ABSTRACT
There is no author who has been as significant in articulating and developing ideas about friendship as Cicero, and no modern text that can compare to his De amicitia in its influence on the ways in which friendship was understood and written about over the following centuries. On the contrary, few modern philosophical works even consider friendship and none has come to be seen as indispensable to anyone currently engaged in writing about it. Friendship was certainly discussed in sermons, letters and essays in the late eighteenth century, but increasingly towards the century’s end and throughout the nineteenth century, it is to fiction rather than to philosophy that one needs to turn to find extended discussions of friendship.
