No one will ever write anything more wise, more true, or more useful. From now on, those whose ambition it is to give men instruction, to provide them with precepts, will be charlatans if they want to rise above you, or will all be your imitators.
VOLTAIRE (1771)
This work, which exercised so unparalleled an influence from the early Fathers until the nineteenth century.(pp. 25 ff.), is a manual of right behaviour and civics, ostensibly addressed to the writer’s son Marcus who was studying at Athens (and who had the instincts not of a philosopher but of a hard-drinking soldier). In the first two of its three Books Cicero has drawn heavily upon the eminent Greek Stoic, Panaetius of Cos (c. 185–109 B.C.),1 the writer of a book with a similar title in which he endeavoured to relate the austere Stoic morality to the practical needs of contemporary public and commercial life. The first Book of Cicero’s work discusses Moral Right, the second Advantage, and this third Book deals with a problem with which life confronts us every day: namely, what is to be done when right and advantage seem to clash. He concludes by pointing out that such clashes can only be apparent, never real, and this gives him occasion to reassert the supremacy of moral considerations over all others. In this part of the treatise Cicero shows many signs of drawing away from Panaetius, who had never carried out his declared intention of tackling this branch of the subject. Cicero calls upon other Stoics, including a contemporary – Athenodorus Calvus, who summarized for him, as we know from a letter, a relevant work by the Stoic polymath Posidonius of Apamea in Syria. But on the whole, as Cicero himself states and as his wealth of Roman illustrations and anecdotes (not to speak of the unphilosophical structure of the book) confirms, he is now writing independently and in accordance with his own experience and his own interpretation of what he has read. The result is a remarkable discussion of how a Roman citizen ought to meet the various problems of his life. Cicero, interpreting life as a complex of obligations to others as well as oneself, offers a splendid testimony to the beliefs in human cooperation which he so enthusiastically confirmed from his readings of the Stoics, and yet tempered with his own undogmatic good sense.
Such a study follows naturally enough after the works on cosmology and theology which he had recently completed.1 Yet On Duties also had a topical significance: for, although perhaps not published until after Cicero’s death (this may account for some textual uncertainties), the book was for the most part written between September and November 44 B.C., during that very same astonishingly productive period of Cicero’s life which produced the Philippics and so much else. This accounts for its bitter incidental allusions to the suppression of Roman public life by the autocracies of Caesar and Antony. One of Cicero’s letters indicates that Atticus (though he helped him to choose the title of the present work) sought to divert him to history as a safe subject. For although the illustrations are mostly derived from early rather than contemporary events – a device later used by the satirist Juvenal – the whole spirit of this analysis of a Roman’s duty to his Commonwealth was fundamentally, if for the most part obliquely, as hostile to tyranny as the Second Philippic (Chapter 3). On Duties represents an attempt to provide a moral code for an aristocracy liberated from one tyranny and in danger of being enslaved by another – the loss of political rights being clearly recognized as a corrupter of moral values. Cicero himself seems to have regarded this treatise as his spiritual testament and masterpiece.
I. PERSONAL STATEMENT TO CICBRO’S SON
II. A PRACTICAL CODE
III. THE UNNATURALNESS OF DOING WRONG
IV. DIFFICULT MORAL DECISIONS
V. TEST CASES IN MYTH AND HISTORY
VI. TEST CASES IN BUSINESS
VII. SHARP PRACTICE AND THE LAW
VIII. RESPECTED MEN AT FAULT IX.
IX IS HONESTY ALWAYS NECESSARY?
X. OBJECTIONS TO HEROISM
XI. THE FALLACY OF PLEASURE