End Page 1015] is organized into four chapters with footnotes, a brief preface, a conclusion, a bibliography of works cited, and an index of names. Chapter one, which focuses on "el amor distante y de oídas," or how characters conjure the image of the distant beloved, approaches the topic through the most wide-ranging sources: in classical works of philosophy (Cicero's De amicitia), a medieval Hispano-Arabic love treatise (Ibn Hazm's El collar de la paloma), troubadour poetry, a medieval Castilian love poem, and in relation to the role of Dulcinea in Don Quijote. The verbal portraits of Dulcinea by Cervantes's characters parody the techniques for visualizing the distant beloved that Avilés presents in the first part of the chapter. The coexistence of competing discourses representing Dulcinea—by Don Quijote, Sancho, the duke and duchess—reveals the "perpetua inestabilidad" of the verbal image created of the beloved (58). Chapter two investigates the court-rural duality in Menosprecio de la corte y alabanza de la aldea through Antonio de Guevara's advice to courtiers to manage the obstacles for handling their identities inherent in both spaces. Guevara extols privacy, cautioning his audience to investigate the lives of others from a legal perspective, instead of prying, while trying to achieve self-knowledge (65–66, 74). In Avilés's analysis, the exterior space of the court threatens the inner self, whereas the problems of boredom and leisure derail the rural village-dweller, but the pitfalls of the latter can be escaped by establishing family life in the home (79, 95, 100–01). Chapter three investigates the space of the frontier/battlefield in El Abencerraje as one of a porous "zone of contact," following Mary Louise Pratt (106). Avilés traces how Narváez's reaction to Abindarráez's sigh drives the transformation of a hostile war zone into a territory of "la amistad, el amor y la generosidad" (111–12). The moor's sigh externalizes his "interioridad velada e invisible" and his vulnerability (120, 124). For Avilés, the unexpected relationship between the supposed enemies in the permeable frontier of the fictional world displays an idealized "convivencia" that was impossible in reality (145). Chapter four is the most accessible chapter to non-specialists because Avilés...

“Mon cher ami”: Friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

Molière’s ideological position in regard to the nobility and bourgeoisie of his era is a hotly contested subject. This article contributes to this ongoing debate by offering a reading of friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. In particular, it analyses the relationship between the bourgeois protagonist, Monsieur Jourdain, and the count Dorante. It seeks to understand this relationship in terms of friendship by referring to the influential philosophical construction of friendship proposed by Cicero in Laelius de amicitia. It argues that both characters fall short of the conditions required for such a friendship, leaving them equally open to criticism. While there appears to be weightier judgment reserved for Dorante’s conduct, this is problematized by considering the cultural phenomenon of honnêteté in seventeenth-century France, which complicates the Ciceronian conception of friendship. The analysis suggests the need for a wider reading of Molière’s works to further explore this socio-cultural tension.

Friendship, temperance and the probable: Erasmus, sermo rhetoric, and the early modern English civic state

The essay explores Erasmus' development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton's printing of the translation of Cicero's De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship proposes a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus' De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero's rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.

Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives. Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix, 248. $124.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1202-7.

Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, <i>Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives</i>. Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix, 248. $124.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1202-7.

