WorkCicero

On Moral Duties

A father's letter to a son in Athens, drafted in under four weeks — and the first Latin classic to come off a printing press north of the Alps.

by Cicero205 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: De officiis
First published: 44 BCE(aged 62)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Its subject is what a person owes — not what the good is in the abstract, but what to do on the morning when the honourable course and the profitable one point in different directions. Cicero's answer is that they never genuinely do: whatever is truly advantageous is also honourable, and a conflict between the two is a mistake about advantage. He takes the framework from the Stoic Panaetius, says openly that he is doing so, and then goes past him on the cases Panaetius had left unfinished — the corn merchant who knows a relief fleet is close and lets the famine price stand, the man selling a house who says nothing about the fault in it. He wrote it in the autumn of 44 BCE, in under four weeks, as a letter to his son Marcus, who was in Athens and studying less than his father hoped; it was seven months after Caesar's assassination, which the book treats as an act against a tyrant rather than a crime, and he had about thirteen months to live. Ambrose of Milan rewrote it for the Christian clergy in 386. He kept the title. Petrarch built on it, the humanists taught out of it, and Frederick the Great, who rated it the best book on morals that had ever been written or could be, paid for a fresh German translation although two already existed. Some seven hundred medieval manuscripts of it survive. When Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer went looking for a classical text to put through their press at Mainz in 1465, they picked this one. Whether their sheets or the Subiaco edition of Sweynheym and Pannartz, from the same year, came off a press first is unsettled, and Lactantius and Cicero's own De oratore have been put forward as earlier still; what nobody disputes is that this was the first Latin classic printed north of the Alps.

Key concepts

What does Cicero mean by decorum, beyond simple good manners?

Decorum is the fittingness that makes conduct suit a person, occasion, and duty. Cicero uses it to connect moral judgment with particulars rather than rules applied mechanically: age, office, character, and circumstance affect how courage or generosity should appear. A senator, a student, and a father may owe the same virtue different expressions. In autumn 44 BCE, that makes duty practical, not ornamental.

Why does Cicero treat social roles as moral obligations?

Cicero’s personae are the roles and dispositions through which a person must act. He distinguishes what belongs to human beings generally from what belongs to an individual’s character, abilities, circumstances, and chosen station. Duty therefore cannot mean copying another person’s excellence. Marcus, the son addressed in the letter, must form a character suited to his own obligations rather than borrow a public persona.

How should the four virtues work together in an actual decision?

The four virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation—give moral action its working structure. Wisdom judges what the situation requires; justice protects other people’s claims; courage steadies action under pressure; moderation governs desire and conduct. Cicero does not treat them as separate badges: a merchant’s decision about a defective house needs judgment, fairness, self-command, and the nerve to accept less profit.

Why does Cicero connect personal duty with the common good?

Cicero grounds duty in the fact that human beings are made for fellowship. Justice therefore reaches beyond private intention to property, promises, public trust, and the common life shared with strangers. His corn-merchant case makes the point concrete: keeping a legal advantage while knowingly worsening a famine may enrich one trader, but it damages the community that makes trade possible.

When does generosity stop being a virtue and become unfair?

Generosity becomes unjust when it benefits one person by taking unfairly from another or by neglecting a more urgent claim. Cicero asks the giver to consider resources, relationships, and consequences rather than treating expenditure as moral by itself. A benefactor who exhausts family property to win applause may look liberal in public while shifting the cost onto those already owed support.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

When Honour and Advantage Diverge

When advantage seems to demand deception, broken promises, or injustice, what does a person owe to others—and can profit still count as good? In a letter written in 44 BCE, Cicero makes the answer consequential for merchants, leaders, and citizens: true expediency cannot oppose honour.

Cicero refuses the common excuse that necessity suspends morality: genuine advantage, he argues, remains bound to honour, so a profitable act that deceives or injures another has been misidentified as expedient. Drawing on Panaetius, he tests the claim where rules become costly—the corn merchant who knows relief is near and the seller who conceals a house’s fault. The same standard governs leaders and friends. Written for Marcus after Caesar’s assassination, the book makes integrity a public duty, not a private preference. Profit does not get the final word.

ethics
integrity
virtue
justice
duty
morality
expediency
character
leadership
reputation
power
wisdom
fairness
community
friendship
moderation
generosity
nature
reason
human nature
humanity
deception
courage
dignity
ambition
promises
good faith
political ethics
wealth
beneficence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 205
distinct concepts: 404
by passages held, corpus-wide: #345

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “expediency” and “justice”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
expediency	justice	14
good faith	justice	11
expediency	political ethics	10
justice	political ethics	9
justice	virtue	6
duty	expediency	5
courage	justice	4
expediency	virtue	3
justice	wealth	3
courage	virtue	2
courage	wealth	2
duty	justice	2
expediency	good faith	2
good faith	political ethics	2
virtue	wealth	2
courage	duty	1
courage	expediency	1
courage	good faith	1
duty	good faith	1
duty	political ethics	1
duty	virtue	1
expediency	wealth	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-70 Orations
Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.
EN
-54 The Republic (De re publica)
Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.
EN
-52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)
Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.
EN
-46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)
Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.
EN
-45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)
Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.
EN
-45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)
Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.
EN
-45 The Academic Questions (Academica)
Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.
EN
-45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)
The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.
EN
-44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)
Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.
EN
-44 On Moral Duties (De officiis) you are here EN
-44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)
Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.
EN

— or open another of their works