Cicero · Politics
Cicero’s two beloved late dialogues - On Old Age and On Friendship - and their humane wisdom about how to grow old well and what makes a true friend.
In one of his most beloved late works, On Old Age (De Senectute), written when he was past sixty, Cicero sets out to console himself and others against the common dread of growing old. He puts his arguments in the mouth of Cato the Elder, the venerable Roman, who confronts the four great complaints against old age: that it withdraws us from active life, that it weakens the body, that it deprives us of pleasures, and that it brings us near to death. To each, Cicero offers a thoughtful reply. Old age withdraws us from some activities but opens us to others - the activities of mind, counsel, and wisdom, which often matter most; it weakens the body but this can be managed by temperate living, and the loss of bodily strength is more than compensated by the gains of experience and judgment; it lessens some pleasures but frees us from the tyranny of the appetites that enslaved our youth; and it brings us near death, but death is nothing to fear. Old age, rightly lived, is not a misery to be dreaded but can be the most rewarding and serene season of life.
Cicero’s consolation comes with an important condition: old age is good for those who have prepared for it by living well. The serenity, authority, and contentment of a good old age are not automatic gifts of age itself but the harvest of a life of virtue, moderation, and cultivation of the mind. ‘The best armour of old age,’ Cicero writes, ‘is a well-spent life preceding it.’ The person who has lived intemperately, neglected their mind, and built their happiness on bodily pleasure and external goods will find old age a wretched decline, stripped of the pleasures they depended on and possessing no inner resources to replace them. But the person who has cultivated wisdom, practised virtue, and laid up the resources of a rich inner life will find that age brings these resources to fruition - that the mind, unlike the body, can grow stronger and richer with the years, and that a life well lived ripens, rather than rots, in its final season. Old age, like the rest of life, reaps what was sown; the contentment of the end is earned in the living.
In On Friendship (De Amicitia), Cicero offers one of the warmest tributes to friendship in all of literature, calling it among the very greatest of human goods - second only to wisdom itself. Friendship, he argues, doubles our joys and halves our sorrows; it provides counsel, support, and understanding; it draws out the best in us; it makes prosperity more delightful and adversity more bearable; and in the friend we find, as it were, a second self, another in whom we can confide our whole heart. A life without friends, however rich in other goods, is impoverished and lonely; with friends, even a hard life is blessed. True friendship requires honesty (including the willingness to give and receive frank advice), loyalty, constancy, and equality of affection; it cannot be bought or faked, and it grows only between those of genuine virtue. Cicero’s tribute, drawn from his own deep friendships and written in part to honour his dead friend Scipio, has made De Amicitia one of the most cherished meditations on friendship ever written.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Cicero’s teaching that true friendship rests on virtue and is loved for its own sake. Three centuries earlier, Aristotle had given the classic analysis of friendship, distinguishing its kinds. State how Aristotle’s account frames the highest friendship.
Leads to Aristotle.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.