Five-minute digest
On Duties (De Officiis)
Summary
On Duties is Cicero's last philosophical work, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in the months after the murder of Julius Caesar, and addressed as a letter in three books to his son Marcus, then studying philosophy at Athens under the Peripatetic Cratippus. Cicero follows, with freedom, the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, whose treatise on duty (kathēkon, Latin officium) he adapts for a Roman reader, adding examples from Roman history and from his own career. Book I treats the honestum, the morally good or honourable. Cicero derives all duty from four sources of virtue: wisdom, the perception of truth; justice together with beneficence, which hold human society together; greatness of spirit, or fortitude; and seemliness (decorum), the propriety and moderation that make a life consistent. Under justice he insists that no one may harm another unless provoked by wrong, that private property be respected, that promises be kept, that wars be waged only for peace and fought with good faith, and that even slaves be treated as hired labourers who receive their due. He ranks the claims of country, parents, children, kin and friends, and he argues that the statesman's courage in civil affairs can be greater than the general's in war, citing his own consulship. The book ends with practical counsel about speech, dress, conversation, houses and the choice of a career. Book II treats the utile, the expedient or advantageous: how a man wins the goodwill, trust and admiration of others. Cicero argues that it is far better to be loved than feared, that real glory rests on justice, and that liberality should be sensible rather than ruinous; he condemns the confiscations of Sulla and Caesar. Book III addresses the apparent conflict between the honourable and the expedient, which Panaetius promised but never wrote. Cicero's rule is that nothing can truly be expedient that is not honourable. He tests it on hard cases: the ring of Gyges, the corn merchant who arrives at starving Rhodes ahead of other ships, the house seller who conceals defects, the swindle of Pythius the banker, and above all Marcus Atilius Regulus, who returned to torture at Carthage rather than break his oath. The work became one of the most read books of moral philosophy in Europe: St Ambrose modelled a treatise for clergy on it, and it was among the first classical texts printed (Mainz, 1465). The library's text is Cyrus R. Edmonds's nineteenth-century Bohn translation, an OCR copy that also carries his footnotes and, after Book III, Cicero's dialogue On Friendship.
Top Lessons
The honourable and the useful are one
Cicero's central claim is that a real conflict between what is right and what is advantageous is an illusion; the apparent conflict arises when people misjudge what benefits them. Book III tests the claim against cases where deceit or oath-breaking seem to pay.
Duties ranked by closeness
Cicero does not treat all obligations as equal. He ranks the claims of country, parents, children, household, kin and friends, and he adds that circumstances change the ranking, so that a neighbour may have the better claim at harvest and a kinsman in court.
Justice even toward enemies
In Book I Cicero argues that war is waged only so that people may live in peace without injury, that promises to an enemy must be kept, and that the conquered who were not cruel should be spared. These pages fed into later Christian and early modern writing on just war.
Fitting conduct and one's own nature
Decorum asks a person to act in keeping with human nature and with his own particular gifts, station and stage of life. Cicero tells Marcus to choose a calling that fits his character rather than imitate another's.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“But (as has been strikingly said by Plato) we are not born for ourselves alone, and our country claims her share, and our friends their share of us”
“Now the foundation of justice is faithfulness, which is a perseverance and truth in all our declarations and in all our promises.”
Frequently cited
“fraud being the property of a fox, force that of a lion ; both are utterly repugnant to society, but fraud is the more detestable.”
“we ought to regard, to cultivate, and to promote the good will and the social welfare of all mankind.”
“Now, of all things there is none more adapted for supporting and retaining our influence than to be loved, nor more prejudicial than to be feared.”
“that he was never less at leisure than when at leisure, nor less alone than when he was alone.”
“nothing is expedient which is not likewise virtuous”
Medical Lens
On Duties is not a medical work, but it shows how an educated Roman placed medicine and health within a moral life. Cicero ranks medicine with architecture and teaching as an honourable calling for those of suitable rank, a mark of the status of physicians (often Greek) in late Republican Rome. He uses the physician's practice of matching gentle remedies to mild illness and strong remedies to grave disease as a model for prudence in danger. In Book II he records the Stoic Antipater's complaint that Panaetius omitted the care of health, and summarizes it as knowing one's own constitution, observing what helps or harms, temperance in food and comfort, and resort to the skill of those whose art it is. The Stoic picture of virtue as governing the passions belongs to the long tradition of philosophy as care of the soul.
- Book I, ch. XXIV
The prudent man in danger is compared to physicians who use gentle medicines for gentle illnesses and stronger, riskier cures for dangerous diseases.
- Book I, ch. XLII
Medicine, architecture and the liberal arts listed as honourable professions for those whose station they suit.
- Book II, end
Antipater of Tyre's addition of the care of health: self-knowledge of the body, temperance, and the help of the medical art.