Multis erat in ore: Anecdotal and Philosophical Discourse
in Cicero’s Laelius de Amicitia

Richard O. Fletcher (The Ohio State University)

In the year 88BCE, Athenion, a Peripatetic philosopher, speaking from the rostrum built in front of the stoa of Attalus for the Roman praetors in Athens, addresses his Athenian audience, urging them to join with King Mithridates against Rome. He describes how in the face of this King’s awesome uprisings against Roman rule, ‘some [Romans] have taken refuge in the temples, prostrate before the statues of the gods, and the rest have literally become turncoats, changing from the Roman toga back to the original square himation of the Greeks.’ (Posidonius F253). Meanwhile, in the same year, in Rome, sitting in his house at a semicircular portico, before the young Cicero and a small number of friends, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, inspired by a recent political event, narrates the story of the occasion, in his own youth, when he heard Gaius Laelius the Wise hold forth on his philosophy of friendship.

These two contemporaneous events – these two discourses – are transmitted via the texts of Posidonius’ Histories and Cicero’s Laelius de amicitia. This paper shall explore the strategies by which philosophical learning is enacted by how the Ciceronian text engages with the Posidonian text. This engagement, I shall argue, is not only based on the contemporaneous events of the two discourses that these texts inscribe, but also the means of inscription itself – that is, the way in which anecdotal narrative operates to transmit a philosophical message.

For example, at the beginning of Laelius de amicitia, Cicero relates how Scaevola used to talk a great deal (multa narrare) about his father-in-law, Laelius. Later in the text, with the reported account of Laelius’ philosophy of friendship well under way, the projected speaker abruptly cuts short his narrative, stating that his audience should rather inquire of those who lecture (disputant) on these matters, rather than ask him (24). This reluctance to continue with the discussion is dismissed by Laelius’ interlocutors, Scaevola and Fannius, and works to split the preceding generalised praises of friendship from the rather more analytical discussion which follows. Between the opening references to the many matters narrated by Scaevola and those specifically on friendship referred to by Laelius, at the beginning of the text we have Cicero’s own role in the transmission of the philosophy of friendship. Cicero states that he committed to memory many learned arguments of Scaevola (multa…disputata,). This statement thus conflates the later statement of Laelius (multa ab eis…disputant). He then moves to the specific occasion at which Scaevola recounted Laelius’ account of friendship, which is one among many of his remembrances (cum saepe multa, 1.1). Thus, Laelius’ later reluctance to speak, in spite of there being a great deal left to say about friendship, can be read in relation to the projected mode of transmission that Cicero encountered in his own narrative of Laelius’ discourse on friendship.

This paper investigates how Laelius de amicitia produces this variety of discourse in its articulation of a Roman philosophical identity, ranging from anecdotal narratives to philosophical dispute, to construct a unique mode of Roman philosophical discourse.