1 Preliminaries

This Critical Guide both reflects and, I hope, contributes to the ongoing scholarly renaissance of Cicero as a philosophical author. The De Officiis is by any reckoning one of Cicero’s major philosophical works, and in terms of overall historical impact, probably his most influential. While it would be far-fetched to suppose it likely to regain the kind of prominence it had in, say, the early modern period,Footnote ¹ it continues to offer fascinating discussion of a wide range of ethical and political topics. Given that, to this point, a collection of essays devoted to the work has been lacking, the time seemed right for a critical and philosophically oriented assessment of some of its main themes; this is what the current volume seeks to provide.

In this Introduction, I shall focus, in Section 2, on Cicero’s prefaces to the three books that comprise De Officiis,Footnote ² in order both to complement the essays that follow and because the prefaces give important information about the form of the work and about Cicero’s methods and motives in composing it. I shall then, in Section 3, say a little for purposes of orientation about the structure of the volume and offer a brief outline of the individual chapters.

2 De Officiis: Title, Form and Method

To begin, though, with the title of Cicero’s work. Although individual contributors have been free to translate as they see fit, the title of the volume retains the work’s original Latin title rather than attempting a translation such as ‘On Duties’ or ‘On Appropriate Actions’. The former, though useful shorthand, is liable to mislead: the English word ‘duties’ comes freighted with baggage from the deontological tradition that does not necessarily represent the sense of the Latin term, in particular insofar as Cicero uses officia in the work to translate the Greek Stoic technical term kathēkonta, now itself standardly translated in English as ‘appropriate actions’. While that phrase retains both an accuracy and a neutrality that ‘duties’ lacks, ‘On Appropriate Actions’ seems as a rendition of De Officiis somewhat cumbersome and (the downside of its neutrality) without a clear meaning in English absent further explication.

Cicero’s usage of officia belongs, as he tells us near the start of Book 1, in the realm of reasons for action. What he calls a ‘middle’ officium – that is, one whose discharge includes within its scope ordinary agents who have not attained the perfect virtue of the Stoic sage – is an action for which a ‘plausible reason’ (ratio probabilis) can be given (1.8).Footnote ³ I take it that this already gives officium a wider application than that of ‘duty’. Moreover, while ‘duty’ within the deontological tradition tends to refer to something that by its nature one has an overriding reason to do, a key feature in Cicero’s discussion – indeed it structures the whole work – is the question of the relation between what one might call moral and prudential reasons: in his terminology, between what is ‘honourable’ (honestum), on the one hand, and ‘expedience’ (utilitas) on the other.

The main source that Cicero draws on for at least the first two books of De Officiis is the Stoic Panaetius’ now lost work peri tou kathēkontos. Cicero complains (not too despairingly, one feels) that whereas Panaetius promised to consider the question of what to do when the honourable and the expedient course of action are in apparent conflict, he never actually got around to doing so (3.7). Thus, while Cicero broadly follows Panaetius in Book 1, which focusses on what is honourable, and Book 2, which treats of the expedient, the field is clear for him to press ahead in Book 3 and argue that, despite appearances, there is no genuine conflict between what is honourable and what is expedient.Footnote ⁴ Cicero’s often intricate discussion is thus underpinned by an ostensibly simple structure.

The literary form that De Officiis takes is that of a letter (1.4) from Cicero to his only son Marcus, who is studying at Athens, the cradle of Greek philosophy, with the Peripatetic philosopher Cratippus (1.1). While in substance the work is evidently a treatise, as a letter it differs from a straightforward treatise in being personal.Footnote ⁵ Formally, Marcus is its specific recipient. One thing this formal feature may do is remind us that action, one of the basic themes of the work, is personal too, undertaken by specific agents who thereby take responsibility for what they do.

Now De Officiis is part of an astonishing burst of compositional creativity that marked roughly the last two years of Cicero’s life. And he is clear that this turning to philosophical composition is in part attributable to his inability to partake any longer in public life, thanks to, as he not unreasonably saw it, the effective end of Roman republican government (2.2–4, 3.2–4), despite the work being composed in the wake of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Cicero perhaps has a tendency to exaggerate the role of individual agency in the explanation of social and political change. It is characteristic, if understandable, that he places emphasis on the despotism ‘of a single individual’ (unius, 2.2) – that is, Caesar – when he bemoans the fate of the republic. So too he speaks of the individuals (homines) bent on upending the republic at 2.3.

