44 BC 2026
This is an AI modernization of On Duties into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Cicero wrote this in the last months of 44 BC. Caesar had been stabbed to death in March, the Republic was breaking apart around him, and Cicero, born in 106 BC and now sixty-two, had just thrown himself back into politics with a series of speeches attacking Mark Antony. He lost. Late in 43 BC, with his name on a list of men to be killed, soldiers caught him near his villa and cut his throat. On Duties was finished about a year before that, and it is the last of his philosophical books; only the later Philippics, which are speeches, came after it.
It is a letter to his son. Marcus was twenty-one and in Athens, studying philosophy under Cratippus and, his father plainly suspects, not studying very hard. The opening pages tell him to work, to read his father's books as well as his teacher's, and to keep up his Latin. What follows is an ethics for a young man about to enter public life, built in three parts: Book One on what is right, Book Two on what is advantageous, Book Three on what to do when the two appear to collide. The answer to the third is that they never really do, and the whole book is the argument for it.
The argument runs on hard cases, which are the reason to read it. A grain merchant sails into famine-struck Rhodes knowing that more ships are close behind: must he say so before he sells? A man selling a house knows about the defects the buyer cannot see. A ring makes its wearer invisible, so that nothing he does can be found out. Regulus, released by the Carthaginians on his promise to return, goes back to be tortured to death. Cicero takes the Greek framework here from a lost book by Panaetius, but the examples and the pressure applied to them are his.
Two of his terms are doing technical work. Officium is duty, meaning whatever a person in a given situation is obliged to do, not a job. Honestum is the right, what is morally good in itself, and it is set throughout against utile, the useful or advantageous. The famous sentence is that we are not born for ourselves alone.
The book had an unusually long career as a school text. It was one of the first books printed in Europe after the Gutenberg Bible, and it was standard reading for the generation that founded the United States. John Adams quoted it for most of his life.
This edition is translated from Cicero's Latin, complete. His positions are left as he held them: Caesar is a tyrant and his killers are praised, Cicero defends his own execution of the Catilinarian conspirators, and slavery appears as an ordinary institution with rules attached. His other book from these same months, the Tusculan Disputations, is in this collection as a separate volume.
Book III: The Conflict Between the Right and the Expedient
My dear son Marcus, you have been studying under Cratippus for a full year now, and in Athens, no less. By this point you ought to be overflowing with the precepts and principles of philosophy, given the towering reputation of both your teacher and your city — the one can build up your knowledge, the other can supply you with living examples. Still, I have always found it useful to combine Latin studies with Greek, and I did this not only in philosophy but in my training as a speaker. I think you should do the same, so that you become equally at home in both languages. In this, if I may say so, I have done our countrymen a real service: not just people with no Greek, but even the well-educated feel they have gained something — both for speaking well and for judging well.
So by all means keep learning from the leading philosopher of our age, and keep learning as long as you like — and you should like it just as long as you are not disappointed with your own progress. But read my books too. They do not differ much from what the Peripatetics teach, since both they and I want to count as followers of Socrates and Plato. On the substance, use your own judgment — I will not stand in your way. But reading my work will certainly make your Latin fuller and richer. And please do not take that as bragging. Plenty of people know more philosophy than I do, and I gladly say so. But the orator's particular gift — speaking aptly, clearly, and gracefully — is a craft I have spent my whole life on, and if I claim some mastery there, I think I claim it with a certain right.
So I urge you, my Cicero, with all my heart: read not only my speeches but also these books of philosophy, which by now nearly rival them in bulk. The speeches have more raw force, yes — but this calm, even, measured style is worth cultivating too. And here is something I notice: no Greek has yet managed to work in both arenas, mastering both the fighting style of the courtroom and this quiet style of philosophical discussion. Unless perhaps Demetrius of Phalerum counts — a subtle reasoner, an orator without much fire, but pleasant enough that you can recognize the student of Theophrastus in him. How far I have succeeded in the two fields, let others judge. I have certainly attempted both.
For my part, I believe that if Plato had wanted to take up courtroom speaking, he could have done it with tremendous weight and richness; and that if Demosthenes had held on to what he learned from Plato and chosen to deliver it, he could have done it with elegance and brilliance. I judge Aristotle and Isocrates the same way: each was so in love with his own pursuit that he looked down on the other's.
I have decided to write you something now, and much more later, and I wanted to begin with the subject best suited both to your age and to my authority as your father. Philosophy takes up many questions that are weighty and useful, and philosophers have worked through them carefully and at length; but the widest reach belongs to what they have handed down about duties. No part of life can be free of duty — not public life or private life, not the courts or the household, not your dealings with yourself or your bargains with another person. Everything morally good in life lies in honoring duty; everything shameful lies in neglecting it.
And this question belongs to all philosophers in common. Who would dare call himself a philosopher while handing down no teaching about duty at all? Yet there are schools whose accounts of the ultimate good and evil overturn duty completely. Think it through: a man who sets up the highest good with no connection to virtue, measuring everything by his own advantage rather than by what is right — that man, if he is consistent with himself and not occasionally overruled by his own better nature, can cultivate neither friendship nor justice nor generosity. And there is simply no way to be brave while judging pain the worst of all evils, or self-controlled while declaring pleasure the highest good.
All this is so obvious it hardly needs arguing, though I have argued it elsewhere. The point is this: if those schools want to be consistent, they can say nothing about duty. Firm, stable rules of duty, rooted in nature, can come only from people who say that moral goodness deserves to be pursued for its own sake — either solely, or at least chiefly. So teaching about duty properly belongs to the Stoics, the Academics, and the Peripatetics; the opinions of Aristo, Pyrrho, and Erillus were laughed off the stage long ago. Even they would have kept their right to discuss duty if they had left us any basis for choosing between one thing and another, some path toward discovering what duty is. For now, and on this question especially, I will follow the Stoics — not as their translator, but in my usual way: drawing from their springs at my own judgment and discretion, as much as seems right, however it seems best.
Since the whole discussion ahead is about duty, I would like to start by defining what duty is — something Panaetius skipped, to my surprise. Every rational treatment of any subject ought to begin with a definition, so that everyone understands exactly what is being discussed.
Every question about duty comes in two kinds. One kind concerns the ultimate good; the other consists of practical rules by which everyday life, in all its corners, can be shaped. Examples of the first kind: whether all duties are absolute; whether one duty outranks another; and questions of that sort. The duties for which practical rules are handed down do connect to the ultimate good, but the connection is less visible, because these rules seem aimed at organizing ordinary shared life. And those are the duties I intend to explain in these books.
There is another division of duty as well. There is what is called a "middle" duty, and a "complete" one. A complete duty, I think, we should call "right" — the Greeks call it katorthoma, while the ordinary duty they call kathekon. They define them this way: whatever is right is a complete duty; a middle duty is one for which a reasonable account can be given of why it was done.
So then: as Panaetius sees it, deliberating over a decision runs three ways. First, people are unsure whether the thing they are weighing is right to do or shameful — and in thinking it through, their minds are often torn toward opposite conclusions. Second, they investigate and take counsel about whether the thing will serve life's comfort and enjoyment, their means and resources, their wealth, their power — the tools for helping themselves and the people they love. That whole deliberation turns on advantage. The third kind of hesitation comes when what seems useful appears to fight against what is right. Advantage seems to grab the mind and drag it one way; the right calls it back the other; and the result is a mind pulled apart in its deliberating, carrying an anxious, two-headed worry into its thinking.
But leaving things out is the worst mistake you can make in dividing a subject, and this division leaves out two. We deliberate not only about whether something is right or shameful, but also, when two right courses lie before us, which is more right — and when two advantageous ones do, which is more advantageous. So the scheme Panaetius thought was threefold turns out to need five parts. First, then, we must discuss the right — in two ways; then, on the same plan, the useful; and last, how to weigh one against the other.
Start at the beginning. Nature has granted every species of living creature the drive to protect itself — its life and its body — to shy away from whatever looks harmful, and to hunt down and secure everything necessary for living: food, shelter, and things of that kind. Common to all animals, too, is the urge to mate and reproduce, and a certain care for what they have produced. But here is the greatest difference between human and beast. The beast, moved only as far as its senses move it, adjusts itself only to what is present, the here and now, with barely any sense of past or future. But a human being shares in reason. Through reason he sees consequences coming; he sees the causes of things and is not blind to what led up to them; he compares one case with a similar one, and ties the future to the present. So he takes in the course of a whole life at a glance, and prepares in advance what he will need to live it.
The same nature, through the power of reason, draws human beings toward one another, into fellowship of speech and of life. Above all she plants in us a singular love for our children, and she drives us to want gatherings and assemblies of people to exist and to take our own part in them — and, for those reasons, to work at providing what supports a decent life, not for ourselves alone but for a spouse, for children, for all the others we hold dear and are bound to protect. And this responsibility stirs the spirit too, and makes it greater for getting things done.
Above all else, the hunt for truth — searching it out, digging into it — belongs distinctively to human beings. So whenever we are free of necessary business and cares, we itch to see something, hear something, learn something new, and we count knowledge of nature's hidden or wonderful things as essential to living happily. From this you can see that what is true, simple, and genuine is the best fit for human nature. And joined to this appetite for seeing truth is a certain hunger to stand first: a mind well formed by nature is unwilling to obey anyone — except someone giving guidance, or teaching, or commanding justly and lawfully for the common benefit. From this comes greatness of spirit, and a way of looking down on merely human concerns.
Nor is it a small thing that nature and reason have done in this: the human being is the only animal that senses what order is, what is fitting, what the right measure is in deeds and in words. No other animal perceives beauty, charm, or the harmony of parts even in the things the eye can see. Nature and reason carry that perception over, by analogy, from the eyes to the mind, and conclude that beauty, consistency, and order deserve to be preserved far more in our decisions and our deeds. They keep watch that we do nothing unbecoming or soft, and that in every opinion and every act we neither do nor think anything driven by mere appetite.
Out of these elements is forged and fashioned the thing we are looking for: moral goodness — the right. Even with no fame attached, it is still right; and we say truly that even if no one ever praised it, it is by its very nature worthy of praise.
There, Marcus my son, you see the very shape of moral goodness — its face, so to speak — "which, if it could be seen with the eyes," as Plato says, "would awaken an astonishing love of wisdom." Everything that is right springs from one of four sources. It is found in the clear-eyed perception of truth, and skill in reaching it; or in preserving human fellowship — giving each person what is his, and keeping good faith in agreements; or in the greatness and strength of a lofty, unconquerable spirit; or in the order and measure of everything done and said, which is where moderation and self-control live.
These four are tied and woven together, yet each one singly gives rise to its own definite kinds of duty. Take the part listed first, where we place wisdom and practical wisdom: to it belongs the search for truth and its discovery, and that is this virtue's particular work. The more clearly a man perceives what is truest in any matter, and the more sharply and swiftly he can see the reason for it and explain it, the more he is considered wise and sound in judgment — and rightly so. So truth is, you might say, the raw material this virtue handles and works in.
The other three virtues have a different assignment: to provide and protect the things on which the active business of life depends — so that human society and connection are kept safe, and so that a spirit's excellence and greatness can shine out, both in building up resources and advantages for oneself and one's own, and far more in rising above those very things. Order, consistency, moderation, and everything like them belong to the sphere where actual action is required, not just the mind's activity. It is by bringing a certain measure and order to the affairs of daily life that we will preserve what is morally good and honorable.
Of the four headings into which we have divided the nature and force of the right, the first — knowledge of truth — touches human nature most closely. All of us are pulled and drawn toward the desire to learn and to know; we think it a beautiful thing to excel at it, and we count it bad and shameful to slip, to go wrong, to be ignorant, to be deceived. In this pursuit — natural and right as it is — there are two faults to avoid. The first is treating the unknown as known and signing off on it rashly. Whoever wants to escape that fault (and everyone should want to) will give real time and care to weighing the evidence. The second fault is the opposite: some people pour enormous study and effort into subjects that are obscure, difficult — and unnecessary.
Avoid those two faults, and whatever work and care you spend on subjects that are right and worth knowing will earn well-deserved praise. So it was with Gaius Sulpicius in astronomy, as we have heard, and with Sextus Pompeius in geometry, whom I knew myself; so with many in logic and more still in civil law. All these arts are engaged in the search for truth. But to let that search pull you away from getting things done is contrary to duty. All the praise virtue earns, it earns in action. Still, action pauses often enough, and gives us many openings to return to study; and the mind's motion, which never rests, can keep us occupied with questions of knowledge without any effort on our part. In the end, all our thinking and every movement of the mind will be spent either on deciding about things that are right — things that bear on living well and happily — or on the pursuits of knowledge and understanding.
So much for the first source of duty.
Of the three sources that remain, the widest reach belongs to the principle that holds human society together — the shared life, as we might call it. It has two parts. The first is justice, in which virtue shines at its brightest, and from which good men get their very name. Joined to it is the second, generosity, which you may also call kindness or open-handedness.
The first task of justice is this: that no one harm anyone else, unless provoked by a wrong. The next: that we treat common property as common, and private property as our own.
Now, nothing is private by nature. Property becomes private through long-standing occupation, as with people who moved into empty land long ago; or through victory, as with those who took possession in war; or by law, by bargain, by agreement, by lot. That is how the territory of Arpinum comes to be called the Arpinates', and the Tusculan land the Tusculans'; and the marking-out of private holdings follows the same pattern. So, since each person's share of what nature made common has become his own, let each keep what has fallen to him. Whoever grabs for more than that violates the law of human society.
But we are not born for ourselves alone. As Plato wrote so memorably, our country claims a share of us, our friends another. And since, as the Stoics hold, everything the earth produces is created for human use, and human beings themselves are born for the sake of human beings — so that they can be of service to one another — here we ought to follow nature as our guide: to put shared benefits into the common pool through the exchange of duties, by giving and by receiving, and to bind person to person in society through our skills, our labor, and our means.
The foundation of justice is good faith — that is, standing truly and steadily by what you have said and what you have agreed. And so — even if this strikes someone as a stretch — let us dare to imitate the Stoics, who love to dig up where words come from, and accept that good faith, fides, got its name because what is said gets done, fiat.
Injustice comes in two kinds. One belongs to the people who inflict a wrong; the other to the people who fail to shield the victims from it when they could. The man who unjustly attacks someone, whipped up by anger or some other passion, is like a man laying hands on his own comrade. But the man who does not defend against a wrong, does not stand in its way when he can, is as much at fault as if he had abandoned his parents, or his friends, or his country. Notice, too, that wrongs inflicted deliberately, for the sake of harming, often begin in fear: the man plotting to hurt another is afraid that unless he strikes first, he will suffer some harm himself. For the most part, though, people set out to do wrong to get their hands on what they crave — and within that vice, greed covers the widest ground.
Riches are pursued partly for the necessities of life, partly for the enjoyment of pleasures. In men with bigger ambitions, the appetite for money looks toward influence and the power to bestow favors — as Marcus Crassus said not long ago: no fortune is large enough for a man who means to be first in the state, unless he can feed an army on its income. Splendid establishments and a style of living elegant and abundant give pleasure too; and the result of all this is that the appetite for money has become bottomless. Not that growing your estate deserves blame, so long as it hurts no one — but wrongdoing is always to be shunned.