ANALIZA ZASTUPLJENOSTI FILOZOFSKIH PREDMETA I TEMA U „IZVEŠTAJIMA” NOVOSADSKE GIMNAZIJE PERIOD OD 1918-1941. GODINE

Analizu zastupljenosti filozofskih predmeta i tema u „Izveštajima” Novosadske gimnazije autor je započeo od „Izveštaja” za školsku 1918/19. godinu, dok je poslednje ispitivano bilo „Uputstvo učenicima Muške realne gimnazije Kralja Aleksandra I u Novom Sadu za školsku godinu 1940-41”. Autor je utvrdio da se ovo 23 godine dugo razdoblje može segmentirati na dva međusobno vremenski nepovezana perioda. Prvi period sastoji se od dve celine (prva, od školske 1918/19. do 1924/25. godine i druga, od školske 1930/31. do 1932/33. godine). U ovim školskim godinama Filozofija i/ili Filozofska propedeutika (Logika i Psihologija) bila je najviše zastupljena u nastavi u Gimnaziji (predavana je u dva završna razreda (VII i VIII), sa nedeljnim fondom od 4 časa). Drugi period takođe je temporalno fragmentiran (od školske 1925/26. do 1929/30. godine i od školske 1933/34. do 1940/41. godine). Položaj Filozofije i/ili Filozofske propedeutike (Logika i Psihologija, odnosno Osnovi psihologije) bio je u ovom periodu nezavidniji nego u prethodnom, sa fondom od samo 2 časa nedeljno u VIII razredu Gimnazije. Filozofske teme i literatura bili su zastupljeni u Gimnaziji i kroz kurikulume klasičnih jezika. Iz Latinskog jezika proučavana su i prevođena dela velikog oratora i rimskog eklektičara Cicerona (&lt;em&gt;De&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; imp. Gn. Pomp.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;In Catilinam Oratio&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pro Archia poeta oratio&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;De senectute&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Laelius &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;de amicitia&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;De amic.&lt;/em&gt;), radovi slavnog poznog rimskog stoičara Seneke (&lt;em&gt;De&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; divitibus&lt;/em&gt;), te prevođene neimenovane Sokratove izreke. Kada je reč o Grčkom jeziku, čitali su se i tumačili radovi Homera (&lt;em&gt;Ilijada&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Odiseja&lt;/em&gt;), Herodota (&lt;em&gt;Istorija&lt;/em&gt;), Ksenofonta (&lt;em&gt;Uspomene&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; o Sokratu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Kiropedija&lt;/em&gt;), Sofokla (&lt;em&gt;Antigona&lt;/em&gt;) i delovi Platonove &lt;em&gt;Odbrane Sokratove&lt;/em&gt;. Tokom više od dve decenije istraživanog rada Novosadske gimnazije desile su se mnoge značajne stvari, ali organizacija i izvedba nastave iz jedinog filozofskog predmeta nije automatski i dosledno pratila sve ove mene. Štaviše, nastava iz Filozofije i/ili Filozofske propedeutike u Novosadskoj gimnaziji imala je osobeni ritam evolucije, a njeno oblikovanje, mimo svih kvalitativnih i kvantitativnih promena, nije se podudaralo odnosno retko je koincidiralo sa nagoveštenim i primenjenim rešenjima i odlukama.

Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle

Reviewed by: Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle Matthew A. Wyszynski (bio) Gil-Osle, Juan Pablo. Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica 83. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013. ISBN 978-84-8489-640-1. From Antiquity through the Renaissance, friendship was an important theme both in philosophy and in literature. Books Eight and Nine of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia formed the backbone of theoretical thought about friendship, the relationship that reached its apex when formed and shared by two virtuous men. In this study, Juan Pablo Gil-Osle posits that Cervantes was writing at a time when this traditional concept of friendship was undergoing a change in accord with the way social norms [End Page 234] were changing on a wider scale. Gil-Osle captures the nuances in Cervantes’s portrayals of various friendships because he has examined these relationships not as an isolated social phenomenon or theoretical constructs, but rather as bonds that are intertwined with other social interactions, especially patronage, a social relationship both important and problematic to Cervantes. Consequently, Gil-Osle examines how Cervantes, through his fictions, illustrates the ways in which friendship was evolving away from the classical concept, though this Aristotelian paradigm was not completely rejected. Amistades imperfectas is an excellent study of the literary manifestations of the philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of friendship. The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction lays the groundwork for understanding the theory of friendship as outlined in Classical Antiquity as well as the theoretical underpinnings proposed by later philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. Each of the five chapters studies principally one of Cervantes’s works—La Galatea, La Numancia, Don Quijote, Las novelas ejemplares, and Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda. What Gil-Osle demonstrates through his analysis of these works is that Cervantes, though familiar with the concept of the highest form of amicitia as described by Aristotle and other authors of antiquity, problematizes amicitia in his fiction, and proposes alternative views of the relationship between individuals. The trajectory of the chapters demonstrates Cervantes’s multifaceted understanding of friendship, but each chapter can be read profitably in isolation from the others. Chapter one outlines how La Galatea, the “Canto de Calíope” in particular, is a reflection of the system of literary patronage as well as an expression of Cervantes’s desire to be admitted to the pantheon of contemporary intellectuals. The relationship between mecenas and client is not just one based on economics, but holds aspects in common with the characteristics of friendship. In chapter two Gil-Osle re-examines the friendship in La Numancia between Marandro and Leonicio and interprets the relationship as a reworking of the portrayal of friendship in Virgil’s Aeneid. Chapter three is a study of Cervantes’s portrayal par excellence of friendship, “El curioso impertinente,” through which, according to Gil-Osle, Cervantes shows the severe flaws in the classical notion of amicitia, perfect friendship. The subject of chapter four is the link among virtue, friendship, and harmony in the Novelas ejemplares, and Gil-Osle uses Renaissance numerology to join the themes in a convincing way. Finally, in chapter five, Gil-Osle demonstrates that there is a “secuencia evolutiva positiva” (145) of friendship in Persiles y Sigismunda, [End Page 235] and the evolution of friendship to its end, agape, is reflected in the structure of Cervantes’s Byzantine novel. In his conclusion Gil-Osle reiterates the idea that Cervantes is writing at a liminal moment in the development of friendship; early modernity questions the true nature of friendship and the possibility of its realization, and friendship based on virtue would eventually be supplanted by the ideas of the social contract, individualism and legalism propagated by Enlightenment philosophers. Overall, this book will be a good addition to the library of any Cervantes scholar, as well as to anyone interested in the evolution of the ideas of friendship in the early modern period. It is well written, gives well-structured arguments with an appropriate amount of context and supporting evidence, and includes a thorough bibliography for those interested in...

