PATIENT
On Duties
COMPOSED
44 BCE
FORM
An ethical treatise in three books
SETTING
Months after Caesar's murder
CHIEF COMPLAINT
Can doing the right thing ever really cost you what is useful?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
In the months after Caesar's murder, Cicero (106–43 BCE), a retired consul, writes his son a book on what a good person owes to other people. Its claim is that what is right and what is useful never really come apart, and it tests that claim on the hardest cases: tyrants, oaths, a ring that makes you invisible, and a prisoner who goes back to certain death. A year later its author was killed for what he had said. Book I is about moral goodness, organized under the four cardinal virtues; Book II is about the useful; Book III is about the conflicts between the two, with the famous examples.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
HONESTUM
What is morally right. Cicero's claim is that it is the only thing truly worth seeking.
UTILE
What is useful. Real usefulness never conflicts with what is right, though it may seem to.
FIDES
Good faith, keeping your word. The foundation of justice, and of any shared life.
SOCIETY
We are not born for ourselves alone. Duty comes from belonging to a community of all human beings.
POWER
Better loved than feared. Whom men fear they hate, and whom they hate they wish dead.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —A letter-book from a father to his son, in three books. Each can be read on its own.
- —Borrows its framework from the Greek philosopher Panaetius and brings it into Roman life.
- —Argues from cases: Gyges and his ring, Regulus returning to Carthage, and tyrants who fell.
- —A Roman statesman's voice, practical and moral, aimed at how a citizen should act.
- —Takes about five to seven hours to read in full.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
On Duties is the Roman statesman's counterpart to the Stoic guides: Seneca and Epictetus teach how to bear what Fortune does, and Cicero asks what a person owes the community while she does it. Book III also answers the Republic, since the ring of Gyges is Plato's challenge and Cicero's reply is that the just man would not use it. The best-known passages are Book I on justice, Book II on love and fear, and Book III on Gyges and Regulus. For a first read, try P. G. Walsh (Oxford World's Classics) or Margaret Atkins (Cambridge); the full guide quotes Walter Miller's public-domain 1913 Loeb translation.