By the same token, however, Cicero stresses, in a way that manages to be both moving and self-serving, how such developments have failed to quash his own agency. He tells us at 2.2 that he succumbed neither to grief (in addition to the death of companions in opposition to Caesar that he refers to here, we are no doubt supposed to have in mind the loss of his daughter Tullia after childbirth) nor to pleasure. Refusing to let idleness get the better of him (3.3) he has sought to make the best of things by providing a useful service to ‘our people’ (nostris) the Romans in writing philosophy (2.5).

The latter referent shows that Cicero, in fact and unsurprisingly, intends the work to have much wider reach and readership than Marcus alone. While some parts of it rather touchingly address Marcus’ own exploits (e.g. 2.45), they also take pains to remind us of its wider scope (non de te est, sed de genere toto, ibid.). Cicero succeeds on the whole in conveying a well-crafted balance between the strictly personal dimension of his son as formal recipient and his wider ambitions for the work. Indeed there is often a distinct note of unease in his addressing of Marcus that highlights both the special importance to him of trying to inculcate in his son something of Cicero’s own industriousness and achievements (3.6) and the possibility of failure in that regard. I have, says Cicero, written ‘again and again’ (multa … saepe, 3.6) to encourage you; and here it is hard not to detect a sense that Cicero’s efforts to that end may be doomed to failure – as seems to have been the case.Footnote ⁶ Fortunately, Cicero has already made it clear that the work is also intended to foster wider Roman enlightenment. One may speculate that he would have found additional compensatory gratification in its (and in that sense his) endurance far beyond the Roman republican era.

The epistolary form brings out the notion of individual agency in another way too, which connects with issues of philosophical substance that Cicero explores within the main body of the work. While Cicero’s exhortations to Marcus no doubt represent a sincere wish on the part of the father for the son to follow in his footsteps, the father-son relationship also features in the discussion in Book 1 of the Stoic personae theory, which holds that what it is right for an agent to do depends not just on general features of rationality shared with other humans as such, but also on features specific to individuals (singulis, 1.107).

In the context of this theory Cicero notes that while there are many cases of sons who strive for excellence in the same field as their father, some sons decline to do so and follow their own path (1.166). Cicero gives no indication that this latter option is in principle inferior to the former; that would be inconsistent with the theory that Cicero is expounding. So while the drama of the work hints at paternal disappointment, its theoretical discussion suggests that sons are entitled to go their own way. Cicero does not tell us what to make of this juxtaposition; but it provides an indication of how dramatic frame and philosophical content interact to stimulate the reader’s own reflections.

The examples that Cicero lists of sons who did seek to emulate their fathers is itself an example of the work’s thoroughgoing use of illustrative examples (exempla) to support more abstract ethical theory. Cicero’s use of exempla will be covered in some depth later in the volume;Footnote ⁷ let me just note here that it offers an example of how Cicero artfully constructs his prefaces to anticipate features that turn out to be central to the construction of the main body of the work. In the opening lines of De Officiis Cicero reminds Marcus that he has been studying with Cratippus in Athens for a whole year now; and adds that while the former will enrich him in terms of knowledge (scientia), the latter will do so in terms of exempla (1.1). In the dramatic context this is a perfectly natural thing to say: Athens abounds in examples of great philosophers. But it also reflects a commitment on Cicero’s part both to the ethical significance of individuals and to the educational role of examples in communicating ethical ideas.

The idea that I mentioned above, of letting the reader reflect and come to their own conclusions, now connects with a fundamental point about Cicero’s method. He presents himself in De Officiis, as elsewhere in his writings, as an adherent of the sceptical Academy, a stance hinted at at 1.2 and confirmed at 2.7. But this raises a problem: how is this professed stance related to what seems to be a work full of positive philosophical content, chiefly Stoic-inspired? How, moreover, does Marcus’ studying with a Peripatetic philosopher bear upon that?