Latin Literature

Among this latest batch of books to review are a number whose endeavour, very much to my own taste, is intellectual and cultural history through the study of Latin literature. Cream of the crop is Craig Williams’ study of Roman friendship. Admirers of Williams’ excellent Roman Homosexuality, recently reissued in second edition, will recognize the approach; this is a theoretically informed and meticulously argued work of cultural history that also shows fine appreciation of philological, linguistic, and literary issues. In Chapter 1 (Men and Women), Williams has a simple and compelling point to make: basing their idealization of friendship on our male-authored ancient literary texts (Cicero's De amicitia, Seneca's Letters), the great thinkers of Western civilization have asserted that ideal friendship is a man's game, and even that women are by and large incapable of real friendship, at the very least being excluded from the most interesting parts of friendship's history. As Williams shows, the epigraphic evidence tells a different story; here we can gain a new appreciation of friendships between women, and indeed between men and women. In its divergence from the well-trodden literary tradition, the epigraphic material opens up new ways of understanding the ancient world, but it can also be used to bring a fresh perspective to familiar literary texts, especially when one is as open-minded and attentive to linguistic nuance as Williams. Chapter 2 explores some of the key conceptual issues and themes related to the (vexed) distinction between amor and amicitia, and then in Chapter 3 Williams turns to the close reading of particular Latin texts, bringing his new interpretative framework to Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius, Petronius’ Satyricon, and the letters of Cicero and of Fronto. The fourth and final chapter, ‘Friendship and the Grave’, turns again to the epigraphic evidence, and funerary inscriptions in particular, where friends are shown to play an important role in the commemoration of the dead, usually associated in the Western tradition with close family. Williams’ work showcases Classics as a vitally and productively interdisciplinary academic subject, where significant new readings can be achieved with the right methodologies and approach. He has some big claims to make about Roman society, of which ancient historians will certainly want to take note, but his fresh analysis of familiar literary texts is also highly illuminating and the book has many smaller-scale insights to offer as well.

The Discussion as Joust: Parrhesia and Friendly Antagonism in Plutarch and Montaigne

