‘Amicitia’ in the Late Roman Republic

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’.