Most people, however, arrive at a real forgetfulness of justice when they fall into craving commands, high office, and glory. Ennius says, "No fellowship is sacred, no faith is kept, where a throne is at stake" — and the truth of it stretches wider than thrones. Wherever a situation allows only one person to come out on top, the competition usually gets so fierce that keeping any "sacred fellowship" becomes nearly impossible. The recklessness of Gaius Caesar proved it just now: he overturned every law of gods and men for the sake of the supremacy that his own deluded imagination had dreamed up for him. And here is the troubling part: it is precisely in the greatest spirits and the most brilliant minds that cravings for honor, command, power, and glory tend to spring up. All the more reason to take care that nothing goes wrong on that ground.
In every injustice, though, it matters enormously whether the wrong is done in some disturbance of the mind — which is usually brief and momentary — or deliberately and with forethought. Wrongs that break out of a sudden impulse are lighter than wrongs planned and prepared in advance.
But enough now about inflicting wrong.
The reasons people skip the defense of others and desert that duty tend to be many. They do not want to take on enemies, or effort, or expense; or carelessness, laziness, and sluggishness hold them back; or they are so wrapped up in their own studies and occupations that they let the people they ought to protect fall by the wayside. Because of this, I suspect Plato's claim about philosophers falls short. They are just, he says, because they are absorbed in the search for truth, and because they despise, and count as nothing, the things most people chase so hotly and fight each other tooth and nail to win. Well — they achieve one kind of justice, in that they inflict wrong on no one, but they tumble into the other kind: kept back by their devotion to learning, they abandon the very people they ought to protect. Plato even thinks they will not enter public life at all unless forced to. But it would be fairer for it to happen willingly; because even an action that is right in itself is just only if it is voluntary.
There are also people who — out of devotion to guarding their own property, or out of a kind of distaste for their fellow human beings — say they are simply minding their own business, and are convinced they wrong no one. They are free of one kind of injustice and walk straight into the other: they desert the shared life, because they contribute nothing to it — none of their attention, none of their effort, none of their means.
So then: we have laid out the two kinds of injustice and attached the causes of each, and earlier we established what justice itself consists of. From here it will be easy to judge what our duty is at any given moment — unless we are far too much in love with ourselves. Caring about other people's affairs is genuinely hard. Terence's old Chremes may "think nothing human is foreign to him"; still, we perceive and feel what happens to us, good or bad, more sharply than what happens to others — which we see as if from a great distance — and so we judge their cases differently from our own. That is why the advice is sound: never do a thing when you are in doubt whether it is fair or unfair. Fairness shines by its own light; doubt is a sign the mind is already contemplating a wrong.
But times often come when the very actions that seem most worthy of a just man — a "good man," as we say — turn around and become their opposites: returning what was entrusted to you, keeping a promise. Things that belong to truth and good faith can shift, until the just course is to break them rather than keep them. What matters is to refer back to the foundations of justice I laid down at the start: first, harm no one; second, serve the common benefit. When circumstances change these, duty changes with them; it is not always the same. A promise or agreement can turn out so that keeping it damages either the person it was made to or the person who made it. Take the story from the tragedies: if Neptune had not kept his promise to Theseus, Theseus would not have lost his son Hippolytus. Of the three wishes Neptune had granted him, so the story runs, this was the third — the one he wished, in a fit of rage, for Hippolytus' destruction. It was granted, and it plunged him into the blackest grief. So promises are not to be kept when keeping them harms the very people you made them to. And if a promise would hurt you more than it helps the person you made it to, it is no offense against duty to put the greater good before the lesser. Suppose you have agreed to appear in person as someone's advocate, and meanwhile your son falls seriously ill: it is not against duty to fail to do what you said. It is the other man who strays from duty if he complains of being abandoned. And promises extorted by fear, or won by deceit — who fails to see that those do not bind at all? Most of them are voided by the edict of the praetor, Rome's senior judge; some by the laws themselves.
Injustice also springs up, again and again, from a kind of trickery: an over-clever but malicious reading of the law. This is what gave us the saying, worn smooth by now with use: "Law at its strictest, injustice at its worst." Plenty of wrong gets done under this heading even between states. There was the commander who, after a thirty-day truce had been struck with the enemy, went out ravaging their fields by night — because, he said, the truce had bargained for days, not nights. Nor does our own countryman deserve approval, if the story about Quintus Fabius Labeo is true — or whoever it was, for I have nothing beyond hearsay. Appointed by the senate to arbitrate a boundary dispute between Nola and Naples, he arrived at the site and spoke with each side separately: don't be greedy about this, he told them, don't grab; better to step back a little than push forward. Both sides did as he asked — and a strip of land was left over in the middle. So he set their boundaries exactly where they themselves had said; and the strip left in the middle he awarded to the Roman people. That is swindling, not judging. Cleverness of that kind is to be avoided in every affair, always.
There are also duties you must keep even toward people who have wronged you. Revenge and punishment have their limit — in fact, I suspect it is enough that the man who did the harm comes to regret it, so that he never does anything like it again and everyone else grows slower to do wrong.
Above all, in the affairs of a state, the laws of war must be kept. There are two ways of settling a conflict: by talking it through, and by force. The first is the human way; the second belongs to beasts. So you may turn to force only when talking is no longer possible. The one good reason for going to war, then, is so that we can live in peace, unwronged; and once the victory is won, we should spare the enemies who were not cruel or savage in the fighting. Our ancestors lived by this. They took the Tusculans, the Aequi, the Volsci, the Sabines, and the Hernici all the way into citizenship — but Carthage and Numantia they wiped off the earth. I wish they had spared Corinth; but I suppose they were acting on some reason, most likely the advantage of the site itself: they feared its very location might one day tempt someone to start the war over again. My own view is that we should always be working toward a peace that hides no traps. If I had been listened to on that point, we would still have a republic — maybe not the best one, but at least some republic. As it is, we have none.
We owe consideration to those we have beaten by force. More than that: those who lay down their arms and throw themselves on the good faith of our generals must be taken in, even if the battering ram has already struck their wall. In this, our countrymen honored justice so seriously that the men who accepted the surrender of cities and nations defeated in war became, by ancestral custom, the patrons of those very communities.
As for fairness in war itself, it stands written, with full religious solemnity, in the fetial law of the Roman people — our priestly code of war. From it you can learn that no war is just unless it is fought either to recover what has been formally demanded, or after warning has been given and the war openly declared. Popilius, as general, was holding a province, and in his army Cato's son was serving out his first campaign. When Popilius decided to disband one of his legions, he discharged Cato's son too, since the young man was serving in that legion. But the young man loved soldiering and stayed with the army — so Cato wrote to Popilius: if you allow him to remain, bind him with a second military oath, because the first one is void, and without it he cannot lawfully fight the enemy. That is how exact the scruples were about waging war. There is, in fact, a letter of the elder Marcus Cato to his son Marcus, in which he writes that he has heard the young man was discharged by the consul while soldiering in Macedonia in the war against Perseus. He warns him, therefore, to be careful not to go into battle — for, he says, a man who is not a soldier has no right to fight the enemy.
Here is something else I notice. The man whose proper legal name was perduellis — "war-foe" — was called hostis instead, the mildness of the word softening the grimness of the thing. Because to our ancestors, hostis meant what we now mean by "foreigner." The Twelve Tables — our oldest code of laws — prove it: "a day appointed for trial with a hostis," and again, "against a hostis, title holds forever." What could you add to a gentleness that calls the man you are at war with by so soft a name? Though by now, admittedly, long use has hardened the word: it drifted away from "foreigner" and settled, in its strict sense, on the man who carries arms against you.
But when the fight is over empire, and glory is what the war is for, the war must still rest entirely on the same causes I named a moment ago as the only just grounds for war. Wars fought for the glory of empire, though, should be waged less bitterly. Think of how we contend with a fellow citizen: one way if he is an enemy, another if he is a rival. With the rival, the contest is for office and standing; with the enemy, for life and reputation. In just that way, we fought the Celtiberians and the Cimbri as enemies — the question was which side would survive, not which would rule. But with the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, and Pyrrhus, the struggle was over empire. The Carthaginians broke treaties; Hannibal was cruel; the rest were fairer. And from Pyrrhus we have that magnificent speech on returning prisoners:
I ask no gold for myself; you shall pay me no ransom.
Let us not be hagglers of war but wagers of it:
with iron, not gold, let both sides stake our lives.
Whether our mistress Fortune wills that you rule or I,
whatever she brings, let courage put it to the test.
And take this saying with you too: the brave men
whose lives the fortune of war has spared —
their freedom, be certain, I spare as well.
I give them; lead them home; I give them with the blessing of the great gods.
A kingly sentiment indeed, and worthy of the line of Aeacus — Achilles' own royal house.
More than that: even when individuals, pressed by circumstances, have made a promise to the enemy, good faith must be kept in that very promise. In the First Punic War, Regulus was captured by the Carthaginians and sent to Rome to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, swearing that he would return. The first thing he did on arrival was to argue in the senate that the prisoners should not be given back. Then, when his relatives and friends tried to hold him back, he chose to go back to torture rather than break the faith he had given — even to an enemy.
Again, in the Second Punic War, after the battle of Cannae, Hannibal sent ten men to Rome bound by oath to return unless they obtained the ransom of the captives. The censors — the magistrates who policed the citizen rolls — marked every one of those oath-breakers down to the lowest civic grade and kept them there as long as each man lived. And they did the same to the one who thought he had found a loophole in his oath. With Hannibal's permission he had left the camp, then come back a little later, saying he had forgotten something or other; then, leaving the camp the second time, he considered himself released from his oath. And so he was — in the words, but not in the fact. In matters of good faith, always weigh what you meant, not what you said.
But the greatest example of justice toward an enemy was set by our ancestors. A deserter from Pyrrhus promised the senate that he would give the king poison and kill him — and the senate, with Gaius Fabricius, handed the deserter back to Pyrrhus. They refused to sanction the criminal death even of an enemy — a powerful enemy, and one waging an unprovoked war against them.
Enough, then, about the duties of war.
But let's remember that justice must be kept even toward the lowliest. The lowliest station and fortune is that of slaves, and the standing advice about them is not bad: use them as you would hired workers — require the work, and provide what is due.
Since wrong is done in one of two ways, by force or by fraud, fraud seems to belong to the fox — that little schemer — and force to the lion. Both are utterly alien to a human being, but fraud deserves the deeper hatred. And of all injustice, none is more deadly than that of the men who, at the very moment they are cheating you worst, are working hardest to look like good men.
That is enough about justice.
Next in order, as I planned, let's talk about generosity and open-handedness. Nothing suits human nature better — but nothing calls for more caution, either. First, kindness must not harm the very people it seems to bless, nor anyone else. Second, generosity must not outrun your means. Third, it must be measured to each person's worth — for that is the foundation of justice, and justice is the standard everything here must answer to. People who shower someone with a favor that actually damages the person they seem to want to help should be counted not as generous or open-handed, but as ruinous flatterers. And people who harm one man in order to be open-handed to another commit the same injustice as if they had steered a neighbor's property into their own pockets.
Yet there are plenty of people — especially the ones hungry for splendor and glory — who rob some in order to lavish on others, and who expect to look generous to their friends if they make them rich by any means whatever. That is not merely far from duty; nothing could be more opposed to it. So the open-handedness we practice should be the kind that helps our friends and hurts no one. When Lucius Sulla and Gaius Caesar transferred money from its rightful owners into the hands of strangers, that should not be seen as open-handed. Nothing is open-handed that is not also just.
The second caution was that generosity should not exceed your means. People who want to be more giving than their resources allow go wrong first by wronging their own kin: the wealth they hand to strangers would more fairly be spent on their families, or left to them. And inside open-handedness of that sort there usually lurks a greed for seizing and taking wrongfully, just to keep the supply of gifts topped up. You can also see that a great many people are open-handed less by nature than out of a kind of hunger for glory: they do a lot of things simply to look generous — things that seem to spring from showing off rather than from goodwill. That sort of pretense is closer kin to hollowness than to open-handedness or moral goodness.
The third rule laid down was to choose by worth. Here you should look at the character of the person the kindness will go to, his attitude toward us, the community and companionship of our shared life, and the services he has already done for our benefit. Best of all if everything comes together in one person; if not, the more numerous and the weightier claims carry the greater weight.
Since we live not among perfect, fully wise human beings, but among people who are doing splendidly if they carry even the outline of virtue, I think we should grasp this too: no one should be written off entirely in whom any trace of virtue shows. But the people to cultivate most are the ones best furnished with the gentler virtues — moderation, self-control, and this very justice about which so much has already been said. For a brave and great spirit in a man who is imperfect and short of wisdom usually runs too hot; those gentler virtues seem to belong more surely to the good man.
So much for character.
As for the goodwill others feel toward us, the first rule of duty is to give the most to the one who loves us most. But judge goodwill the way grown men do, not the way lovesick boys do — by its steadiness and constancy, not by the heat of its passion. And if merits already stand on the other side, so that gratitude is not to be started but repaid, then even greater care is called for; no duty is more binding than repaying a kindness.
If Hesiod tells us to return what we have borrowed in fuller measure, when we can, what should we do when a kindness challenges us first? Shouldn't we imitate fertile fields, which give back far more than they received? If we don't hesitate to invest our services in people we hope will help us someday, how should we treat the people who already have? Open-handedness comes in two kinds: giving a kindness and repaying one. Whether we give is up to us; but failing to repay is not something a good man is allowed — provided he can repay without wronging anyone.
Among kindnesses received, we must also discriminate — and no question, the greatest kindness claims the greatest debt. But in weighing that, weigh above all the spirit, the eagerness, and the goodwill behind the gift. Many people do a great many things in a kind of heedless fever, without judgment — showering everyone, as if sick with giving, or swept along by some sudden gust of impulse. Benefits like those should not be rated as highly as the ones conferred with judgment — deliberately, and steadily.
But in giving a kindness and in repaying one alike, when everything else is equal, the chief rule of duty is this: help most where help is most needed. Most people do the opposite. The man they hope for the most from is the man they serve hardest — even when he doesn't need them at all.
Human society and its bonds will be best preserved if we show each person the most kindness the more closely he is bound to us.
But it seems we should trace the natural roots of human community and fellowship somewhat deeper. The first level is the one you can see in the society of the whole human race. Its binding cord is reason and speech, which — through teaching and learning, through sharing, debating, and judging — bring people together and unite them in a kind of natural fellowship. Nothing separates us further from the nature of wild animals. We often say animals have courage — horses do, lions do; we never say they have justice, fairness, or goodness, because they have no share of reason or speech.
This is the widest society of all: human beings with human beings, everyone with everyone. Within it, we must preserve the common use of everything nature has produced for the common benefit of mankind — with this understanding: whatever statutes and civil law have assigned as property stays as those laws fix it, but everything else is handled as the Greek proverb has it: "among friends, all things in common." The common property of all people amounts to the kind of thing in Ennius' example — he gives one case, but it carries over to a great many:
The man who kindly shows a wanderer the road
lights, as it were, another's lamp from his own:
his own shines no less for kindling his friend's.
