On Duties for Seekers

Dear reader — also true, but that's the day job. De Officiis, On Duties, is something else: a long letter in three books from Marcus Tullius Cicero to his son Marcus, a student in Athens. The question it asks is what a good person ought to do, in public and in private, and how to decide when doing the right thing seems to conflict with doing the useful thing. It's the most influential book on ethics in the Roman world. And he wrote it as a father, a politician reviewing his career, and a man watching the Republic he served fall apart.

The Guy And The Year

Cicero was born in 106 BCE, the most famous orator and lawyer of the late Roman Republic, consul in 63, a defender of the Republic's traditions. In March 44 BCE Julius Caesar was assassinated. Cicero had been sidelined under Caesar's dictatorship and hoped to restore the Republic. He wrote On Duties in that window, which is why it's got a lot to say about power, fear, and what makes a ruler last. As he puts it, "I am kept by force of armed treason away from practical politics and from my practice at the bar, I am now leading a life of leisure."

His son, Marcus the younger, was about twenty-one, studying in Athens under the philosopher Cratippus. Cicero's letters suggest a pleasant but not especially diligent kid, fonder of society than of books. The book's addressed to him but clearly meant for everyone.

For the philosophy, Cicero says he follows the Greek Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes in Books I and II, whose lost treatise On Duty set out the plan. In Book III, where Panaetius left a gap, he draws on Posidonius and his own thinking. Early in Book II he explains why he turned to philosophy at all: amid the calamities of the time he's won this good out of evil, the chance to write down for his countrymen things they haven't seen in Latin.

Book I: Doing The Right Thing, Four Ways

Cicero starts with a claim about the reach of duty. Of all philosophy's questions, those on moral duty have the widest practical application, because "no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home" is without its moral duty.

Moral goodness has four sources: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. On wisdom, the love of truth, he names two errors to avoid: don't treat the unknown as known, and don't give your assent to it too hastily.

Justice, he says, is the crowning glory of the virtues, and close kin to it is kindness. And the sentence that gets quoted: "we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share." Justice rests on good faith, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements. And there are two kinds of injustice. One is committing wrong. The other is failing to prevent it when you could: "he who does not prevent or oppose wrong, if he can, is just as guilty of wrong as if he deserted his parents or his friends or his country."

On fortitude he compares public service with retirement. Neither is wholly to be condemned. Retirement is easier and safer and less burdensome to others, while the career of statecraft is more profitable to mankind and brings greater fame. But those nature has equipped for public affairs "should put aside all hesitation" and enter the race.

And against people who limit their obligations. Some would not rob a parent or brother for gain, but the rest of their fellow-citizens are another matter. Others respect citizens' rights but not foreigners'. That, he says, would destroy the universal brotherhood of man.

Book II: The Useful

Book II turns from the right to the useful. Five principles have been laid down for duty: two for the morally right, two for external advantages like means and influence, and a fifth for choosing when they seem to conflict. Then the claim that matters: separating the right from the useful is wrong. His verdict on that idea: "No more pernicious doctrine than this could be introduced into human life."

And a passage that's also a comment on the recent news. "Of all motives, none is better adapted to secure influence and hold it fast than love; nothing is more foreign to that end than fear." Whom men fear, they hate, and whom they hate, they wish dead. And those who want to be feared must be afraid of the people they intimidate. His examples from Greek history: the elder Dionysius of Syracuse, so terrified, had his hair singed off with a hot coal rather than risk a barber's razor. Alexander of Pherae, who loved his wife, would send an armed barbarian into her chamber ahead of him and have his guards search it.

Book III: When It Looks Like Right Will Cost You

The hardest part, and the part Cicero added to his Greek source. It opens with a preface on leisure. Scipio Africanus used to say he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, and never less lonely than when he was alone. Cicero wishes he could say the same. He's in forced leisure, the senate abolished, the courts closed.

His central argument is that a thing can't be useful if it's wrong. If on closer inspection some immorality attaches to what looks expedient, you're not sacrificing utility, you're seeing there was never any utility there. Nature demands harmony.

He tells his son not to waste time deciding whether to take a wrongful course: "there is guilt in their very deliberation, even though they never reach the performance of the deed itself."

To test the claim that only the right is useful, he retells Plato's story of Gyges, a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible. With it he seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes the throne of Lydia, undetected. Cicero says a wise man with that ring wouldn't imagine he's free to do wrong any more than without it. The test question: if your act could be hidden forever from gods and men, would you do it?

And his most famous example, Marcus Atilius Regulus, a Roman consul captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War and sent to Rome on parole to negotiate a prisoner exchange, swearing to return if it failed. In the senate he argued against the exchange, then went back to Carthage, to be tortured to death by enforced wakefulness. Cicero says that even then he was happier than if he'd stayed home.

What To Make Of It

The thesis of the whole book: what's morally right is also, in the deepest sense, what's advantageous, and apparent conflicts come from a short-sighted view of the useful. Whether you're convinced is up to you. I'm honestly not sure I am every time. The ring of Gyges is a tough test, and Regulus is a lot to ask of somebody.

The book organizes around one idea: people are made for each other. The interest of each individual and the whole community should be identical, and if someone takes for selfish ends what should serve the common good, all human fellowship is destroyed. On leadership, "fear is but a poor safeguard of lasting power; while affection, on the other hand, may be trusted to keep it safe for ever." Rulers who run on terror live in terror.

Readers have used it in different ways. Christians admired it: in the fourth century, Ambrose of Milan wrote On the Duties of the Clergy as a deliberate Christian counterpart, following Cicero's structure but replacing his sources with scripture. It was one of the first classical texts printed, went through hundreds of editions, and shaped political and legal thought; Grotius drew on its account of natural law.

And modern readers point out the limits. It's the work of a wealthy Roman aristocrat for whom duty is partly a matter of class: the duties of a gentleman, a statesman, a landowner. It accepts slavery and aristocratic hierarchy, and it cares more about reputation than a modern ethic would. Both things are true, and I'm not going to pick one.

To read it: the version quoted here is Walter Miller's 1913 Loeb translation, public domain and a little formal, with the Latin printed beside it. Three books: Book I is the longest, on moral goodness through the four virtues; Book II on the useful; Book III on conflicts, with the famous examples. It takes about five to seven hours, and each book can be read alone. The best-known passages are Book I on justice, Book II on love and fear, and Book III on Gyges and Regulus.