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Daily · Philosophy

De Officiis

Marcus Tullius Cicero · philosophical treatise, 44 BCE·10 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • Addressed directly to his son, not to Rome. The treatise opens as a letter: "My dear son Marcus, you have now been studying a full year under Cratippus, and that too in Athens." Cicero is writing to a twenty-one-year-old who, by his own translator's introduction, was living on an allowance of nearly £870 a year and running through it fast.
  • Moral goodness is broken into exactly four sources. Cicero lists them: perception and intelligent development of the true, the conservation of organized society and rendering to every man his due, the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit, and the orderliness and moderation of everything said and done. Wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance become the whole architecture of the book.
  • A grain merchant's silence becomes a live ethics case. During a famine at Rhodes, a trader arrives from Alexandria with a full cargo of grain, knowing other ships loaded with grain are right behind him. Cicero stages a debate between two Stoics, Diogenes and Antipater, over whether the trader must tell the starving Rhodians that prices are about to crash.
  • Two wise men, one plank, no easy answer. Citing Hecaton, Cicero poses the sinking-ship problem directly: if two equally wise men can only save themselves with one small plank, who yields? His answer: whoever's life serves his country more, and if that is a tie, they settle it "as if the point were decided by lot or at a game of odd and even."
  • Regulus chooses torture over breaking an oath. Captured by Carthage and paroled to negotiate a prisoner exchange, Regulus argues in the Roman senate against the very deal that would free him, then walks back to Carthage knowing what awaits him. Cicero says he died "being slowly put to death by enforced wakefulness" rather than call his own life more expedient than his word.
  • The book ends as a father's goodbye, not a lecture. Cicero signs off: "Farewell, my dear Cicero, and be assured that you will be dearer to me still, if you find pleasure in such counsel." An editor's footnote adds the fact Cicero could not have known: he never saw his son again.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the last thing Cicero wrote before Antony's proscription killed him, and its central argument, that nothing genuinely useful can ever be genuinely dishonest, impressed Frederick the Great enough that he called it the best book on morals ever written.

Cicero's last work before Antony's men killed him is a father's field manual for right conduct, built on the claim that nothing genuinely expedient can ever be genuinely dishonest.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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