That one example teaches the whole lesson: whatever can be granted without loss, grant it — even to a stranger. From it come the everyday rules: don't bar anyone from running water; let anyone who wants it take fire from your fire; give honest advice to a person trying to make up his mind. Such things help the one who receives them and cost the giver nothing. So practice them — and always be contributing something to the common good. But since any one person's resources are small, and the crowd of people who need them is endless, this everyday open-handedness has to be measured against Ennius' limit — "his own shines no less" — so that we keep the means to be open-handed to our own.
Human society has many degrees of closeness. Step in from that boundless outer circle, and nearer stands the society of the same people, the same nation, the same language — among the strongest of the bonds that join human beings. Closer still is belonging to the same city, for fellow citizens share a great deal: the forum, the temples, the covered walkways, the streets; laws, rights, courts, and the vote; and beyond all that, the acquaintances and friendships, the dealings and interests, that tie so many people to so many others.
Tighter yet is the bond among kin. Out of the vast fellowship of the human race, it closes down into something small and narrow. Since nature gives every living creature the urge to reproduce, the first society is marriage itself; the next is children; then one household, with everything shared. And that household is the beginning of the city — the seed-bed, you might say, of the state. Then come the bonds between brothers, then between first cousins and second cousins, who, once one house can no longer hold them, go out into other houses as if into colonies. Then come marriages and in-laws, and from them still more kin — and that spreading growth of families is the origin of states. Ties of blood, then, bind people together with goodwill and with affection: it counts for much to have the same ancestral monuments, to share the same family rites, to have a common resting place for your dead.
But of all fellowships, none is finer, none stronger, than when good men of like character are joined in close friendship. For that moral goodness I keep returning to moves us even when we see it in someone else; it makes us friends of the person it seems to live in. Every virtue draws us to itself and makes us love the people who seem to possess it, but justice and open-handedness do this most of all. And nothing is more lovable, nothing binds tighter, than likeness of good character: where people share the same pursuits and the same desires, each comes to delight in the other as much as in himself, and what Pythagoras wanted in friendship comes true — out of many, one.
Great, too, is the community built up by kindnesses given and received, passing back and forth; as long as they are mutual and welcome, the people they pass between are locked in a solid fellowship.
But when you have surveyed everything with reason and a clear mind, of all fellowships none is weightier, none dearer, than the one each of us has with the republic. Our parents are dear to us; our children, relatives, and friends are dear; but our country by herself embraces all our loves. What good man would hesitate to meet death for her, if his death would do her good? Which makes the savagery of certain men all the more detestable — men who have mangled their country with every crime, who have been busy, and are busy still, with her total destruction.
Now, if a contest were held to rank where the most duty is owed, first would come country and parents, whose enormous benefits have put us in their debt; next our children and the whole household, which looks to us alone and can have no other refuge; then the kin we get along well with, who usually share our fortunes too.
So the necessary supports of life are owed first of all to the people I just named. But shared life and shared living — advice, conversation, encouragement, comfort, sometimes even a scolding — these flourish best in friendships, and the sweetest friendship of all is the one that likeness of character has sealed.
In distributing all these duties, though, you will have to consider what each person needs most, and what each could or could not obtain without you. Degrees of relationship, then, will not always match degrees of circumstance. There are duties owed more to one person than to another: you would sooner help a neighbor bring in his harvest than a brother or a close friend; but if a case comes to court, you would defend a relative or a friend before you would defend the neighbor. These are the things to look around for in every duty — and it takes habit and practice to become a good accountant of duty, able to add and subtract and see what the balance comes to: how much is owed to whom.
Doctors, generals, and orators, however well they have grasped the rules of their art, accomplish nothing worth much praise without experience and practice. It is the same here. The rules for keeping duty get handed down — I am doing it right now — but a matter this large demands experience and practice too.
And that is more or less enough on how the right, the source from which duty is shaped, grows out of the claims of human society.
Understand, though, that of the four categories we set out as the springs of moral goodness and duty, the one that shines brightest in most eyes is whatever is done with a great and lofty spirit that looks down on human fortunes. So when we reach for an insult, the readiest thing at hand is something like: "You young men carry a woman's heart; that girl carries a man's" — or something in this vein: "Son of Salmacis, win your spoils without sweat or blood."
And when we praise, it is the deeds done with a great spirit — bravely, magnificently — that we somehow praise with a fuller voice. That is why orators have an open field on Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae, and Leuctra; why our own Cocles — the Horatius who held the bridge — and the Decii, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, Marcus Marcellus, and countless others get the same treatment; and why the Roman people itself stands out above all in greatness of spirit. You can see their passion for military glory in the statues, too: nearly all of them are in armor.
But when that elevation of spirit you see in dangers and hard labor is empty of justice — when it fights not for the safety of all but for its own advantage — it is a vice. Not only is there nothing of virtue in it; it is closer to a savagery that shoves away everything human. So the Stoics define courage well when they call it the virtue that fights on the side of fairness. No one, then, who has grabbed a reputation for courage through treachery and malice has ever won real praise: nothing can be morally right that is empty of justice.
Plato put it magnificently: "Not only should knowledge divorced from justice be called cunning rather than wisdom," he says, "but even a spirit ready for danger, if it is driven by private greed instead of the common good, should bear the name of audacity rather than courage." So we want our brave and great-spirited men to be, at the same time, good and straightforward men, friends of the truth and strangers to deceit — praise that comes from the very heart of justice.
But here is the hateful part: this very elevation and greatness of spirit is the soil where stubbornness and an excessive lust for first place sprout most easily. Plato says the whole character of the Spartans was on fire with the desire to win; in just that way, the more a man excels in greatness of spirit, the more he wants to be first among all — or rather, to be the only one. And once you have set your heart on towering over everyone, it becomes hard to keep the fairness that belongs to the very essence of justice. That is why such men let themselves be beaten neither in debate nor by any public and lawful authority; in the state they generally turn up as bribers and faction-builders, out to grab the greatest power they can and to stand above others by force rather than beside them in justice. But the harder the thing is, the more magnificent: no moment of life is ever permitted to be empty of justice.
The brave and great-spirited, then, are not the men who inflict wrong but the men who beat it back. And true, wise greatness of spirit judges that the right — the thing nature seeks above everything — lies in deeds, not in fame, and prefers being first to seeming first. A man who hangs on the errors of an ignorant crowd should not be counted among the great. At the same time, the loftier a man's spirit, the more easily the hunger for glory pushes him into injustice. It is slippery ground: you will hardly find the man who takes on labors and walks into dangers and does not then want glory as a kind of wage for what he has done.
A brave and great spirit shows itself above all in two things. The first is disdain for externals: the settled conviction that a person should admire, wish for, or pursue nothing except what is right and fitting — and should surrender to no man, to no inner turmoil, to no stroke of fortune. The second is this: with your spirit in the condition I just described, you then do deeds that are great and supremely useful, yes — but steeply difficult, full of labor, and full of danger both to life and to much of what makes life worth living.
All the splendor and grandeur of these two — and, I will add, all the usefulness — lies in the second; but the cause, the engine that makes men great, lies in the first. For the first contains what makes spirits exceptional and contemptuous of merely human concerns. And that quality itself shows in two ways: judging that only the right is good, and being free of every disturbance of the soul. To count as small the things most people find dazzling and glorious, and to despise them on firm and settled principle — that is the mark of a brave and great spirit. And to bear what seems bitter — and human life and fortune serve it up in many and various forms — so steadily that you depart not an inch from your natural state, not an inch from the dignity of a wise man: that takes a tough spirit and great constancy. Besides, it would make no sense for a man whom fear cannot break to be broken by desire, or for a man who has proved unconquerable by hardship to be conquered by pleasure. So avoid these — and flee the love of money above all. Nothing marks a narrow and small spirit like loving riches; nothing is more honorable and magnificent than despising money if you don't have it, and, if you do have it, putting it to work in generosity and open-handedness.
Beware the hunger for glory too, as I said before. It strips away liberty — and liberty is the prize for which great-spirited men should wage every contest. And commands should not be chased; rather, sometimes they should be declined, and sometimes laid down.
Keep yourself free of every disturbance of the soul — of desire and fear, but also of grief, of excessive pleasure, of anger — so that you may have tranquility of spirit and security, which bring with them both constancy and dignity. Many men, now and in the past, have gone looking for that tranquility by withdrawing from public affairs and taking refuge in leisure. Among them are the noblest and by far the foremost philosophers, along with certain strict and serious men who could stomach the conduct of neither the people nor the people's leaders; and some of them settled in the country, content with the management of their own estates. All of these aimed at the same thing kings aim at: to need nothing, to obey no one, to enjoy their liberty — whose essence is exactly this, living as you please.
So this desire is shared by the men who crave power and the men of quiet retirement I have just described; the difference is that the first group thinks the way to get it is to command vast resources, while the second thinks the way is to be content with their own — and with little. Neither view deserves to be dismissed outright. But the quiet life is the easier one, the safer one, and the lighter burden on everyone else; while the life of those who have fitted themselves for public service and for doing great things yields more for the human race, and is better suited to fame and to a large place in the world.
So perhaps we should excuse the men of exceptional talent who skip public life to give themselves to learning, and also those whom poor health or some other serious cause has forced to withdraw, leaving to others the power and the credit of governing. But when a man has no such excuse and says he simply despises what most people admire — command and public office — I count that not to his credit but against him. Insofar as such men disdain glory and treat it as worthless, it is hard not to approve the judgment; but the truth is that they seem to dread the toil and the headaches, and the supposed disgrace and humiliation of political defeats and lost elections. There are people who are anything but steady when the situations reverse: they despise pleasure with perfect sternness but go soft in pain; they shrug at glory but are crushed by disgrace — and even in that they manage no real consistency.
But the men to whom nature has given the equipment for public business should drop every hesitation, seek office, and take up the government of the state. There is no other way for a state to be steered — and no other way for greatness of spirit to show itself. And those who do enter public life need, no less than philosophers — perhaps even more — that largeness of outlook and disdain for ordinary human concerns I keep coming back to, along with calm of mind and a settled security, if they are to live free of anxiety, with dignity and constancy. All this comes easier to philosophers: their lives expose less surface for fortune to strike, they need fewer things, and if disaster does come, they cannot fall so hard. There is good reason, then, why stronger passions and more driving ambitions stir in men who govern than in men at rest — and all the more reason for them to arm themselves with greatness of spirit and freedom from gnawing worry.
Whoever steps forward to act should be careful to weigh not only how right the undertaking is, but also whether he has the capacity to carry it through. And right there he must watch both sides: neither despairing too quickly out of cowardice, nor trusting himself too far out of appetite. In every enterprise, before you begin, prepare diligently.
Most people think the achievements of war are greater than the achievements of civil life. That opinion needs cutting down to size. Many men have gone looking for wars out of sheer hunger for glory — it happens mostly in great spirits and great talents, and all the more when they have a gift for soldiering and an appetite for campaigning. But if we are willing to judge honestly, many achievements of civil life have proved greater and more famous than anything done in war.
Themistocles is rightly praised; his name is more illustrious than Solon's; Salamis gets cited as the witness of a most glorious victory, and that victory gets ranked above Solon's statesmanship in first establishing the Areopagus, Athens's great council. But the second achievement should be judged every bit as brilliant as the first. The victory helped the city once; the council goes on helping it forever. It is what preserves the laws of the Athenians and the institutions of their ancestors. Themistocles could name nothing he ever did to help the Areopagus; the Areopagus could truly say it had helped Themistocles — for the war was conducted under the guidance of that very council Solon had established.
The same can be said of Pausanias and Lysander. People credit their exploits with winning Sparta her empire, but those exploits do not compare, even in the smallest part, with the laws and discipline of Lycurgus. In fact it was precisely because of those laws that Sparta's armies were so obedient and so brave. For my own part, when I was a boy, Marcus Scaurus never seemed to me to rank behind Gaius Marius; nor, once I was in public life myself, did Quintus Catulus rank behind Gnaeus Pompeius. Arms abroad are worth little without wisdom at home. And Africanus — a singular man and a singular commander — did the state no more good by razing Numantia than Publius Nasica, a private citizen at the time, did in the same era by striking down Tiberius Gracchus. True, that deed does not belong purely to civil life — it touches the military kind too, since it was carried out by force and by hand — but even so, it was done as an act of political judgment, without an army.
Best of all, though, is the verse that I hear the wicked and the envious love to attack: "Let arms yield to the toga, the laurel yield to civic praise."
To pass over every other example: when I was the one guiding the republic, did not arms yield to the toga — to civilian power? Never was the state in graver danger; never was the peace that followed deeper. By my planning and my vigilance, the weapons slipped quickly from the hands of the most reckless citizens and fell of their own accord. What feat of war was ever so great? What triumph stands comparison? I am allowed to boast to you, Marcus my son, for to you belong the inheritance of this glory and the duty of imitating the deeds behind it. And in fact Gnaeus Pompeius — a man heaped with military honors — paid me this tribute in front of many listeners: he said his third triumph would have been won in vain, had my service to the state not preserved a place for him to celebrate it in.
So there are civic forms of courage that yield nothing to the military kind. Indeed, they call for even more effort and more devotion.
The moral goodness we are looking for in a lofty, magnificent spirit is achieved, through and through, by the powers of the mind, not the body. Still, the body should be exercised and conditioned so that it can obey judgment and reason in carrying out business and enduring hard work. But the right itself — the thing we are searching for — lies entirely in the mind's care and thought. And here the men in togas who preside over the state contribute no less than the men who fight its wars. It is by their counsel that wars are often avoided or brought to an end, and sometimes even declared: the Third Punic War was Marcus Cato's doing, and his authority carried weight in it even after his death. So the wisdom to decide is more to be sought than the courage to fight it out — but take care that we choose that course from a reckoning of advantage, not just from a wish to dodge fighting. And a war should be undertaken in such a way that it is plainly seeking one thing only: peace.
It takes a brave and steady spirit not to be rattled when things get rough — not to be flustered and knocked off your footing, as the saying goes, but to keep presence of mind and clear judgment, and never leave the path of reason.
That is strength of spirit. But this takes a great mind as well: to run ahead of events in thought; to settle well in advance what may happen on either side, and what to do when it does; and never to let yourself be caught saying, "I hadn't thought of that."
These are the works of a spirit that is great and lofty, confident in its own practical wisdom and planning. Whereas plunging blindly into the fray and grappling hand to hand with an enemy is something savage — the way of beasts. But when the hour and necessity demand it, then fight hand to hand, and prefer death to slavery and disgrace.
On destroying and plundering cities: think very hard, so that nothing is done recklessly, nothing cruelly. The great man's part, when events are in upheaval, is to punish the guilty, spare the many, and in every turn of fortune hold to what is upright and honorable. For just as there are men, as I said above, who rank warfare above civic achievement, so you will find many to whom risky, hot-blooded schemes seem more dazzling and grander than calm, considered ones.