Cicero’s first move is to tell Marcus that his own writings do not differ greatly from those of the Peripatetics, seeing that both the latter school and the sceptical Academy claim allegiance with Socrates and Plato (1.2). And while there is no doubt an element of mischief in this – Cicero was well aware of the contested nature of such allegiances – it contains a serious point of method. While perfectly capable of incisively distinguishing and critiquing different schools (as, for example, in De Finibus), Cicero is also inclined, when he wishes, to expound philosophical ideas in less critical mode and to play down differences between schools in favour of similarities (the Tusculan Disputations may serve as an example here; in contrast to De Officiis, it even brings the Epicureans into the fold, e.g. Tusc. 3.76, 5.87–9).

At the same time, Cicero tells Marcus (1.2) that as far as philosophical substance (rebus ipsis) is concerned, he must use his own judgement (tuo iudicio) when reading Cicero’s work. Now note, firstly, how this subtly undercuts the idea of similarity: the sceptics and the Peripatetics are at any rate not so similar that one who is undertaking study with an adherent of the latter does not have to use critical judgement in responding to work by an adherent of the former. But what to make of the fact that that work in turn draws heavily on Stoic material? Here too we see a dual response by Cicero. He tells us, on the one hand, that he does not uncritically follow his Stoic sources; in fact, he uses ‘my own judgement and discretion (iudicio arbitrioque nostro, 1.6)’ in this regard. On the other hand, the Stoics and Peripatetics have some relevant similarities: both allot the leading role in their ethics to virtue, albeit to a different extent (3.11, cf. 3.20, 33). Moreover, by speaking at 1.8 of the notion of officium as related to what can be given a plausible (probabilis) reason, Cicero slyly suggests affinity between Stoicism and, with its criterion of plausibility, Academic scepticism.

Whatever Marcus may have made of all this (if he made anything of it at all), the Ciceronian strategy seems designed, in line with good sceptical Academic practice, to engage the reader critically. The De Officiis is a sceptical work, it seems to me, even as it forges a mainly Stoic path, just to the extent that it draws our attention to questions about the relation between philosophical schools and invites us to use our judgement in assessing similarities and differences. At the same time, in response to objections he says have been raised against him (2.7), Cicero insists that the sceptic is perfectly entitled to follow positions that seem plausible (probabilia), while treating, by contrast with the dogmatic schools, nothing as certain (2.7–8). Interestingly, Cicero proceeds to mount a defence of the practice of the sceptical Academy of arguing against every position, claiming that only by this procedure can one determine what is plausible (2.8). One might have thought this part of his defence somewhat gratuitous, given that De Officiis is not apparently a work that goes in for such argument. But Cicero thereby signals that what we find in the work is indeed a product of that kind of engagement, and by implication we as readers should, if we are appropriately constituted, seek to emulate Cicero’s industriousness and not respond in uncritical fashion to what he has laid out before us.

3 This Volume: Structure and Chapter Outlines

The Critical Guide is organised around a series of themes, within which individual chapters are located. The themes are intended to reflect the way De Officiis itself is written, in being interconnected and overlapping rather than marking rigid demarcations. They are there to help orient readers and provide some structural backbone, as well as to indicate, non-dogmatically, some of the work’s main currents of thought. Part I, ‘The Framework of De Officiis’, comprises a pair of chapters that deal respectively with two of the basic elements in the work’s construction, namely family relationships and the nature and status of officia.

In Chapter 1, ‘The Family in De Officiis’, John Wynne explores the central role that Cicero allots to the family unit. Beginning at the end, with Cicero’s final exhortation to Marcus, Wynne seeks to clarify how Cicero considers the family, and in particular the love of parents for their children, to serve as the origin for other social relationships and ultimately as the foundation of civil society. Wynne argues that while our rational natures are responsible for our concern for others insofar as they too are rational, it is parental love which, in practice, makes us care for at least some other humans as humans rather than just as bare reasoners, and to that extent explains how we are able to come to care for others for their own sake. Wynne goes on to consider how the family fits with Cicero’s conception of the social virtues of justice and beneficence, arguing that, in the case of justice, Cicero views parental love as enabling a bridging of that cognitive gulf between awareness of how oneself and others are affected that tends to make us more attentive to our own interests than those of others. In the case of beneficence, moreover, the example of parental love teaches other family members attitudes and behaviour through which bonds that unite human societies more broadly can be forged. Wynne uses these reflections to illuminate how the virtues function for Cicero within the family itself, including, as members of every wealthy Roman’s household, in the treatment of slaves.

