On Duties

ON DUTIES deserves more attention than it gets, and it rewards the attention it receives, because it deals with the question of the well-lived life in a clear, thoughtful, accessible, and compelling manner. Cicero believed On Duties to be his magnum opus, and much of history has agreed with him on this. Of O n Duties , the French philosopher Voltaire wrote: "No one will ever write anything more wise, more true, or more useful." And Martin Luther, in his Table Talk says this of Cicero: "Let those who wish to see a true philosophy read Cicero. Cicero was a wise and industrious man, and he suffered much and accomplished much." On Duties was the second book to be printed by Gutenberg's press. Parts of it served as inspiration for Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy . St. Ambrose was so enamored with the work that he wrote his On the Duties of the Clergy with Cicero's On Duties as the model, and refers to it throughout his own book. The three books that make up On Duties are full of historical examples which are worth their weight in gold. They, like Homeric similes, are marvelous windows into an age that is not described in any ancient texts since the audience of the texts are written to people who shared the age and therefore needed no descriptions. But they also give us Cicero's own culturally conservative interpretations of the events of his time, and this is very valuable indeed.

ON DUTIES deserves more attention than it gets, and it rewards the attention it receives, because it deals with the question of the well-lived life in a clear, thoughtful, accessible, and compelling manner. Cicero believed On Duties to be his magnum opus, and much of history has agreed with him on this. Of O n Duties , the French philosopher Voltaire wrote: "No one will ever write anything more wise, more true, or more useful." And Martin Luther, in his Table Talk says this of Cicero: "Let those who wish to see a true philosophy read Cicero. Cicero was a wise and industrious man, and he suffered much and accomplished much." On Duties was the second book to be printed by Gutenberg's press. Parts of it served as inspiration for Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy . St. Ambrose was so enamored with the work that he wrote his On the Duties of the Clergy with Cicero's On Duties as the model, and refers to it throughout his own book. The three books that make up On Duties are full of historical examples which are worth their weight in gold. They, like Homeric similes, are marvelous windows into an age that is not described in any ancient texts since the audience of the texts are written to people who shared the age and therefore needed no descriptions. But they also give us Cicero's own culturally conservative interpretations of the events of his time, and this is very valuable indeed.

The ethics of a statesman. Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

The ethics of a statesman. Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.