We should never flee danger in a way that makes us look cowardly and weak; but we should equally avoid offering ourselves to danger without cause — nothing could be more foolish. In facing danger, copy the practice of doctors: mild illness gets gentle treatment, but grave disease forces them to apply risky, double-edged remedies. To pray for a storm while the sea is calm is madness; to meet the storm with every means you have is wisdom — above all when settling the matter promises more good than leaving it in doubt threatens harm.
Dangerous undertakings lay some of the risk on the men who attempt them and some on the state. Likewise, some men are called to stake their lives, others their glory and the goodwill of their fellow citizens. We ought to be readier to risk what is ours alone than what belongs to everyone, and quicker to fight for honor and glory than for our other advantages.
Yet many have been found who would pour out not only their money but their lives for their country, and who still refused to give up the smallest scrap of personal glory — even when their country demanded it. Callicratidas, the Spartan commander in the Peloponnesian War, had done many things brilliantly; then at the end he overturned it all. He rejected the advice of those who thought the fleet should be pulled back from Arginusae and no battle risked with the Athenians. His answer was that if Sparta lost that fleet, she could build another, but he could not retreat without disgracing himself. The blow that followed was a moderate one for Sparta. The deadly blow came when Cleombrotus, afraid of criticism, recklessly gave battle to Epaminondas — and Spartan power came crashing down.
How much better Quintus Maximus managed it! Ennius wrote of him:
One man, by delaying, restored our state to us.
He set no rumor of the crowd above our safety.
So now the man's glory shines the brighter, ever after.
This species of fault must be avoided in civil life as well. There are men who dare not say what they think, even when it is the best counsel there is, because they fear unpopularity.
Everyone who intends to preside over a state should hold on to Plato's two rules. First: keep the citizens' benefit so fixed in view that everything you do refers back to it, whatever your own interests, which you must forget. Second: care for the whole body of the republic, and never protect one part while abandoning the rest. The management of a state, like a legal guardianship, must be run for the benefit of the people entrusted to it, not of the people it is entrusted to. Those who look after one part of the citizens and neglect another bring into the state the deadliest thing there is: division and discord. And from that comes the result that some pose as champions of the people, others as devotees of the "best men," and precious few as servants of the whole.
That is what produced the great feuds at Athens, and in our own republic not just riots but ruinous civil wars. A serious, brave citizen — one worthy of leading the state — will run from all of that and hate it. He will give himself to the republic entire; he will chase neither wealth nor power; and he will protect the whole state in a way that serves everyone. He will not drag anyone into hatred or ill will with false accusations. He will hold so tightly to justice and moral goodness that, provided he preserves them, he will accept any blow, however heavy, and go to meet death itself rather than desert them.
Nothing is more wretched than electioneering — the scramble and shoving for office. Plato is splendid on this too: men who fight one another over which of them will run the state, he says, behave like sailors brawling over which of them gets to steer. And he lays down the rule that we should treat as adversaries those who take up arms against the state, not those who want to guard it according to their own judgment — a disagreement in the manner of Publius Africanus and Quintus Metellus, which had no bitterness in it.
Nor should we listen to those who think we ought to rage against our political enemies, and who imagine that this is what a great-spirited, brave man does. Nothing is more praiseworthy, nothing more worthy of a great and splendid man, than a readiness to be appeased — gentleness and mercy. Among free peoples, under equality before the law, we must also practice courtesy and what is called an unruffled mind: if we bristle every time someone approaches us at a bad hour or asks with too much nerve, we will slide into a sour touchiness that is useless to us and hateful to everyone else. And yet mildness and mercy deserve approval only on this condition: that severity can still be applied for the republic's sake, for without severity no state can be governed. But every punishment and every rebuke should be free of insult, and should look not to the satisfaction of the man doing the punishing or the scolding, but to the good of the state.
Take care, too, that the penalty never exceed the fault, and that for the same offense some are not punished while others are not even called to account. And above all, keep anger out of punishing. A man who comes to punishment angry will never hold that middle line between too much and too little — the mean the Peripatetics favor, and rightly favor, if only they did not also praise anger and tell us nature gave it to us for our own good. No: anger should be refused in every situation, and we should pray that the men who preside over the state be like the laws themselves, which are moved to punish not by wrath but by fairness.
In prosperity too — when everything is flowing just the way we want — let us steer hard away from pride, disdain, and arrogance. It is a mark of weakness to lose your balance in good fortune, just as it is in bad; and it is a splendid thing to keep an even keel through the whole of life, the same expression, the same face, always — as the tradition tells us of Socrates, and of Gaius Laelius too. Philip, the king of Macedon, was outstripped by his son in achievements and glory; but in courtesy and humanity, I find, the father was the greater man. So the one was always great, while the other was often at his most shameful. The advice seems sound, then: the higher we stand, the more humbly we should carry ourselves. Panaetius says that Africanus, his student and close friend, used to put it this way: horses grown wild and unmanageable from constant charges in battle are handed over to trainers to make them easier to handle; and in the same way men who run unbridled in prosperity and trust themselves too far should be led into the training-ring of reason and learning, where they can see plainly how fragile human affairs are and how fortune turns.
The height of prosperity, moreover, is exactly when to make the most use of friends' advice — and to grant it even more authority than before. And in those same seasons, beware of opening your ears to flatterers or letting yourself be flattered. It is easy to be fooled there, because we assume we are just the sort of people who deserve the praise; and out of that assumption grow countless blunders, when men puffed up with their own image are made a shameful laughingstock and wander into the gravest errors.
But enough of that.
Here is the judgment to make. The greatest deeds, and the greatest spirit, belong to the men who govern states, because government reaches the widest and touches the most people. But there are, and have been, many people of great spirit in the quiet life as well — some pursuing deep investigations or attempting great things while keeping within the borders of their own affairs; others, standing halfway between the philosophers and the statesmen, finding their satisfaction in the family estate — not piling it up by every means available, not shutting their own people out of the use of it, but sharing it with friends, and with the republic, whenever the need arises. Only let the estate be honestly acquired in the first place, by no shameful or hateful trade; then let it grow by good sense, hard work, and thrift; and then let it be made useful to as many people as possible — provided they are worthy of it — and serve open-handedness and doing good rather than lust and luxury.
Keep to these rules, and a man can live magnificently, seriously, and with spirit — and at the same time simply, faithfully, a true friend to his fellow human beings.
It follows that we must now speak of the one remaining part of moral goodness. In it we find a proper modesty; a certain ornament of life, so to speak; self-control and restraint; the complete quieting of the mind's disturbances; and a sense of measure in things. Here belongs what in Latin can be called decorum — what is fitting; the Greek word is prepon. Its essential force is that it cannot be pulled apart from the right: what is fitting is right, and what is right is fitting. What exactly the difference is between the right and the fitting is easier to feel than to explain. Whatever the fitting is, it shows itself only where moral goodness has gone before. So what is fitting shows up not only in this part of moral goodness, the one we take up here, but in the three earlier parts as well. It is fitting to use reason and speech with practical wisdom, to do whatever you do with consideration, and in every matter to see what is true and to stand by it; while being fooled, going wrong, slipping, being taken in — that is as unfitting as raving and losing your mind. And everything just is fitting; everything unjust, being shameful, is unfitting.
The case of courage runs the same way. What is done in a manly way, with a great spirit, seems worthy of a man, and fitting; its opposite, being shameful, is unfitting.
So this fittingness I am talking about belongs to every part of moral goodness — and belongs to it so plainly that no hidden chain of reasoning is needed to see it; it lies in open view. There is something fitting — you can sense it in every virtue — which can be separated from virtue in thought more easily than in fact. Just as the grace and beauty of a body cannot be cut apart from its health, so this fittingness we are discussing is completely blended with virtue, and only the mind, in thought, can tell them apart.
Its description is twofold. There is a general fittingness that runs through moral goodness as a whole; and beneath it sits a second kind, which belongs to the individual parts of moral goodness. The first is usually defined roughly like this: the fitting is what accords with man's excellence precisely where his nature differs from the rest of living creatures. And the subordinate kind they define this way: the fitting is what so accords with nature that moderation and self-control show in it, together with a certain well-bred grace.
We can judge how to understand all this from the fittingness the poets aim at — a subject on which more is usually said elsewhere. We say the poets observe what is fitting when what each character does and says is worthy of that character. If Aeacus or Minos said, "Let them hate, so long as they fear," or "The father is himself his children's tomb," it would strike us as unfitting, because tradition holds that they were just men. But when Atreus speaks those lines, the audience bursts into applause — the speech is worthy of the character. The poets will judge what fits each figure from the character's role. But on us, nature herself has laid a character — one of vast excellence, towering above the rest of living creatures.
The poets, then, working with a great variety of characters, will work out what suits and befits even the vicious ones. But we are different. Nature has cast us for the roles of steadfastness, moderation, self-control, and modesty; and since that same nature teaches us not to neglect how we behave toward other people, it becomes clear how far the fitting extends — both the kind that belongs to moral goodness as a whole and the kind on display in each individual virtue. For just as bodily beauty, with its apt arrangement of limbs, draws the eye and delights it precisely because all the parts agree with a certain charm, so this fittingness, shining out in a life, wins the approval of the people we live among, through the order, consistency, and restraint of everything said and done.
We should therefore treat every person with a certain reverence — the best among them, and the rest as well. To be indifferent to what people think of you is the mark not only of arrogance but of a character that has come completely undone. There is, though, a difference between justice and considerateness in how we reckon with other people. Justice's job is not to violate them; considerateness's job is not to wound their feelings. And here the force of the fitting is seen most clearly.
With all this laid out, I think what we mean by "fitting" is understood.
Now, the duty that flows from it takes, first, the road that leads to harmony with nature and the preservation of her ways. Follow nature as your guide and you will never go astray: you will be following the part of our nature that is sharp-sighted and discerning, the part suited to binding human beings into fellowship, and the part that is forceful and strong. But the greatest force of the fitting lies in the part of moral goodness we are discussing now. For it is not only the body's motions that deserve approval when they agree with nature — far more the mind's motions, when they too are fitted to nature.
For the force and nature of the mind is double. One part is planted in appetite — horme, in Greek — which snatches a person this way and that; the other in reason, which teaches and explains what to do and what to avoid. The result is that reason commands, and appetite obeys.
Every action ought to be free of rashness and carelessness; and no one should do anything he cannot give a defensible reason for. That, in fact, comes close to a definition of duty.
We have to bring the appetites to obey reason — never running out ahead of it, and never lagging behind and deserting it out of laziness or cowardice — and to keep them tranquil, free of every disturbance of the mind. Out of that, all steadiness and all moderation will shine. For appetites that range too far — that go bucking and rearing, so to speak, whether in craving or in fleeing, without reason keeping a firm enough grip — those appetites plainly overrun every limit and measure. They throw off obedience and cast it aside; they refuse to obey reason, though nature's own law places them under its rule. And they throw not just minds into disorder, but bodies too. Just look at the faces of angry people, or of people shaken by lust or fear, or squirming with too much pleasure: the face, the voice, the movements, the posture — all of it changes.
From all this — to come back to our outline of duty — we can see that every appetite must be reined in and quieted, and that watchfulness and care must be kept awake, so that we do nothing rash or random, nothing thoughtless or careless. Nature did not bring us into the world to look like creatures made for play and joking; she made us, rather, for seriousness, and for pursuits that are weightier and greater. Play and joking are certainly allowed — but the way sleep and the other kinds of rest are allowed: after we have done justice to the weighty and serious things. And the joking itself should be neither extravagant nor indecent, but well-bred and genuinely funny. We do not give children unlimited license to play, only the freedom that does not clash with good conduct; in the same way, even in a joke, some light of an upright character should shine through. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of humor: one low, insolent, scandalous, obscene; the other elegant, urbane, inventive, witty. Our own Plautus is full of the second kind, and so is the old comedy of Athens; so are the books of the Socratic philosophers; so are the many clever sayings of many men — the ones old Cato collected, for instance, which people call apophthegms. So the line between the well-bred joke and the low one is easy to draw. The one, in season — when the mind is off duty, say — is worthy of the most serious man alive; the other is unworthy of any free man, when obscene words are draped over a shameful subject.
In our amusements, too, there is a limit to keep: we should not pour everything we have into them, or let pleasure sweep us off into some disgrace. Our own Campus — Rome's exercise field — and the pursuits of the hunt supply honorable models of play enough.
For every question of duty, it helps to keep one thing always in view: how far human nature surpasses cattle and the other animals. They feel nothing but pleasure, and they charge toward it with every impulse they have. The human mind is different: it feeds on learning and on thinking, it is always investigating something or doing something, and it is drawn along by the sheer delight of seeing and hearing. More than that — take a man a little too inclined toward pleasure. Provided he does not actually belong with the herd (for some people are human in name only), provided he stands even slightly upright, then however tightly pleasure has caught him, he hides and disguises his appetite for it out of plain shame.
From this we can conclude that bodily pleasure is not worthy of human excellence, and that it deserves to be looked down on and turned away. But if someone does grant pleasure a place in his life, he must hold carefully to a limit in enjoying it. So let food and the care of the body aim at health and strength, not at pleasure. And if we are willing to consider what excellence and dignity there are in human nature, we will understand how shameful it is to dissolve into luxury and live daintily and softly — and how good it is to live frugally, with restraint, austerely, and soberly.
We must also understand that nature has dressed each of us, so to speak, in two characters. One of them is universal. It comes from the fact that we all share in reason, and in the excellence that raises us above the animals; from it everything right and everything fitting is drawn, and from it we work out the very method of discovering our duty. The other character is the one assigned to each of us individually. Bodies differ enormously — one man is fast, built for running, another strong, built for wrestling; one face carries dignity, another charm — and the varieties among minds are greater still. Lucius Crassus and Lucius Philippus had a great fund of wit; Gaius Caesar, Lucius's son, had even more of it and deployed it more deliberately. In the same era, Marcus Scaurus and the young Marcus Drusus were remarkable for their seriousness, Gaius Laelius for his great cheerfulness, while his close friend Scipio had larger ambitions and a more somber way of life. Among the Greeks, tradition gives us Socrates — sweet, witty, playful in conversation, in everything he said pretending to know less than he did, what the Greeks called an eirōn — while Pythagoras and Pericles reached the summit of authority without a trace of levity. Among the Carthaginian generals Hannibal was the cunning one, and among our own, Quintus Maximus: quick to conceal, to keep silent, to dissemble, to lay traps, to snatch away the enemy's plans before they could act on them. In this category the Greeks rank Themistocles and Jason of Pherae above everyone else — and above all they prize the crafty, clever stroke of Solon, who pretended to be mad so that his own life would be safer and he could do the state considerably more good.
Then there are others very unlike these: simple, open men who believe nothing should be done in secret or by ambush — lovers of truth, enemies of fraud. And others still who will put up with anything and grovel to anyone so long as they get what they are after; we watched Sulla and Marcus Crassus do exactly that. Of this type, tradition says the craftiest and most patient was Lysander the Spartan; his opposite was Callicratidas, who commanded the fleet right after him. Then again, in conversation, there is the man of real power who manages to seem like just one of the crowd. We saw that in Catulus, both father and son, and in Quintus Mucius Mancia; and I have heard from my elders that Publius Scipio Nasica was the same — while his father, the man who punished the ruinous schemes of Tiberius Gracchus, had no warmth of conversation at all, stern as Xenocrates, the severest of the philosophers, and for that very reason became great and famous.