In Chapter 2, ‘Conflict of Duties in Cicero’s De Officiis’, Georgia Tsouni investigates the way in which the work is structured around the themes of what is honourable and what is expedient in action. Tsouni brings out the relevance to Cicero’s philosophical project of his characterisation of officium as what has a ratio probabilis (see above) and goes on to outline the work’s relationship with Panaetius’ treatise and the significance of the latter work’s failure, deliberate or otherwise, to address in detail the question of conflict between officia. Tsouni draws attention to the sheer variety of kinds of conflict that Cicero then covers in the work: in addition to the (as Cicero sees it) merely apparent conflict between what is honourable and expedient, this includes the possibility of the ‘tragic dilemma’, that is, conflict arising from within duties mandated by the virtues, where an agent is unable to perform one duty without violating another. In laying out in some detail the various stratagems that Cicero deploys in an attempt to show that in these cases too conflict is merely apparent, Tsouni demonstrates how extensively the theme of conflict permeates the work. Tsouni argues that this emphasis is in turn a reflection of the dialectical strategy that Cicero is apt to utilise in his more overtly dialogical works. In De Officiis, however, it serves above all the aim of preserving republican values and the political community.

While the essays in Part I each offer treatments of virtue in relation to their respective themes, Part II, ‘The Role of Virtue’, focusses more directly on how De Officiis conceives of virtue’s nature and role. In Chapter 3, ‘Oikeiōsis and the Origin of Virtue’, Brad Inwood argues that at Off. 1.11–12 there is an innovative version of the Stoic theory of oikeiōsis (‘appropriation’), likely deriving from Panaetius himself, that possesses greater explanatory power in tracing how other-regarding attitudes develop from the phenomenon of self-love than other versions of the theory known to us. Inwood then investigates how this theory relates to the establishment of the virtues proper, and argues that while three of the four cardinal virtues are plausibly based in oikeiōsis, the fourth, wisdom, is at least initially not presented that way, lacking in particular a connection back to the drive for self-preservation. Only when theoretical and practical wisdom are later distinguished do we find, in the latter case, such a connection. Inwood shows that we can explain both Panaetius’ innovations and Cicero’s acceptance of them in terms of distinct motivations arising from the respective philosophical contexts in which each author wrote.

Chapter 4, ‘Cicero’s Project in Book 2 of De Officiis’ takes us, as the title indicates, from Book 1 to Book 2. Malcolm Schofield begins by outlining the basic agenda of Book 2 as concerned with a question more complex than is sometimes supposed, namely how to acquire the resources that represent the means to the attainment of an agreeable life, with the most important of these resources being human. It is then virtue that enables us to secure from our fellow humans the cooperation needed for our ability to lead a good life. Schofield analyses the central role that Cicero allots to beneficence or liberality in winning the favour of our fellow humans, bringing out in particular how Book 2, in contrast with Book 1, lays emphasis on the res publica both as object of beneficence and constraint on the exercise of largesse. Against some interpretations, Schofield argues that, if anything, it is gratitude more than glory that Cicero highlights as the main benefit accruing to the bestower of beneficence, this in turn according with the idea that preservation of the res publica, as the entity on which our wellbeing as individuals ultimately depends, serves as the principal reference-point for the exercise of individual virtue.

In Chapter 5, ‘Cicero’s De Officiis on Practical Deliberation’, Christopher Gill takes up the question of how virtue figures in practical deliberation in the context of the Stoic ethical theory that Cicero draws on. For the Stoics, virtue is the only good, and as such the sole constituent of happiness; on the other hand, it is the so-called indifferents, items that are neither good nor bad, that provide the Stoics with the material for practical deliberation. Theorists in this tradition are thus faced with the problem of how, if at all, given the categorical difference between them, virtue and the indifferents are supposed to work together in the operation of practical reason. Gill discusses and rejects some scholarly readings that take consideration of virtue to play little or no part in the Stoic agent’s practical deliberations. Such readings, Gill suggests, underplay the role of specifically virtuous motivation in Stoicism. Gill proposes that this aspect can be brought out, so as to illuminate the treatment of virtue in De Officiis, by appeal to certain features of Rosalind Hursthouse’s contemporary virtue theoretical ethics. These features Gill utilises to outline a model of practical deliberation in Stoicism that coheres with, and is evidenced by, Cicero’s discussion of the grounds for appropriate action as it unfolds across the three books.

