De Officiis
In De Officiis, written in his final troubled years as the Roman republic collapsed around him, Cicero casts his treatise on moral duty as a long letter to his son Marcus, a twenty-one-year-old student in Athens. Drawing chiefly on the Stoic Panaetius, he sets out across three books what duty requires of a person: how the honorable and the useful relate, why they can never truly conflict, and how to act rightly in public and private life. Roman examples illustrate Greek doctrine at every turn.
The work matters as Cicero's effort to make philosophy serve conduct rather than mere knowledge, fitting Greek ethics to the practical Roman mind. Its themes—virtue, justice, generosity, and the bonds of human society—proved so congenial that later readers called Cicero the "Pagan Christian." Frederick the Great judged it the best book on morals ever written, and Cicero himself counted it his masterpiece.
How it begins
In the de Officiis we have, save for the latter Philippics, the great orator's last contribution to literature. The last, sad, troubled years of his busy life could not be given to his profession; and he turned his never-resting thoughts to the second love of his student days and made Greek philosophy a possibility for Roman readers. The senate had been abolished; the courts had been closed. His occupation was gone; but Cicero could not surrender himself to idleness. In those days of distraction (46-43 b.c. ) he produced for publication almost as much as in all his years of active life. The liberators had been able to remove the tyrant, but they could not restore the republic. Cicero's own life was in danger from the fury of mad Antony and he left Rome about the end of March, 44 b.c. He dared not even stop permanently in any one of his various country estates, but, wretched, wandered from one of his villas to another nearly all the summer and autumn through. He would not suffer himself to become a prey to his overwhelming sorrow at the death of the republic and the final crushing of the hopes that had risen with Caesar's downfall, but worked at the highest tension on his philosophical studies. The Romans were not philosophical. In 161 b.c.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.