There are countless other differences of nature and character — and they deserve no blame at all.
Each of us, then, must hold on firmly to what is distinctively his own — so long as it is distinctive, not defective — to make it easier to keep hold of that fittingness we are looking for. And the way to do it is this: fight against universal human nature in nothing; but with that preserved, follow your own particular nature, so that even if other pursuits are weightier and finer, you still measure your own pursuits by the rule of your own nature. There is no point in warring against your nature, and no point in chasing what you cannot catch. All of this shows more clearly what the fitting really is: nothing is fitting "against Minerva's will," as the old saying goes — that is, when your own nature opposes and resists it.
If anything at all is fitting, surely nothing is more so than evenness — consistency across your life as a whole and in every single action — and you cannot preserve that if you copy other people's natures and abandon your own. Just as we ought to speak the language born in us — not stuffing in Greek words like certain people who richly deserve the laughter they get — so we ought to bring no discord into our actions or into our life as a whole. This difference between natures carries so much weight that one man may be obliged to choose his own death while another, in the very same circumstances, is obliged not to. Was Marcus Cato really in one situation, and the others who surrendered to Caesar in Africa in another? No — and yet for the others it might well have been counted a fault if they had killed themselves, because their lives had been gentler and their characters more pliable. Cato was different. Nature had granted him an almost unbelievable gravity; he had hardened it himself with unbroken constancy, and he had never once wavered from a purpose or a plan he had adopted. For him it was death rather than look upon the face of a tyrant.
Think how much Ulysses endured in his long wandering — making himself the servant of women, if Circe and Calypso can be called women, and working in every conversation to be agreeable and pleasant to everyone. At home he even swallowed the insults of the enslaved men and women of his household, all to arrive in the end at what he wanted. But Ajax, with the temper tradition gives him, would have chosen to meet death a thousand times rather than endure any of that.
Reflecting on all this, each of us must weigh what he has that is his own, and manage that — not keep testing how other people's qualities might look on him. What is most a man's own is what most befits him.
So let each person come to know his own talent, and make himself a sharp judge of his own strengths and his own faults. Otherwise the actors will look wiser than we are. For they choose not the best plays but the plays best suited to them: the ones who trust their voice take the Epigoni and the Medus; the ones who trust their movement take the Melanippa and the Clytemnestra; Rupilius, whom I remember myself, always played the Antiopa; Aesopus rarely took the Ajax. Will an actor see this on the stage, and a wise man fail to see it in life?
We will put our hardest work, then, into whatever we are best suited for. And if necessity ever shoves us toward things that do not fit our talent, we must apply every ounce of care, preparation, and diligence, so that we can do them — if not fittingly, then at least with as little unfittingness as we can manage. Nor should we strain so hard to reach excellences that were never given to us as to flee the faults that were.
To those two characters I described above, a third is added — one that chance or circumstance imposes. And there is a fourth as well, which we fit to ourselves by our own decision. Kingdoms, military commands, noble birth, public office, wealth, influence, and their opposites lie in the hands of chance and are governed by circumstances. But the character we ourselves choose to play proceeds from our own will. That is why some devote themselves to philosophy, others to civil law, others to eloquence — and even among the virtues, different men prefer to excel in different ones.
Those whose fathers or ancestors stood out in some field of glory usually strive to excel in the same kind: Quintus Mucius, son of Publius, in civil law; Africanus, son of Paulus, in war. Some add a distinction of their own to the ones they inherited — that same Africanus crowned his military glory with eloquence. Timotheus, son of Conon, did the same: he matched his father's reputation in war, then added to it the glory of learning and intellect. And sometimes men skip the imitation of their ancestors altogether and strike out on a course of their own; the ones who work hardest at that are usually those who set themselves great goals despite being born of obscure ancestors.
All of this we must gather up in mind and thought when we ask what is fitting. But first and foremost we must settle who we want to be, what sort of person, and in what kind of life — and that is the most difficult deliberation of all. For it is at the very entrance of youth, when judgment is at its weakest, that each of us fixes on the way of life he has fallen most in love with; and so a person gets entangled in one settled course of living before he was capable of judging which was best.
Prodicus tells a story about Hercules — you will find it in Xenophon. When Hercules was first coming of age, the season nature has appointed for each of us to choose the path of life he will walk, he went out into solitude, sat down, and debated with himself long and hard. He could see two roads, one belonging to Pleasure, the other to Virtue — which was the better to take? Perhaps that could happen to Hercules, "sprung from the seed of Jove." It does not happen to us. We each imitate whomever we happen to admire, and we get pushed toward their pursuits and their practices. Most of us, steeped in our parents' precepts, are drawn into their customs and their way of life. Others are swept along by the judgment of the crowd, and want most whatever the majority finds most splendid. Yet a few, whether by some stroke of luck or by natural goodness, follow the right road of life without any parental training at all.
Rarest of all is the class of those who, endowed with outstanding greatness of talent, or with brilliant education and learning, or with both, have also had time to deliberate about which course of life they most wanted to follow. In that deliberation, the whole decision must be brought back to each person's own nature. In every single thing we do, we are asking what is fitting given how each of us was made — as I said above; but in settling the shape of a whole life, that question demands far greater care, so that we can stay consistent with ourselves for the whole stretch of our lives and never limp in any duty.
In this reckoning nature carries the greatest force, and fortune the next. We must take account of both in choosing a kind of life, but of nature more, for she is far firmer and steadier — so much so that when fortune fights with nature, it looks like a mortal doing battle with an immortal. So a man who has fitted his whole plan of living to his own nature — his nature where it is sound, not where it is faulty — should hold his course; constancy is what fittingness most demands. Unless, that is, he comes to realize he made a mistake in choosing his kind of life. If that happens — and it can happen — then a change of habits and plans must be made. If circumstances favor the change, we will manage it more easily and more comfortably; if not, it must be made gradually, step by step, just as the wise judge it more fitting to let a friendship that has stopped pleasing and stopped deserving approval fade out little by little than to cut it off at a stroke. And once we have changed our kind of life, we must take every care to show that we did it for good reasons.
Since I said a moment ago that we should imitate our ancestors, let me enter two exceptions. First: not their faults. Second: some things nature simply will not let a man imitate. The son of the elder Africanus — the one who adopted the younger Africanus, Paulus's son — could not, because of frail health, take after his father the way his father had taken after his. So if a man cannot plead cases, or hold a crowd with his speeches, or wage wars, he ought all the same to deliver what does lie in his power: justice, good faith, open-handedness, modesty, self-control — so that the world asks him less about what he lacks. And the best inheritance a father can hand down to his children, worth more than any estate, is the glory of his virtue and his deeds; to bring disgrace on that must be judged a sin and a fault.
And since duties are not handed out identically to every age — the young have one set, the old another — something should be said about this distinction too.
It is a young man's duty to respect his elders, and to pick out the best and most proven among them, so that he can lean on their counsel and their authority; for the inexperience of youth must be steadied and steered by the practical wisdom of the old. Above all, this age must be fenced off from its appetites, and exercised in labor and in endurance of mind and body alike, so that its energy will be strong for duties in war and in civic life. And even when the young want to unwind and give themselves over to enjoyment, they should beware of excess and remember their sense of shame — which comes easier if they are willing to have their elders join them even in that sort of thing.
The old, on the other hand, should scale back the body's labors and actually increase the mind's exercise; and they should take pains to help their friends, the young, and above all the state with counsel and practical wisdom, as much as they possibly can. There is nothing old age must guard against more than surrendering itself to listlessness and idleness. Luxury is disgraceful at every age, but in old age it is repulsive; and if unrestrained appetite is piled on top, the evil is doubled: old age both disgraces itself and makes the excesses of the young more shameless.
Nor is it out of place to speak of the duties of magistrates, of private citizens, of citizens generally, and of foreigners.
The special task of a magistrate is to understand that he plays the character of the state itself: it falls to him to uphold its dignity and its honor, to preserve the laws, to administer rights, and to remember that all of this has been entrusted to his good faith.
A private man ought to live with his fellow citizens on fair and equal terms, neither cringing and abject nor puffing himself up, and to want for the state whatever is peaceful and right. That is the man we habitually feel to be — and call — a good citizen.
As for the foreigner and the resident alien, his duty is to mind his own business and nothing else, to pry into no one's affairs, and to be the least curious of anyone about the politics of a state not his own.
That, roughly, is how duties will be found, whenever we ask what is fitting and what suits persons, circumstances, and ages. And nothing is so fitting as maintaining consistency in everything you do and in every plan you form.
But since the fitting shows itself in everything done and said, and finally in every movement and posture of the body; since it rests on three things — beauty, order, and a bearing suited to the action, things hard to put into words, though it is enough that they be understood; and since within these three lies our concern to win the approval of the people with whom, and among whom, we live — let me say a little about these matters as well.
To begin with, nature herself seems to have taken great thought for our bodies. Our face and figure, wherever the appearance is honorable, she placed in open view; the parts given over to nature's necessities, which would have looked misshapen and ugly, she covered up and tucked away. Human modesty has imitated this careful workmanship of nature's. What nature has hidden, everyone of sound mind keeps out of sight, taking care to answer necessity itself as privately as possible; and as for the parts of the body whose uses are necessary, we call neither the parts nor the uses by their own names. What it is not shameful to do, provided it is done in private, is obscene to talk about. So the open performance of those acts never escapes indecency, and neither does obscene talk about them.
Nor should we listen to the Cynics — or to those Stoics who were practically Cynics — who scold and mock us because we treat as scandalous in words things that are not shameful in fact, while calling truly shameful things by their proper names. Robbery, fraud, adultery: shameful in fact, but not obscene to name. Conceiving children: honorable in fact, obscene in name. They pile up plenty of other arguments in the same vein against modesty. But let us follow nature, and run from everything that offends the approval of the eye and the ear. Standing and walking, sitting and reclining at table, expression, eyes, the movement of the hands — let all of it hold to the fitting.
In these matters there are two things above all to avoid: nothing limp and effeminate, nothing harsh and boorish. And we surely cannot grant that these standards bind actors and orators while we go slack. Stage people's custom, in fact, has inherited so much modesty from its old discipline that no actor steps onto the stage without a loincloth; they are afraid that if some accident exposed certain parts of the body, the sight would be unseemly. And by our own custom, grown sons do not bathe with their fathers, nor sons-in-law with their fathers-in-law. Modesty of this kind must be kept up, then — especially with nature herself as our teacher and guide.
There are two kinds of beauty: in one, loveliness prevails; in the other, dignity. Loveliness we should regard as the woman's kind of beauty, dignity as the man's. So let a man keep off his person every ornament unworthy of a man, and guard against the same fault in gesture and movement. The moves picked up in the wrestling school are often rather off-putting; some gestures of actors are not free of silliness; and in both fields, it is what is straight and simple that wins praise. Dignity of appearance is maintained by a good healthy color, and color by physical exercise. To this add a cleanliness that is neither offensive nor overdone — just enough to steer clear of boorish, uncivilized neglect. The same principle governs dress: here, as in most things, the middle course is best.
We must beware, too, of a soft, trailing slowness in our walk, as though we were floats swaying along in a parade — and equally of putting on too much speed when we hurry. That sets us panting, changes the face, twists the features; and nothing announces more loudly that steadiness is missing. But it takes far more work to keep the movements of the mind from deserting nature. We will manage it if we take care not to tumble into agitation and panic, and if we keep our minds attentive to preserving the fitting.
The mind's movements are of two kinds: thought and impulse. Thought is occupied above all in searching out truth; impulse pushes us to act. Our care, then, is to aim our thinking at the best possible objects, and to keep impulse obedient to reason.
Speech has great power, and it comes in two kinds: formal debate and conversation. Debate should be assigned to the contests of the courts, the public assemblies, and the senate; conversation lives in social circles, in discussions, in gatherings of friends — and it should follow along to dinner parties too. The rhetoricians have rules for debate; for conversation there are none, though I do not see why there could not be. Wherever there are students eager to learn, teachers appear; yet nobody studies conversation, while the whole world is packed with crowds of rhetoric students. Still, the rules that exist for words and ideas will apply to conversation as well.
The voice is the instrument of speech, and in the voice we aim at two things: that it be clear, and that it be pleasant. Both, in the end, must come from nature; but practice will build up the first, and the second is helped by imitating people who speak with precision and smoothness.
There was nothing about the two Catuli to make you credit them with refined literary judgment — they were educated men, but so were others. Yet they were considered the finest users of the Latin tongue: the sound sweet, the letters neither hammered out nor swallowed, so that the effect was neither muddy nor precious; the voice unstrained, neither feeble nor ringing. Lucius Crassus had a richer flow and no less wit, but the Catuli's reputation for speaking well stood just as high. And in salt and humor Caesar, the elder Catulus's brother, beat them all: even in courtroom pleading, his conversational style could defeat the labored orations of the other advocates.
In all of this, then, we must do our work — if what we are seeking is what is fitting in everything.
So let conversation — the art in which the followers of Socrates are the great masters — be gentle and not the least bit stubborn, and let there be charm in it. A speaker should not shut everyone else out as though he had moved into his own private property; in conversation, as in everything else, he should think it only fair that each person gets a turn. And he should notice, first of all, what the subject is: if it is serious, let him bring seriousness; if playful, charm. Above all, he should watch that his conversation does not expose some flaw in his character — which happens most of all when people take eager pleasure in running down those who are absent, whether with mockery or with grave, insulting abuse, just to tear them apart.
Conversations mostly deal with household affairs, or with the state, or with the arts and learning. So take pains, even when the talk starts to drift elsewhere, to call it back to these — but always to suit the company, for we do not all enjoy the same subjects at every moment or to the same degree. Notice, too, how long the conversation keeps giving pleasure; and just as there was a reason for beginning it, so let there be a measure for bringing it to a close.
In all of life, the soundest rule we are given is to flee agitations — movements of the mind grown too large to obey reason — and conversation should be free of exactly those movements. Let no anger show, no craving, no sluggishness, no indifference, nothing of the kind; and take the greatest care of all to show that you respect, and genuinely like, the people you are talking with.
Sometimes rebukes become necessary. Then, perhaps, we must use a louder strain of voice and sharper, weightier words — must even act the part of an angry man. But like burning and cutting in surgery, this kind of chastisement is something we should come to rarely and reluctantly, and never except out of necessity, when no other medicine can be found. And even then, let anger itself stay far away: with anger nothing can be done rightly, nothing with due consideration. Most of the time a gentle rebuke will serve, though joined with seriousness, so that firmness is applied and insult is kept out; and even the sting a rebuke does carry should be shown to have been taken up for the sake of the person being rebuked.
The right course, even in clashes with our bitterest enemies — even when we hear things we do not deserve — is still to hold on to gravity and push anger away. Whatever is done in a state of agitation cannot be done with steadiness, and cannot win the approval of anyone watching.
It is ugly, too, to sing your own praises — above all when they are false — and, to the derision of your audience, to play the Braggart Soldier of the comic stage.