Part III of the Guide, ‘Exemplary Ethics’, presents a pair of complementary essays devoted to an aspect of De Officiis that suffuses the work, namely Cicero’s use of illustrative examples (exempla) to support and elaborate its positions. In Chapter 6, ‘De Officiis and Exemplary Ethics’, Rebecca Langlands brings out the variety of functions that exempla serve in De Officiis, and the interrelations between them. Taking Cicero’s treatment of Regulus in Book 3 as a case study, and drawing in part on Gill’s discussion in the preceding chapter, Langlands shows how Cicero’s presentation matches dialectical features that are characteristic both of his philosophical procedure elsewhere and of the Stoic debate between Diogenes and Antipater described earlier in the book. This dialectical mode means that the case of Regulus is not offered straightforwardly as a paradigm of admirable behaviour. Rather, the different readings of Regulus’ behaviour that Cicero voices have the effect of expressing an anxiety about the difficulty in identifying the truly right thing to do. Exemplarity is thus for Cicero itself a topic for critical reflection, as, Langlands suggests, can also be seen from Cicero’s handling of cases in which a moral quality and its opposite each appear as candidates for exemplary status. At the same time Langlands demonstrates how Cicero not only draws on Stoic resources in constructing his exempla but introduces dimensions that enable them to do better at capturing virtuous Stoic attributes than the Stoics themselves had hitherto managed. This in turn influences later Stoic-inspired treatments, such as those of Seneca, and aligns with the critical and creative way that Cicero engages with the exempla that he draws from Panaetius.

In Chapter 7, ‘Emulation and Moral Development in De Officiis’, Georgina White addresses the question of how precisely Cicero’s use of exempla, particularly historical exempla, are intended to aid moral development. To the extent that they are models to imitate, they would presuppose proper understanding of the ethical theory that they serve to exemplify, given that it is the virtuous nature of the deeds in question rather than the specific actions performed that must carry over. Instead, White shows how Cicero takes pains to warn his readers away from an imitative model by focussing on its liability to lead us into error. Cicero underpins this theoretically by reference both to the idea that no ordinary human exemplum embodies the perfected virtue of the Stoic sage, and by appeal to features of the personae theory. How, then, do exempla serve an agent’s moral development? For Cicero, White argues, in three main ways: they improve our capacity for self-analysis by prompting us to analyse the behaviour of others; they bear witness that the kind of ethical deliberation theorised in De Officiis has real-world application; and they provide motivating illustration of the idea that moral behaviour brings glory to the agent (and immoral behaviour the opposite) – and do so, moreover, White suggests, in a way designed to mitigate the threat of explanatory circularity arising from Cicero’s reconceptualising of traditional Roman ideas of glory to fit the normative theory he expounds.

Part IV, ‘Self and Society’, also contains two complementary essays, each with a differing focus on the way that De Officiis conceives of the nature of the ethical self and its exercise in a social context, in particular with regard to the virtue of decorum. In Chapter 8, ‘Care of the (Written) Self: Literary and Ethical Decorum in De Officiis’, Caroline Bishop lays out how Cicero’s treatment of decorum serves the task of constructing a moral identity suited to an environment in which the crisis of the republic had, for a member of the Roman elite, increasingly shrunk the possibilities for self-expression in the traditional public sphere. Bishop emphasises how the term decorum, which Cicero translates from the Greek to prepon that featured in Panaetius’ treatise, represents a quality to which a notably comprehensive scope is given, as the virtue that encompasses and moderates our speech and actions in such a way that they conform with the other virtues. Moreover, in both the Greek and Latin cases, its usage signals the importation into philosophical ethics of a concept with pervasively aesthetic connotations. Bishop shows how in De Officiis it is these aesthetic dimensions, in particular as they relate to the orator’s construction of speeches, that Cicero invokes in explaining the concept’s applicability to ethics. In keeping with the times, he thus initiates the formation of a more private, inward-looking self, but one which purports to salvage the norms that had applied to the more traditional public roles. As Bishop argues, Cicero thus positions himself to reclaim old elite values for the new reality, and for the generations (Marcus included) to come.

