‘Amicitia’ in the Late Roman Republic

Abstract

In describing a close political union Sallust observes haec inter bonos amicitia, inter malos factio est (BJ 31, 15). This remark may be taken as a text for a fashionable interpretation of amicitia in the late Roman Republic. Professor Lily Ross Taylor writes that ‘the old Roman substitute for party is amicitia’ and that ‘friendship was the chief basis of support for candidates for office, and amicitia was the good old word for party relationships’. Again, Sir Ronald Syme says that ‘amicitia was a weapon of politics, not a sentiment based on congeniality’ and he maintains that ‘Roman political factions were welded together, less by unity of principle than by mutual interest and by mutual services (officia), either between social equals as an alliance, or from superior to inferior, in a traditional and almost feudal form of clientship: on a favourable estimate the bond was called amicitia, otherwise factio’. On this view, if a Roman called a man amicus, it meant that he was a political ally, or a member of what in eighteenth-century England could have been described as the same ‘connexion’.

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