And since my plan is to cover everything — at least, that is certainly the intention — I should also say what kind of house, in my view, suits a man of honor and public standing. A house's purpose is use, and the design of the building should be fitted to that; and yet care must be given to comfort and dignity as well.
We are told that Gnaeus Octavius, the first man of his family to be elected consul, won real credit for building a splendid house on the Palatine hill, a house full of dignity. People went to see it, and since its owner was a new man — the first of his line to seek high office — the house was thought to have won him votes for the consulship. Later Scaurus tore it down and used the site as an annex to his own house. So Octavius was the first to bring a consulship home to his house; Scaurus, the son of a very great and famous man, brought home to his enlarged house not just defeat at the polls but disgrace and ruin. The truth is that a house should adorn a man's dignity, not supply the whole of it. The owner must bring honor to the house, not the house to the owner. And just as in everything else you must think not only of yourself but of others, so with the house of a distinguished man, which has to welcome many guests and admit crowds of every kind of person: take care that it is roomy. Otherwise a grand house often embarrasses its owner, if it stands empty — above all if, under an earlier owner, it used to be full. It stings to hear the passers-by say, "O ancient house, alas — how unlike your old master is the master who rules you now!" And in times like these, you could say that of many a house.
Take care, too — especially if you are building for yourself — not to run past all measure in expense and display. There is a great deal of harm in this, even just in the example it sets. For most people eagerly imitate the leading men in exactly this department. Who imitates the virtue of Lucius Lucullus, that excellent man? Yet how many have imitated the magnificence of his country villas! Surely a limit must be set here, and things called back to moderation — and that same moderation should be carried over into every use and comfort of life.
But enough of that.
In undertaking any action, hold on to three rules. First, that impulse obey reason — nothing serves the keeping of duties better than this. Second, take note of how large the thing is that you want to accomplish, so that you spend neither more nor less care and effort than the case demands. Third, see that whatever concerns a gentleman's appearance and standing is kept within measure. And the best measure is to hold to what is fitting itself, which we discussed above, and go no step further. Of these three rules, though, the greatest is that impulse should obey reason.
Next we must speak about the order of our actions and the timing of our occasions. These fall under the science the Greeks call eutaxia — not the eutaxia we translate as "moderation," modestia, a word with modus, "measure," inside it, but the eutaxia that means keeping things in order. So — allowing ourselves to call this one "moderation" too — the Stoics define it this way: moderation is the science of putting everything you do or say in its proper place. Order and right placement, then, come to the same thing; for they define order as the arrangement of things in apt and suitable places, and the "place" of an action, they say, is its right moment in time. The right moment for an action is called eukairia in Greek; in Latin, occasio — the occasion. So this "moderation," taken the way I have described, turns out to be the science of the right moment: knowing when the time is fit for acting.
Now, the same definition could serve for practical wisdom, which I spoke of at the beginning. But in this place we are asking about moderation and self-control and the virtues of that family. So what belonged to practical wisdom was said in its own place; what belongs to the virtues we have been discussing all this while — the ones that touch on decency and on winning the approval of the people we live among — must be said now.
The order to be kept in our actions is this: that, as in a well-built speech, everything in life should fit together and agree with itself. It is shameful, and badly wrong, to drag dinner-party banter or loose talk of any kind into serious business. Pericles put it well. He had the poet Sophocles as his colleague in a generalship, and they had met on their shared official business, when by chance a handsome boy walked past. "What a beautiful boy, Pericles!" said Sophocles. "A general, Sophocles, should keep not only his hands under control, but his eyes." And yet if Sophocles had said the very same thing at a tryout of athletes, he would have deserved no rebuke at all. So great is the force of place and time. If a man about to argue a case runs through it in his head on a journey or a walk, or concentrates hard on some other matter, no one blames him; but let him do the same thing at a dinner party and he looks like a boor who cannot read the occasion.
Now, the things that clash violently with civilized behavior — bursting into song in the forum, say, or some other gross perversity — are obvious to everyone and hardly call for warnings and rules. It is the faults that look small, the ones most people cannot even detect, that we must steer away from all the more carefully. With lyres or flutes, however slightly they slip out of tune, an expert still catches it; in the same way we must watch that nothing in our life falls out of tune — indeed we must watch far more closely, because a harmony of actions is greater and finer than any harmony of sounds.
So then: just as a musician's ear feels even the smallest flaw in the strings, we too, if we mean to be sharp and careful spotters of faults, will often learn big things from small ones. From the look of the eyes, from eyebrows relaxed or drawn together, from gloom, from cheerfulness, from laughter, from talk, from silence, from a voice raised or lowered, and from everything of the kind, we will easily judge which of these things is done fittingly and which is out of step with duty and nature. And in this whole territory it is no bad plan to judge the character of each of these things by watching other people, so that whatever is unbecoming in them, we avoid in ourselves. For somehow it happens that we see a fault far more clearly in others than in ourselves. That is why, in school, the pupils who are corrected most easily are the ones whose faults the teachers imitate in order to fix them.
Nor is it out of place, when a choice raises real doubt, to call in learned men — or men seasoned by experience — and ask what they think about each kind of duty. For most people tend to drift wherever their own nature carries them. With an adviser, you must look not only at what he says, but at what he actually thinks, and even at why he thinks it. Painters, sculptors, and yes, poets too, each want their work examined by the public, so that whatever many people criticize can be corrected; they hunt out, on their own and with the help of others, where the work went wrong. In just the same way, it is by other people's judgment that we will find a great many things to do and not to do, to change and to correct.
About conduct that follows custom and civic convention, there is nothing to prescribe: the conventions are themselves the rules. And no one should be led into the mistake of thinking that because Socrates or Aristippus did or said something against the custom and usage of their city, he is free to do the same. Those men earned that license by great, even godlike gifts. But the Cynics' whole system must be thrown out entirely, for it is the enemy of decency — and without decency nothing can be upright, nothing right.
Furthermore, the men whose lives have stood the test in great and honorable affairs — men loyal to the republic, who have served it well or are serving it still — these we ought to honor and respect as if they held some office or command. We should also grant a great deal to old age; defer to those who hold public office; and make a distinction between citizen and foreigner, and with the foreigner himself, between one who comes on public business and one who comes on his own. In short, not to go through every case: we ought to cultivate, protect, and preserve the fellowship and union of the whole human race.
Now, about trades and ways of earning money — which are to be considered worthy of a free man, and which are low — here is roughly what has come down to us. First come the earnings that are condemned because they draw people's hatred: the customs collector's, the moneylender's. Unworthy of a free man, too, and low, are the earnings of all hired workmen whose labor, not skill, is what is bought; in their case the very wage is the price of servitude. We should also count as low the men who buy from wholesalers only to sell again at once, for they would make no profit unless they lied constantly — and nothing is more disgraceful than empty misrepresentation. And all craftsmen are engaged in low trade, for a workshop can have nothing about it worthy of a free man. Least deserving of approval are the trades that wait upon our pleasures — "fishmongers, butchers, cooks, sausage-makers, fishermen," as Terence says. Add to these, if you like, the perfume-sellers, the dancers, and the whole low-stage troupe.
But the professions that call for greater practical wisdom, or that bring no small benefit — medicine, architecture, the teaching of honorable subjects — are honorable for those whose station they suit. Trade, if it is small, should be counted low; but if it is large and well supplied, bringing in goods from everywhere and passing them on to many buyers without misrepresentation, it is not much to be blamed. Indeed, if the merchant — sated with his profits, or rather satisfied with them — moves at last from the open sea into port, and from the port itself onto land and estates, as he so often crossed from sea to harbor before, he seems to deserve praise with the fullest right. But of all the pursuits by which anything is earned, none is better than farming, none more fruitful, none more delightful, none more worthy of a free man. Since I said quite a lot about it in my Cato the Elder — my book on old age — you can take from there whatever applies here.
By now, I think, it has been explained well enough how duties are drawn from the parts of moral goodness. But among right actions themselves, a contest and comparison can often arise — of two right courses, which is more right — a topic Panaetius passed over. For since all moral goodness flows from four sources — one is knowledge, the second fellowship, the third greatness of spirit, the fourth moderation — in choosing a duty these must often be weighed against one another.
My view is that the duties drawn from fellowship fit nature more closely than the duties drawn from knowledge, and the point can be confirmed by this argument. Suppose a wise man were granted a life so furnished that, with everything flowing to him in abundance, he could examine and contemplate at total leisure everything worth knowing — still, if the solitude were so complete that he could never see another human being, he would walk out of life. And the chief of all the virtues is that wisdom the Greeks call sophia — for practical wisdom, which they call phronesis, is something different as we understand it, namely the knowledge of what to pursue and what to avoid; while the wisdom I called chief is the knowledge of things divine and human, and it embraces the community of gods and men and their fellowship with one another. If that wisdom is the greatest of the virtues — and it certainly is — then it follows that the duty drawn from fellowship is the greatest of duties. For knowing and contemplating nature would be somehow crippled and unfinished if no action followed from it. And that action shows itself most clearly in protecting human interests; it belongs, then, to the fellowship of the human race — and therefore it must be ranked above knowledge.
Every good man shows this, and judges it, by his own conduct. For who is so hungry to probe and understand the nature of things that — even while he handled and contemplated the matters most worth knowing, even if he believed he could count the stars and measure the size of the universe — he would not drop it all and throw it aside if sudden word came of danger and crisis for his country, which he could help and relieve? And he would do the same for a parent or a friend, in their trouble or their danger.
From all this it is plain that the duties of justice must be set above the pursuits and duties of knowledge — for they concern human welfare, and nothing ought to be dearer to a human being than that.
And yet the men whose studies and whole lives have been spent in the pursuit of knowledge have not, in the end, held back from increasing human benefit and advantage. For they have trained many to be better citizens and more useful to their states: Lysis the Pythagorean trained Epaminondas of Thebes; Plato trained Dion of Syracuse; and many teachers, many students. I myself, whatever I brought to the republic — if I brought anything at all — came to it fitted out and equipped by my teachers and what they taught. And such men do not teach and train the eager only while they are alive and present; they go on doing the same work after death through the monuments of their writing. They have passed over no point that bears on laws, on customs, on the ordering of the state, so that they seem to have spent their leisure as a gift to our public business. So even the men devoted to learning and wisdom apply their practical wisdom and insight above all to human benefit. And for the same reason, to speak fully and well — provided you speak wisely — is better than to think ever so sharply without eloquence; for thinking turns in on itself, while eloquence reaches out to embrace the people we are joined with in fellowship.
And just as swarms of bees do not gather in order to build honeycomb, but build honeycomb because they are by nature creatures that gather, so human beings — far more so — gather by nature and then apply their skill to acting and thinking together. And so, unless the virtue that consists in protecting people — that is, in the fellowship of the human race — goes along with the pursuit of knowledge, that knowledge will look solitary and barren; and in the same way greatness of spirit, cut off from human community and connection, would be a kind of savagery, something brutal. So it comes about that human association and fellowship outrank the pursuit of knowledge.
Nor is it true, as some people claim, that community and fellowship among human beings were entered into merely from life's necessities — because we could not obtain and produce what nature requires without the help of others. If everything that belongs to food and comfort were handed to us by a magic wand, as the saying goes, then every person of the finest talent would drop all his business and settle himself entirely into knowledge and study. Not so. He would flee loneliness and look for a companion in his work; he would want now to teach and now to learn, now to listen and now to speak. Therefore every duty that works to protect the union and fellowship of human beings must be ranked above the duty that is bound up in knowledge and study.
Perhaps this question should be asked: whether this fellowship, which fits nature most closely of all, is also always to be ranked above moderation and restraint. I think not. For there are some acts, partly so foul and partly so outrageous, that a wise man would not commit them even to save his country. Posidonius collected a great many of them, but some are so vile, so obscene, that it seems shameful even to say them aloud. These, then, the wise man will not undertake for the sake of the state — and the state will not want them undertaken on its behalf either. But the matter settles itself conveniently, because the moment can never actually come when it would be in the state's interest for a wise man to do any of those things.
So let this stand settled: in choosing among duties, the kind that is grounded in human fellowship ranks highest. And this follows naturally, since considered action comes after knowledge and practical wisdom — which is how it turns out that acting with consideration is worth more than merely thinking wisely.
And that is enough on this point. For the ground itself has been laid open, so that in searching out our duty it is not hard to see what must come first for each of us. Within fellowship itself, moreover, there are degrees of duty, from which you can tell what is owed to whom: the first is owed to the immortal gods, the second to country, the third to parents, and then, step by step down the scale, to the rest.
From this brief discussion it can be seen that people are often unsure not only whether a thing is right or shameful, but also — when two right courses lie before them — which is more right. This topic, as I said above, Panaetius passed over. But now let us move on to what remains.
How duties are drawn from the right, Marcus my son — from moral goodness and from every kind of virtue — I think I explained well enough in the previous book. What comes next is to work through the kinds of duty that concern the equipment of life: the means of getting the things people use, influence, resources. Here, as I said, the questions are: what is useful and what is not, and then, among useful things, which is more useful and which most useful of all. I will take these up — after a few words, first, about my purpose here and my own judgment.
My books have stirred quite a few people to an appetite not only for reading but for writing. Even so, I sometimes worry that certain good men find the very name of philosophy hateful, and wonder why I pour so much work and time into it.
My answer is this. As long as the republic was being run by the men to whom she had entrusted herself, I gave her all my care and all my thought. But when one man's mastery came to hold everything, and there was no longer any room anywhere for counsel or authority; and when, finally, I had lost my partners in guarding the republic — men of the highest rank — I did not surrender to the grief that would have crushed me if I had not fought it, and I did not surrender, on the other side, to pleasures unworthy of an educated man.
How I wish the republic had held the footing it started from, instead of falling into the hands of men eager not so much to change the state as to demolish it! Then, first, I would be spending my effort on action rather than on writing, as I used to do while the republic stood; and second, I would be committing to paper not these essays but my own public acts, as I so often did before. But when the republic — where all my care, thought, and work used to go — ceased to exist entirely, those writings of the forum and the senate naturally fell silent. And since my mind could not simply do nothing, I decided that the most honorable way to lay down my troubles was to return to philosophy, where I had lived from the start of my life. As a young man I gave it a great deal of time as a student; but once I began to chase office and handed myself over entirely to the state, philosophy got only whatever room was left over from friends and public business — and all of that went into reading. There was no leisure to write.
So out of the greatest evils I seem to have salvaged at least this much good: the chance to put into writing things our countrymen did not know well enough, things richly worth knowing. For what, in the name of the gods, is more desirable than wisdom? What is finer? What is better for a human being, what more worthy of one? The people who go after it are called philosophers, and philosophy, if you translate the word, is nothing other than the pursuit of wisdom. And wisdom, as the old philosophers defined it, is knowledge of things divine and human, and of the causes that hold those things together. If a man sneers at studying that, I honestly cannot see what he thinks does deserve praise. If it is delight for the mind you want, and rest from cares, what can compare with the pursuits of people who are always searching out something that looks toward living well and happily? If it is a plan for steadiness and virtue, either this is the art by which we reach them or there is no art at all. To say that there is no art of the greatest things, when not even the smallest things lack one, is the talk of people who speak without thinking and go wrong about what matters most. And if there is some school of virtue, where will you look for it once you have walked away from this kind of learning?
