On Duties

What It Is

A treatise in three books, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in a matter of weeks. Caesar had been assassinated in March. Cicero was preparing the most dangerous thing he ever did, an open attack on Mark Antony, and in the middle of it he sat down and wrote a book about how to behave.

It is addressed to his son Marcus, then twenty-one and studying philosophy in Athens with more enthusiasm for the city than for the philosophy. That address is not a device. The book is a father talking to a young man he cannot get at from across the sea, and the strain shows.

The structure is plain. Book 1 asks what is honourable and works through the four cardinal virtues. Book 2 asks what is useful, in the practical sense of what advances a career and a reputation. Book 3 asks what to do when the two collide, which is the question everyone actually faces, and it works through the answer by cases: a man selling a house he knows is unsound, a grain merchant sailing into a starving city, a promise it would be wrong to keep.

He is drawing on a lost Greek work by the Stoic Panaetius. The examples, the urgency and the fury are his own.

Why It Matters

Its influence is out of proportion to almost any book in this collection. Ambrose rewrote it for Christians in the fourth century and it entered the moral bloodstream of the Church. It was one of the first classical texts ever printed, at Mainz in 1465, while it was still not obvious that anything but scripture was worth the type. Erasmus edited it. Voltaire said no one would ever write anything wiser. For most of European history, if a schoolboy read one work of moral philosophy, it was this.

What makes it live now is Book 3. The conflict between what is right and what is useful is the entire subject of professional ethics, business ethics and public life, and Cicero got there first and handled it better than most who came after. His answer is uncompromising and inconvenient, and it refuses the escape route almost everyone reaches for. Whether he can sustain that under pressure is the drama of the book, and he knows you are watching.

Before You Read

Five or six hours, and the most approachable of Cicero's philosophical works by a distance. No technical vocabulary, no metaphysics, nothing you need to have read first.

Read it in sections rather than at a run. It is a book of advice and it works the way advice works: a few pages, then a pause while you decide whether he is right.

Book 2, on reputation and advancement, is the weakest and most dated part, and a brisk pass over it costs nothing. Books 1 and 3 are where the book lives. Read Book 3 twice.

Which Translation to Read

• Walter Miller (Loeb Classical Library, 1913) — recommended. The version the English-speaking world has quoted for a century, and the only one that puts Cicero's Latin on the facing page. That matters more here than usual: the key terms — honestum, utile, decorum, officium — do not go cleanly into English, and you will want to see them. Miller's prose is more supple than its date suggests. The cost: it is 1913 English, it occasionally reaches for a dignity Cicero did not have, and the notes are thin. View on Amazon →
• M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1991). The modern scholarly standard, and the best guide to what the Stoic vocabulary is actually doing. Take it to understand the argument. The cost: a student edition, and the English is serviceable rather than good.
• P. G. Walsh (Oxford World's Classics, 2000), published as On Obligations. The most readable modern English of the three. The cost: the retitling loses people who go looking for it, and the apparatus is lighter than Cambridge's.

Take Miller for the Latin facing and the century of quotation behind it, Griffin and Atkins for the philosophy, Walsh if you simply want it to read well.

Getting the Most From This Book

Argue with the cases in Book 3. They are constructed so that you have to decide, and reading them passively wastes them. Take a position before you read Cicero's, and notice when he changes your mind.

Read it against the Second Philippic, written in the same months. The same man, at the same desk, in one book setting out the obligations of a civilised person and in the other tearing an enemy to pieces in public. Neither is a pose. Both are Cicero.

And read it as what it is: a father writing to a son he cannot reach, about how to be a man, at the end of a world. That is not a frame the book announces. It is simply true, and it changes every page.