On Duties

Overview

On Duties is a hundred and eighty pages, written in a few weeks in the autumn of 44 BCE, and addressed to Cicero’s twenty-one-year-old son, who was supposed to be studying philosophy in Athens and was mostly not. The tone follows from that. It is a father telling a young man how to behave, with examples, and it is far more concrete than any other ancient work of ethics.

The circumstances are worth holding onto. Caesar had been assassinated in March. Cicero, who had spent his life defending the republic and had watched it collapse anyway, was writing while Mark Antony gathered power, and he would be hunted down and killed within a year, his head and hands nailed up in the forum. Book III includes a direct verdict on Caesar. This is not a detached treatise.

Cicero says openly that he is working from a Greek source: a lost treatise by the Stoic Panaetius, which covered the first two books’ material and stopped before the third. Cicero follows it, disagrees with it in places, supplies the missing part himself, and fills the whole thing with Roman cases. He is not claiming originality; he is claiming usefulness.

The Latin title is De Officiis. An officium is what is owed, a duty in the sense of a task falling to you because of who you are, which is closer to obligation than to moral law.

The argument

Cicero divides the subject at the start. There are three questions about any proposed action: is it honourable, is it advantageous, and what do you do when the two conflict. Book I takes the first, Book II the second, Book III the collision.

Book I: the honourable. Four sources, the cardinal virtues. Wisdom, the pursuit of truth, which Cicero warns must not become a retreat from public business, since knowledge that ignores the claims of other people has gone wrong. Justice, which is the largest section and the heart of the book: do no harm, and serve the common good. He is unusually clear that injustice has two forms, the harm you do and the harm you allow, and that a man who could have prevented an injury and did not is as guilty as the one who inflicted it. He treats property, contract and good faith at length, insists that promises bind even when inconvenient, and argues that promises extracted by force or which would harm the person they were made to do not bind at all. He extends justice to enemies, laying down that wars must be declared, preceded by a demand for redress, fought for peace, and that those who surrender must be spared.

Then greatness of spirit, where he makes the point that courage without justice is not a virtue but a danger, and that the appetite for glory is the specific temptation of able men. And propriety, decorum, a section with no real Greek equivalent, about fitting your behaviour to your nature, your age, your circumstances and your role, which runs into practical advice about conversation, dress, houses and how to walk.

He also sets out a ranking of obligations when they compete: country and parents first, then children and household, then kin, then the wider community of human beings, which he takes to be a real bond.

Book II: the advantageous. How to get on in the world, and Cicero’s answer is that nothing is more useful than being trusted. Goodwill is won by being thought just, and there is no way of appearing just reliably except by being so. He prefers generosity of service to generosity with money, distrusts spectacular public giving, and is scathing about politicians who buy popularity. There is a hard-headed section on property, debt and land redistribution, where his conservatism is unmistakable.

Book III: the collision. Cicero’s thesis is that the conflict is never real. Anything genuinely dishonourable is never advantageous, because what is advantageous is what is good for a human being, and a human being is a social animal whose good is bound up with others. To take from another for your own gain is to destroy the thing that makes society possible, which is a worse loss than any gain.

He then tests it on cases, and the cases are why the book survived. A grain merchant sails into famine-stricken Rhodes knowing other ships are close behind; must he tell the buyers? A man sells a house he knows to be defective; how much must he disclose? Is it right to kill a tyrant? What about the ring of Gyges, which makes the wearer invisible: Cicero takes Plato’s thought experiment and uses it as a test of whether you would still be honest. He argues each case and does not always find it easy.

The book ends with Regulus, the Roman general released by Carthage on parole to negotiate, who advised the senate against the terms and then went back to be tortured to death because he had given his word. Cicero offers him as the demonstration.

How to read it

Read Book I and Book III. Book II is the least interesting and its advice on public generosity is dated.

Read the cases in Book III slowly and argue with them. That is what the book is for, and a reader who agrees with every verdict is not reading carefully.

Notice how much is Roman rather than universal. The ranking of obligations, the assumptions about status, the section on which occupations are respectable, which excludes almost everyone who works with their hands, all belong to a senatorial world. Cicero’s principles are broader than his examples, and separating the two is most of the work.

Read it next to Machiavelli, who knew this book well and set out to invert it. The Prince is in several places a direct answer to Cicero’s claim that the dishonourable can never be advantageous, and the two together make the argument better than either alone.

The common misreading is that this is bland. It is a book written by a man who had just seen his republic destroyed, arguing, on the evidence of a career spent among people who did the opposite, that decency pays. Whether he believed it or needed to is a fair question.

Questions it raises

• Is it true that nothing dishonourable is ever advantageous? Cicero asserts it and then spends a book on cases that look like counter-examples.
• The grain merchant knows more than his buyers. Where is the line between a good bargain and a deception?
• Cicero says failing to prevent an injury is itself an injustice. How far does that obligation extend?
• He defends tyrannicide, months after Caesar’s assassination, while claiming justice requires good faith even with enemies. Are those consistent?
• The obligations run country, parents, children, kin, then humanity in general. Is that ordering defensible, and would Cicero defend it the same way today?
• Regulus keeps his word and is tortured to death for it. Is that the strongest case for the argument or the point at which it breaks?