Now, when I am urging someone toward philosophy, I usually argue all this more carefully — I have done it in another book. Just now I only needed to explain why, stripped of my duties to the state, I turned to this study above all others.
But an objection is raised against me, and by learned and educated men at that: am I being consistent? Our school says nothing can be grasped with certainty — and yet here I am, in the habit of holding forth on all sorts of subjects, and at this very moment laying down rules of duty. I wish these critics understood our position properly. We are not people whose minds drift in confusion with nothing to steer by. What kind of mind would that be — what kind of life, rather — with every standard thrown away, not just for arguing but for living? No: where other schools say some things are certain and others uncertain, we differ and say some things are probable, others not.
What, then, is to stop me from following whatever looks probable to me, rejecting whatever does not, and — while avoiding the arrogance of flat assertion — steering clear of the recklessness that is as far from wisdom as anything can be? And if our school argues against every position, that is because the probable itself cannot shine out unless the case has been fought from both sides.
But I explained all this carefully enough, I think, in my Academics. And though you, my Cicero, are working in the oldest and noblest philosophy, with Cratippus for your guide — a man very like the ones who fathered those famous doctrines — I still did not want our school, which lives next door to yours, to be unknown to you.
But now let us get on with the plan.
Five headings, then, were laid out for tracking down duty. Two concerned what is fitting and moral goodness; two concerned life's conveniences — resources, wealth, means; and the fifth concerned how to choose, if ever the ones I have named seemed to clash. The part about moral goodness is finished — and that is the part I most want you to know inside and out.
What we take up now is the very thing called "the useful." On this word, usage has slipped off the road. Little by little it has drifted to the point of splitting the right from advantage — of granting that something can be right without being useful, and useful without being right. Nothing more destructive than this could have been brought into human life.
Philosophers of the very highest authority draw these three ideas apart strictly and honorably in thought, though in reality they run together. Whatever is just, they hold, is also useful; and likewise whatever is right is just; from which it follows that whatever is right is also useful. People who see this poorly are the ones who gape admiringly at sly, clever operators and mistake malice for wisdom. That error has to be torn out, and their whole way of thinking brought over to this hope: that it is by honorable plans and just deeds, not by fraud and malice, that they can get what they want.
Now, of the things that keep human life going, some are inanimate — gold and silver, what grows from the earth, other things of that kind — and some are alive, with their own drives and appetites. Of the living, some lack reason and some use it. Without reason: horses, oxen, the rest of the herd animals, and bees, whose work produces something for human use and human life. Of those that use reason there are held to be two kinds: gods and men. Devotion and clean living will keep the gods favorable; and right after the gods, second only to them, it is men who can be most useful to men.
The same division applies to things that harm and hinder. But since people do not believe the gods do harm, the gods drop out — and the conclusion is that men do the most damage to men.
Even the inanimate things we just mentioned are mostly the product of human work. We would not have them at all if hands and skill had not been applied, and we could not use them without human management. Care of the sick, seafaring, farming, the gathering and storing of grain and the rest of the earth's produce — none of it could have existed without human labor. And there would certainly be no exporting of our surpluses or importing of what we lack, if men did not perform those services. By the same reasoning, no stone would be cut from the earth for our needs, and no "iron, copper, gold, and silver, hidden deep away" would be dug out, without men's labor and men's hands.
And roofs — shelter to drive off the bite of the cold and ease the misery of the heat: where could the human race have gotten it in the beginning, or found help afterward, when storm or earthquake or sheer age brought a building down, if shared life had not taught men to turn to one another for aid in such things? Add the aqueducts, the channeling of rivers, the irrigation of fields, the breakwaters set against the waves, the harbors built by hand — where would we get any of it without human work? From these examples and many more, one thing is plain: whatever profit and advantage we take from inanimate things, we could never have captured any of it without human hands and human labor.
Finally, what profit or convenience could we draw from the animals, if men did not help? It was men, after all, who led the way in discovering what use we could make of each creature; and to this day, without human work, we could not feed them, tame them, protect them, or take what they yield in season. It is men, too, who kill the ones that do harm and capture the ones that can serve.
Why should I even count up the multitude of crafts without which life could not exist at all? How would the sick be helped, what pleasure would the healthy have, what food or comfort would there be, if so many crafts did not wait on us? It is in these things that the cultivated life of human beings stands so far above the feeding and existence of beasts. And cities could never have been built, or filled with people, without human beings banding together. Out of that came laws and customs; then the fair marking-out of rights and a settled discipline of living; those in turn brought gentler spirits and a sense of decency — and the result was a life better defended, in which, by giving and receiving, by lending and exchanging what we have, we go without nothing.
I am running longer here than I need to. Who does not already see the point Panaetius spells out at such length — that no one, whether a general in war or a leader at home, could ever have done great and salutary things without the devoted support of other men? He cites Themistocles, Pericles, Cyrus, Agesilaus, Alexander, and says none of them could have accomplished so much without human help. He calls unnecessary witnesses to a case nobody disputes.
And yet, just as we win great advantages through men's cooperation and agreement, so there is no plague so detestable that it does not come to man from man. Dicaearchus, a great and prolific Peripatetic, wrote a book on the destruction of human life. He collects all the other causes — floods, pestilence, devastation, even sudden swarms of wild beasts, whose attacks, he shows, have wiped out whole tribes of men — and then he makes the comparison: far more human beings have been destroyed by the assaults of other human beings, that is, by wars and civil strife, than by every other calamity put together.
Since there is no room for doubt on this point — that men are the greatest help to men, and the greatest harm — I set this down as the special work of virtue: to win the hearts of men and bind them to one's own service. The useful things human life draws from inanimate objects and from the handling and use of animals we owe to the productive crafts; but the eager, ready devotion of men to enlarging our fortunes is called out by the wisdom and virtue of outstanding men. Indeed, virtue as a whole turns on roughly three things. The first is seeing clearly what is true and genuine in each situation — what fits with what, what follows from what, and what causes each thing. The second is reining in the mind's disturbed motions, which the Greeks call pathe, and making the appetites, which they call hormai, obedient to reason. The third is dealing with the people around us with moderation and skill, so that with their support we may have what nature requires, supplied in full and heaped high — and through those same people push back any harm that comes at us, take vengeance on those who have tried to hurt us, and punish them as far as fairness and humanity allow.
By what means we can gain this ability — to win men's devotion and hold on to it — I will explain, and not much later; but a few things must be said first.
Who does not know the great power of fortune in both directions, toward success and toward disaster? When we run before her favoring breeze, we are carried to the harbor we hoped for; when she blows against us, we are wrecked. Still, fortune's own blows are the rarer kind: first, from inanimate nature — squalls, storms, shipwrecks, collapses, fires; then from beasts — kicks, bites, attacks. These, as I say, are the rarer thing. But the destruction of armies — three of them just recently, and often many more; the loss of commanders — lately of a very great and extraordinary man; the hatred of the crowd, and because of it the expulsion, ruin, and exile of citizens who often deserved well of their country; and on the other side the successes — offices, commands, victories: all of these, though chance runs through them, cannot come about in either direction without the resources and devotion of other men.
With that understood, I can now say how we may attract men's devotion and rouse it to our advantage. If the discussion runs long, set its length beside the size of the advantage; it may even come to look too short.
Whatever people give a man, then, to build him up and honor him, they give for one of these reasons. Out of goodwill, when for some reason they are fond of him. Out of respect, if they look up to his virtue and think him worthy of the most splendid fortune there is. Or because they trust him and believe he serves their interests well. Or because they fear his power. Or the reverse — because they expect something from him, as when kings or crowd-courting politicians hold out handouts. Or, last of all, because they are moved by pay and price — the filthiest motive of all and the dirtiest, both for the people gripped by it and for those who stoop to using it. For things are in a bad way when what ought to be won by virtue is attempted with money. But since this crutch is sometimes necessary, I will explain how to use it — after I have spoken of the things that stand closer to virtue.
Men also place themselves under another man's rule and power for several reasons. They are led by goodwill, or by the size of favors received, or by his outstanding rank, or by hope that it will pay them, or by fear of being forced to obey anyway, or they are captured by the hope of handouts and by promises — or, finally, as we have seen so often in our own republic, they are simply hired.
Of all things, though, nothing is better suited to winning power and keeping it than to be loved — and nothing is worse suited than to be feared. Ennius put it perfectly: "Whom they fear, they hate; and whom a man hates, he wants dead."
That no amount of power can hold out against the hatred of the many — if that was unknown before, it has been learned recently. And it is not only the death of this tyrant, whose grip the city endured under force of arms and obeys even now that he is dead as much as ever, that shows how much men's hatred can do to destroy; it is the similar ends of the other tyrants, hardly one of whom has escaped such a death. Fear is a bad guardian of permanence; goodwill keeps faith, even to the end of time.
Grant that men who hold a conquered people down by force must use harshness — as a master must with his slaves, if they cannot be controlled any other way. But people who arrange things in a free city so that they will be feared — nothing could be more insane. However deep the laws are sunk by some man's power, however thoroughly freedom is cowed, sooner or later these things surface — in silent verdicts, or in secret ballots for office. And freedom bites harder after it has been interrupted than if it had never been touched. So let us embrace the rule that reaches widest and counts most, not only for safety but for wealth and power too: banish fear, hold on to affection. That way we will get what we want most easily, in private life and in public life alike.
Besides, men who want to be feared cannot help fearing the very people who fear them. Think of the elder Dionysius: what torture of dread he lived in, so afraid of the barber's razor that he singed off his own hair with a glowing coal. Think of Alexander of Pherae — what a state of mind he must have lived in. He loved his wife Thebe dearly, we read; and yet, coming from dinner to her bedroom, he had a barbarian — tattooed with Thracian markings, as the record says — walk ahead of him with a drawn sword, and he sent men of his bodyguard ahead of that to rifle through the lady's chests and make sure no weapon was hidden in her clothing. Miserable man, to think a barbarian, a branded slave, more faithful than his own wife! And he was not wrong: she killed him herself, over a suspicion of another woman.
No power of command is great enough to last while fear is pressing on it. Witness Phalaris, whose cruelty stands out beyond everyone's: he did not die by ambush, like the Alexander I just named, and not at the hands of a few, like this tyrant of ours — the whole population of Agrigentum charged him at once.
More: did not the Macedonians abandon Demetrius and carry themselves over to Pyrrhus as one man? And when the Spartans ruled unjustly, did not nearly all their allies desert them and stand by as idle spectators of the disaster at Leuctra?
In matters like this I would rather recall foreign examples than our own. Still, this much. As long as the empire of the Roman people was held together by services, not by wrongs, our wars were fought either for our allies or for supremacy; the endings of our wars were merciful, or no harsher than necessary; the senate was a harbor and refuge for kings, peoples, and nations; and our magistrates and generals strained after one distinction above all — to have defended the provinces and the allies with fairness and good faith. So Rome could more truly be called the protectorate of the world than its empire.
This habit and discipline we were already letting slip, bit by bit, even before; after Sulla's victory we lost it completely. Once such cruelty had been shown to citizens, nothing done to allies could look unjust anymore. In Sulla's case, an honorable cause was followed by a victory that was not honorable: when he had planted the spear — the sign of a public auction — and was selling off in the forum the goods of good men, of wealthy men, of Roman citizens at the very least, he dared to announce that he was "selling his plunder." After him came a man whose cause was impious and whose victory was fouler still: he did not stop at confiscating the property of individual citizens, but swallowed whole provinces and regions in one common sentence of ruin.
And so, with foreign nations battered and destroyed, we watched a model of Massilia — Marseilles today — carried along in a triumph, an exhibit of our lost empire; we saw a triumph celebrated over the very city without which our generals never once triumphed in a war beyond the Alps. I could list many more outrages against our allies, if the sun had ever looked down on anything more shameful than this one. So we are being punished justly. If we had not let the crimes of so many go unpunished, license on this scale would never have descended to one man. His estate passed by inheritance to a few; his appetites passed to many scoundrels. And the seed and cause of civil wars will never be lacking so long as ruined men remember that bloody auction spear and hope to see another. Publius Sulla brandished it while his kinsman was dictator; and thirty-six years later the same man did not step back from a spear more criminal still. Another Sulla, who had been a clerk in the first dictatorship, was city quaestor — a treasury office — in this last one. From which you should understand: with prizes like these on offer, civil wars will never run out.
So the walls of the city stand and remain — and even they now dread the final extremes of crime — but the republic itself we have utterly lost. And we fell into these disasters (I am coming back to my subject now) because we preferred to be feared rather than to be held dear and loved. If this could happen to the Roman people for ruling unjustly, what should individual men expect for themselves? Since it is plain, then, that goodwill is strong and fear is feeble, the next task is to discuss how we can most easily win the affection we want — affection joined with honor and trust.
But we do not all need it in the same measure. Each man's plan of life decides whether he needs the love of many or whether the love of a few is enough. But let this much be fixed — the first thing, and the most necessary: to have the faithful friendship of people who love us and admire what we do. On this one point the greatest men and ordinary men are not far apart, and both must secure it almost equally.
Honor, glory, and the goodwill of fellow citizens — perhaps not everyone needs those equally. But whoever has them finds that they help a good deal, toward everything else and especially toward gaining friends.
But friendship I have discussed in another book, the one called Laelius. Now let us talk about glory — though I have two books on that subject as well. Let us just touch on it here, since it helps so much in the management of greater affairs.
The highest and most complete glory rests on these three things: the people love you; they trust you; and, with a certain admiration mixed in, they judge you worthy of honor. These responses, to put it simply and briefly, are won from the many by nearly the same things that win them from individuals. But there is also another kind of approach to the many — a way of flowing, so to speak, into the hearts of everyone at once.
Of the three I named, take goodwill first, and the rules for winning it. Goodwill is captured above all by kind services. Second, it is stirred by the willingness to serve, even when the means happen to fall short. And the love of the crowd is powerfully moved by the mere name and reputation of open-handedness, of doing good, of justice, of good faith, and of all the virtues that belong to gentleness of character and ease of manner. For the very thing we call the right and the fitting pleases us in and of itself, and moves every heart by its own nature and beauty; and since it shines out — almost glows through — from the virtues I have just named, nature herself compels us to love the people we believe possess them. These are the weightiest causes of love; there can be some lighter ones besides.
Trust can be produced in two ways: people must judge that we have acquired practical wisdom joined with justice. For we trust those we think understand more than we do — who we believe can see ahead into the future and, when the moment of action comes and things reach a crisis, can clear a path and make the right call on the spot. That is what people count as useful and genuine practical wisdom. And trust is given to just and faithful men — good men, that is — on the understanding that in them there is no suspicion of fraud or wrongdoing. So it is to them that we think our safety, our fortunes, and our children are most rightly entrusted.