In Chapter 9, ‘Cicero and the Cynics’, Sean McConnell examines decorum as a locus for the relation between self and society in its guise as the virtue by which, bound by a sense of shame (verecundia), we avoid giving offence to others. But this raises a problem: why should the attitudes of others have a bearing on the moral status of one’s actions? McConnell shows how Cicero responds by grounding the moral significance of offence in nature rather than convention. Cicero mounts his defence principally in opposition to the Cynic view (shared by some Stoics) that nothing is by nature offensive. McConnell analyses Cicero’s setting out (in Fam. 9.22) of the Cynic challenge that implicates the moral irrelevance of offence in the seeming arbitrariness of which words count as offensive. Since the parties on both sides agree that only things that are by nature offensive have moral significance, Cicero needs to show that there are such things. McConnell emphasises how Cicero’s response in De Officiis is tailored to Stoic principles of rational design in nature and thus offers a dialectically appropriate defence in terms of the naturalness of verecundia. However, Cicero’s argument, which centres on the parts and functions of the human body, risks failing to capture swathes of apparently culture-specific conventions about what is offensive. McConnell shows how the personae theory offers a framework for him to address this issue and considers how Cicero’s discussion in De Officiis may provide resources for those of us in modern liberal multicultural societies to navigate the moral complexities of offence.

The previous two chapters veer towards the realm of politics, a realm which forms a continuous backdrop to De Officiis. Part V of the Guide, ‘Politics’, foregrounds the political dimension. In Chapter 10, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Cicero’s De Officiis’, Jed Atkins explores the relation between two strands of the work’s thinking about the civic sphere: on the one hand, a republicanism that sees our greatest allegiance as being to the citizens of our own country (res publica); on the other hand, the Stoic cosmopolitan notion that we belong to a society of all humans, to whom we have obligations in virtue of our shared humanity regardless of particular citizenship. Given the latter, how does Cicero argue for the special priority of the former? Atkins notes that Cicero grounds both these strands on the same philosophical basis, namely the naturalness of human sociability, which allows Cicero to develop an account of ‘patriotic cosmopolitanism’, whereby the res publica is the optimal place for developing other-regarding attitudes and meeting human needs, the latter in turn enhancing human sociability. This establishes that the kind of ‘thick’ allegiance made possible by a res publica is the best exemplification of the attachment of human to human that cosmopolitanism rightly upholds. Atkins moves on to discuss some objections to this picture and, in considering possible Ciceronian responses, shows how its problems and prospects continue to offer material for modern cosmopolitans to reflect on.

Chapter 11, ‘Cicero’s Extremist Ethics’, takes as its starting point Cicero’s lauding in De Officiis of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Ingo Gildenhard argues that this endorsement of tyrannicide is not an isolated feature of the work but reflects a broader stance in which the use of force for the common good, up to and including homicide, is seen by Cicero as a legitimate political tool, one that he defends in a multitude of ways. There is thus a tension in the work between the idea that humans are made to be sociable and the reality of the conflict and chaos besetting the republic. Cicero adduces a number of psychological explanations to account for the human propensity to wickedness but, as Gildenhard shows, also wrestles with the paradox that the subversion of the republic had at its root the pursuit of objectives that its own political culture most admired. Cicero’s remedy, Gildenhard argues, is the advocacy of both education and, where all else fails, political violence. The latter is given theoretical underpinning in the work’s doctrine of passive injustice, that is, failure to prevent others’ unjust action. Moreover the demands of justice override other obligations, even, in appropriate circumstances, legal ones. This makes the Cicero of De Officiis ‘extremist’, Gildenhard suggests, not simply in that his position seemed not to find favour with those whom Cicero might have taken to be allies, but because from a theoretical point of view it allows for political killing to be a repeatable action. As Gildenhard observes, it is a grim irony that this portends Cicero’s own fate.

Here the Guide’s exploration of the long arc of De Officiis comes to a close, on a somewhat sombre note, but one perhaps not unsuited either to the times that Cicero was living through, or to our own. Like every great composition, De Officiis has a tendency to outrun any particular reading of it. Taken as a whole, the contributors to this volume aim to showcase a work that, in its richness and range, and its synthesis of philosophical theory with social and political reality, retains its vibrancy today.