Prietenia ca virtute la Cicero în De amicitia
Friendship as Virtue in De Amicitia of Cicero

Summary/Abstract: Marcus Tullius Cicero is famous as orator, politician and author of rhetoric treaties but in this paper we also emphasize that he is at least equally philosopher and moralist. It is true, he is not a philosopher as Platon or Aristotel, but he bequathed us moral principles which are aplicable in our daily life, being a critic of the Stoics in issues such as ‘wisdom’, ‘virtue’ and ‘friendship’. Cicero is considered a representative of The New Probabilistic Academy, but in the issue of friendship he agrees more with Aristotel, for whom friendship is a virtue, or at least they are inseparable as he mentions since the beginning of The Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero adopts Greek philosophical principles, but he adjusts them to the Roman reality, he is not only the creator of a Latin philosophical language that has been being bequathed till nowadays, but especially, the founder of the Roman philosophy. Laelius sive De amicitia (Laelius or About friendship) is a small treaty of moral practice conceived as a discussion among Laelius and his two sons-in-law, Q. Mucius Scaevola and Fannius, through which Cicero proposes to demonstrate that friendship after wisdom is the most valuable thing of humans.

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