No single word in English language fully reflects polysemy of Greek term agon, which denotes entire gamut of struggles from combat to athletic contests. Antagonism, then, is defined less by origin or nature of its conflict than by mutual resistance implied by its etymology and its prefix. The term may thus be used to describe opposition not only between enemies, but between friends. It is just such a friendly antagonism that Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) describes in eighth chapter of Book Three of his Essays, Of art of (De l'art de conferer), proposing a markedly agonistic conception of discussion as a heated and even violent struggle between two parties (Pesty 119). This chapter and vigorous, yet well-intentioned and introspective give-andtake it prescribes have typically been regarded as a rejection of scholastic disputation and as a model for conversation in classical era in keeping with Pascal's description of Montaigne in l'esprit geometrique (Of Geometrical Mind) as the incomparable author of art of (357; trans. mine). (1) A number of critics, especially Vivien Thweatt, Richard Regosin, and Jules Brody, have noted Montaigne's frequent use of martial vocabulary and related it to chapter's central metaphor of discussion as a joust as well as to essayist's philosophical skepticism (Thweatt 110-12; Regosin 113-15; Brody 82). Yet, when considered in context of its preceding chapter, Of disadvantage of greatness (De l'incommodite de la grandeur; bk. 3, ch. 7), Of art of reveals its preoccupation with both friendship and politics, a preoccupation Montaigne shares with one of his principal ancient sources, Plutarch (46-120 CE). Along with Seneca, Plutarch ranks first and foremost among authors from which Montaigne learns to renger [ses] humeurs et [ses] conditions (arrange [his] humors and [his] ways; 413a; bk. 2, ch. 32; Frame 300). (2) Montaigne, unable to read Greek, read Plutarch in French translation of Jacques Amyot, to whom he gives palm over all other French writers (363a; bk. 2, ch. 4; Frame 262). He had a particular predilection for Plutarch's Moralia, mining them time and time again for exempla: Pierre Villey counts some 258 references to them in Essays (LXVII, n. 1). Nowhere is Montaigne's dialogue with Plutarch more palpable than in chapters 7-8 of Book Three, which may be read as a response to one of Moralia, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. Aside from Montaigne, this treatise enjoyed quite a prominent readership in Renaissance. Erasmus, for example, makes Flattery and Self-Love into twin handmaidens of Folly (18). The treatise's political relevance was not lost on Dutch humanist, either, as he produced a Latin translation of it in 1514 that would be included in edition of his Education of a Christian Prince two years later. In all, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, while perhaps not as widely read as Cicero's De amicitia, constituted a locus classicus for friendship and flattery: in addition to Erasmus, both Bacon and Castiglione used it extensively (Achilleos 660). When considered as a source, Plutarch's treatise makes clear thematic unity of Montaigne's two chapters: Of disadvantage of greatness details how susceptible powerful men are to flattery and how rarely they benefit from sort of parrhesia (frankness/frank speech) prescribed in Of art of discussion. Parrhesia serves to define respective antagonisms of Plutarch and Montaigne, as well as to connect friendship with political discourse. By tracing parrhesia, antagonistic friendship, and metaphors used to convey them in Plutarch and Montaigne, present study will show how both authors arrive at what may be termed an ethics of antagonism with repercussions for both friendship and politics. It will also show how Montaigne translates Plutarch culturally in same way that Amyot translates him linguistically by adapting his friendly antagonism to political context of late sixteenth-century France. …

Primeras traducciones hispánicas del tratado De amicitia de Cicerón

El propósito de este artículo es establecer cronológicamente la recepción, presencia y difusión de Cicerón en la Península Ibérica a través de las traducciones del diálogo De Amicitia hasta 1600. En él daremos cuenta de cada uno de los traductores que se encargaron de esta tarea y asimismo incluiremos cuantos datos biográficos y bibliográficos hemos encontrado. Finalmente proponemos el cotejo y comparación de fragmentos escogidos de las distintas traducciones, no sólo entre ellas, sino con respecto a un incunable latino y a una edición moderna.The aim of this article is to clarify the reception, presence and spreading of Cicero all over the Iberian Paeninsula, and more particularly to provide a deeper insight of the peninsular translations of the «De Amicitia» dialogue up to 1600 A.D. With this purpose in mind, we will list out every single translator that devoted himself to this task; and we will also include as many biographical data as we have came across. Last, but not least, we offer the collating and comparison of selected extracts from several translations, not only between them, but also regard to the original Latin version.

Can Girls Be Friends?: Talking about Gender in Cicero's de Amicitia

One of the most prominent, although often overlooked, features of Cicero's de Amicitia is that it talks exclusively about men's relationships with other men. Similarly to the pederastic system and the sexual and political assumptions of Plato and his contemporaries, the idealized Roman male affective relationships called amicitia present us with a crucial and intense form of social attachment. This essay offers strategies for encouraging students to analyze the role of gender in the theory and practice of Roman and Hellenistic amicitia , as well as in their own real-life relationships, beginning from Cicero's text.