Of these two, justice has the greater power to create trust, since justice even without practical wisdom carries plenty of authority, while practical wisdom without justice is worthless for creating trust. The craftier and cleverer a man is, the more he is hated and suspected once his reputation for honesty is stripped away. So justice joined with intelligence will have all the strength it wants for creating trust. Justice without practical wisdom can do a great deal; practical wisdom without justice can do nothing.
But before anyone raises an eyebrow: all philosophers agree — and I have argued the point often myself — that whoever has one virtue has them all. So why am I now pulling them apart, as if a man could be just without also being wise? The answer is that there are two kinds of precision. One belongs to philosophical debate, where truth itself is being filed to an edge; the other belongs to speech fitted to common opinion. In this discussion I am talking the way ordinary people talk, calling some men brave, others good, others wise. When the subject is popular reputation, you have to use popular, everyday words — and Panaetius did exactly the same. But back to the point.
Of the three things I said win glory, the third was this: admiration joined to honor — that people admire us and judge us worthy of honor. Now, people admire in general anything they notice that is great and beyond what they expected; in particular, they admire individuals in whom they spot unexpected good qualities. So they look up to and heap the highest praise on men in whom they think they see certain rare and towering virtues, and they look down with contempt on men in whom they think there is no virtue, no spirit, no muscle. Note that they do not despise everyone they think badly of. The dishonest, the slanderous, the fraudulent — men equipped to do harm — are not despised at all; people simply think badly of them. The despised are the ones I mentioned before, who are "no good to themselves or anyone else," as the saying goes: no work in them, no effort, no care about anything.
Admiration goes to the men who are thought to outstrip everyone else in virtue — free not only of every disgrace but of the vices most people cannot easily resist. Pleasures, those most seductive of mistresses, twist the majority of souls away from virtue; and when the hot irons of pain come close, most people panic beyond all measure. Life and death, wealth and poverty shake every human being to the core. But when a man looks down on all of that, good and bad alike, from a great height of spirit — and when some large and honorable cause appears and seizes him, turns him wholly toward itself and sweeps him along — then who could fail to admire the splendor and beauty of virtue?
So this contempt for externals produces great admiration; and justice above all — the one virtue that earns men the name of "good men" — strikes the multitude as something marvelous. And rightly so. For no one can be just who is afraid of death, pain, exile, or poverty, or who puts their opposites ahead of what is fair. And people admire most of all the man money cannot move; where that has been proved in a man, they consider him tested in the fire.
So justice, by itself, delivers all three of the things we set down as the roads to glory: love, because a just man wants to help as many people as possible; trust, for the same reason; and admiration, because he scorns and shrugs off the very things that most people, burning with greed, are dragged after.
In my judgment, moreover, every plan and way of life needs the help of other people — above all, people to share friendly conversation with, and that is hard to come by unless you carry yourself as a good man. So even a recluse, even a man who spends his life in the countryside, needs a reputation for justice — needs it all the more, in fact, because without it he will be taken for unjust, and, fenced by no protection, he will suffer wrong after wrong. And for everyone who sells and buys, hires and rents, everyone tangled up in doing business, justice is indispensable for getting anything done. Its power is so great that even men who feed on crime and wickedness cannot live without some small particle of it. A robber who steals or snatches something from a member of his own gang loses his place even among robbers; and the man they call the pirate captain, if he does not split the loot evenly, is either killed by his crew or marooned. Robbers are even said to have laws of their own, which they obey and observe. It was fair division of plunder that gave Bardulis, the Illyrian bandit Theopompus writes about, his great power — and gave far greater power to Viriathus of Lusitania, a man our own armies and generals actually gave way to, until Gaius Laelius, the one known as "the Wise," broke and crushed him as praetor, and so tamed his ferocity that he handed an easy war on to his successors.
If the power of justice is great enough to prop up and enlarge even the fortunes of robbers, how great do we think its power will be among laws and courts, in an established republic?
It seems to me that not only among the Medes, as Herodotus says, but among our own ancestors too, kings of good character were originally set up for one purpose: the enjoyment of justice. When the poor multitude was being squeezed by those with greater wealth, they ran for shelter to some one man who stood out for virtue; and by shielding the weaker from wrong, by establishing fairness, he held the highest and the lowest under equal right. The reason for creating laws was the same as the reason for creating kings. What people have always sought is right that is equal — otherwise it would not be right at all. As long as they could get it from one just and good man, they were satisfied with him; when that ran out, laws were invented, to speak to everyone, always, with one and the same voice.
This much, then, is plain: the men people used to choose to rule over them were the men whose justice stood high in public opinion. Add the further belief that those same men were wise, and there was nothing people thought they could not achieve under such leaders. So justice is to be cultivated and kept up in every way — for its own sake, first, since otherwise it would not be justice, but also for the enlargement of honor and glory.
Now, with money there is a method not only for getting it but for investing it, so that it funds our ongoing expenses, both the necessary ones and the generous ones. In the same way, glory has to be both won and managed by method. Though Socrates put it beautifully: the nearest road to glory — the shortcut, so to speak — is to work at actually being what you want to be thought to be. If anyone imagines he can win lasting glory by pretense, by empty display, by faking not just his words but his face, he is badly mistaken. True glory strikes roots and keeps spreading; everything fake drops off quickly, like little flowers, and nothing counterfeit can last. There are plenty of witnesses on both sides, but for brevity's sake one family will do. Tiberius Gracchus, son of Publius, will be praised as long as the memory of Rome endures; but his sons were not approved by good men while they lived, and now that they are dead they hold a place among those whose killing men call justified.
So whoever wants to win true glory should perform the duties of justice. What those are, I set out in the previous book.
But even though the whole heart of the matter is to be what we want to be thought to be, some rules are still worth giving for how to be seen, most easily, as what we are. If a man has grounds for fame and a known name from his earliest youth — inherited from his father, as I think has happened to you, my dear Cicero, or landed on him by some chance or stroke of fortune — then every eye is turned on him. What he does, how he lives, gets examined; he moves, as it were, in the brightest light, and not a word or deed of his can stay hidden. But those whose early years pass unknown, in humble obscurity, should — the moment they become young men — set their sights on great things and strive toward them with honest effort. And they can do it with the steadier heart because that age of life is not envied; it is actually favored.
The first recommendation to glory for a young man, then, is whatever can be won in war. Many among our ancestors made their names that way — there was almost always a war being fought. Your own youth, however, fell on a war in which one side had too much crime in it, and the other too little luck. Yet in that war, when Pompeius put you in command of a cavalry wing, you earned real praise, from a very great man and from the army, for your riding, your javelin work, your endurance of every hardship of a soldier's life. And then that praise of yours fell together with the republic.
But I have taken up this discussion not about you personally, but about the whole subject; so let us go on to what remains.
Just as in everything else the works of the mind are far greater than the works of the body, so the things we pursue with intellect and reason win more gratitude than the things we pursue with muscle. The first recommendation for a young man, then, comes from self-restraint, from devotion to his parents, and from goodwill toward his own people. Next, young men make themselves known most easily, and in the best light, by attaching themselves to famous and wise men who counsel the republic well. Seen constantly in such company, they give the public the impression that they will grow to resemble the very men they picked out to imitate. Time spent in the house of Publius Mucius commended young Publius Rutilius to a reputation both for clean character and for knowledge of the law. Lucius Crassus, on the other hand, while still very young, borrowed from no one: he earned the highest praise for himself, with that famous and glorious prosecution. At the age when students usually win applause for practice exercises — as we are told of Demosthenes — Lucius Crassus was proving that he could already do superbly in the forum what he might still, quite creditably, have been rehearsing at home.
Speech comes in two forms: conversation and formal argument. There is no doubt that formal argument — which is what we mean by eloquence — carries more weight toward glory; and yet it is hard to say how much a warm and approachable way in conversation wins people's hearts. There survive letters from Philip to Alexander, from Antipater to Cassander, from Antigonus to his son Philip — three of the wisest men, by all report — in which they instruct their sons to draw the hearts of the multitude toward goodwill by kindly speech, and to win over their soldiers with a gentle, personal address. Still, a speech delivered with force before a crowd often sets the whole assembly on fire. The admiration for a full, wise speaker is enormous; his hearers assume he understands more and is wiser than everyone else. And if his speech carries dignity mixed with restraint, nothing can be more admired — all the more if those qualities appear in a young man.
There are many kinds of cases that call for eloquence, and many young men in our republic have won praise speaking before judges, before the people, and before the senate; but the greatest admiration is won in the courts.
Court speaking divides in two: prosecution and defense. Defense is the more praiseworthy of the pair, but prosecution too has very often won approval. I spoke of Crassus a moment ago; Marcus Antonius, as a young man, did the same. A prosecution also put the eloquence of Publius Sulpicius on display, when he brought Gaius Norbanus — a seditious and worthless citizen — to trial. But this is not something to do often, and never except for the republic's sake, like the men I just named; or for vengeance, like the two Luculli; or to protect clients, as I did for the Sicilians, and Julius did for the Sardinians in the case against Albucius. The diligence of Lucius Fufius, too, was made known in the prosecution of Manius Aquilius. Once, then — or at any rate not often. If someone does have to do it more often, let him do it as a service to the republic: there is nothing wrong with punishing the republic's enemies again and again. Even so, there should be a limit. It looks like the mark of a hard man — or rather, hardly a man at all — to put one person after another in danger of their lives. And besides being dangerous to yourself, it stains your reputation to let yourself be called a prosecutor. That is what happened to Marcus Brutus, born of the highest family, son of the Brutus who was one of the great experts in civil law.
And hold on carefully to this rule of duty: never bring a capital charge against a person who may be innocent. There is no way to do that without becoming a criminal yourself. For what is more inhuman than to take eloquence — given to us by nature for the safety and preservation of human beings — and turn it into a weapon for the ruin and destruction of the good? Yet while we must shun that, we need not make it a matter of conscience never to defend a guilty man — provided he is not vile and beyond the pale. The public wants it; custom allows it; humanity itself puts up with it. In a trial, the judge's job is always to pursue the truth; the advocate's job is sometimes to defend what is plausible, even if it is less than true. I would not dare write that — especially in a book of philosophy — if it were not also the position of Panaetius, the weightiest of the Stoics. But it is defenses, above all, that breed glory and gratitude, and all the more when you come to the rescue of someone who seems hemmed in and hard-pressed by the power of some great man. I have done that often, and once as a young man I did it for Sextus Roscius of Ameria, against the power of Lucius Sulla at the height of his dominance. The speech survives, as you know.
Now that we have laid out the duties by which young men win glory, the next topic is doing good and open-handedness. Generosity works in two ways: you help the needy either with personal service or with money. The money way is easier, especially for a rich man; but the other is finer, more splendid, and worthier of a strong and distinguished man. Both contain the same generous wish to oblige, but one is drawn from the strongbox and the other from virtue — and giving that comes out of the family estate drains the very spring of generosity. Generosity kills generosity: the more people you have spent it on, the fewer people you can spend it on. But those who are generous and open-handed with service — that is, with their ability and their effort — gain two things. First, the more people they help, the more allies they will have in doing good. Second, the habit of doing good leaves them readier and better trained, so to speak, at deserving well of many.
In one of his letters, Philip splendidly takes his son Alexander to task for chasing the goodwill of the Macedonians with handouts. "What on earth," he writes, "led you to hope that men you had corrupted with money would be loyal to you? Or is your project to have the Macedonians expecting you to be not their king but their steward and supplier?" "Steward and supplier" — well said, because it is degrading for a king; and better still that he called the handout "corruption." For the taker is made worse by it, and ever readier to hold out his hand for the next one.
Philip gave this to his son; but let us take it as a rule for everyone.
There is no doubt, then, that the generosity that consists of service and effort is more honorable, reaches wider, and can benefit more people. Still, sometimes we do have to give money. That kind of generosity is not to be rejected outright, and we should often share from our own property with worthy people in need — but carefully, and in moderation. Many men have poured away their inheritance by thoughtless giving. And what is more foolish than to arrange things so that you cannot keep doing the very thing you enjoy doing? Worse: plunder follows lavishness. When giving has made men needy, they are forced to lay hands on other people's property. And so, aiming to be generous in order to win goodwill, they earn less affection from those they gave to than hatred from those they robbed.
The family purse, then, should not be locked so tight that generosity cannot open it, nor left so unbarred that it stands open to everyone. Keep a limit, and set the limit by your means. And we should always remember the saying our countrymen have repeated so often that it has become a proverb: "Lavish giving has no bottom." What limit could there be, when the people used to getting it want the same as before, and everyone else wants it too?
Broadly, there are two kinds of big givers: the wasteful and the open-handed. The wasteful are the ones who pour out their money on public banquets, handouts of meat, gladiatorial shows, and lavish productions of games and beast-hunts — things that will leave behind a short memory or none at all. The open-handed are the ones who use their means to ransom captives from pirates, or take over their friends' debts, or help with dowries for friends' daughters, or lend a hand in acquiring property or enlarging it. So I wonder what got into Theophrastus in his book on wealth. There is much that is fine in it, but this is absurd: he goes on at length praising magnificence and the staging of shows for the people, and he treats the means to pay for that kind of spending as the real fruit of riches. To me, the fruit of open-handedness — I have just given a few examples — seems far greater and far more certain.
How much more weight and truth there is in Aristotle's rebuke: that we feel no amazement at these outpourings of money, all spent to flatter the crowd. If people under siege, he says, were forced to buy a pint of water for a mina, at first we would find it unbelievable, and everyone would be amazed; but on reflection we would excuse it as necessity. Yet at these monstrous losses and bottomless expenses we feel hardly any amazement at all — even though no necessity is being relieved, no dignity is being raised, and the crowd's delight itself lasts only a brief, tiny moment, a delight felt only by the most frivolous, in whom even the memory of the pleasure dies the instant they have had their fill. He sums it up well, too: such things please boys, silly women, slaves, and freemen barely distinguishable from slaves; a serious man, weighing what happens with steady judgment, cannot possibly approve of them.
And yet I recognize that in our own state, even back in the good times, it had taken root that splendor is demanded from the best men in their aedileship — the office that stages the public games. Publius Crassus, "the Rich" by surname and rich in fact, performed that office on the grandest scale; a little later Lucius Crassus — with Quintus Mucius, the most restrained man alive, as his colleague — gave a most magnificent aedileship; then came Gaius Claudius, son of Appius, and after him many more: the Luculli, Hortensius, Silanus. But Publius Lentulus, in the year of my consulship, outdid everyone before him, and Scaurus copied him; and the shows our Pompeius gave in his second consulship were the most magnificent of all. So you see what I think of this whole business.
Still, one must avoid any suspicion of stinginess. Mamercus was an extremely rich man, and skipping the aedileship cost him the consulship. So if the people demand it, good men must put on the show — with the approval of the responsible, even if not their enthusiasm — but within their means, as I did myself. And it is justified, too, whenever some greater and more useful object is gained by pleasing the people with largesse: so, recently, Orestes' free lunches in the streets, given under the name of a tithe-offering, brought him great honor. Nor was it held against Marcus Seius that during a grain shortage he sold the people a peck for a single as: he freed himself from a great and long-standing hatred at a cost that was neither dishonorable — he was aedile at the time — nor very high. But the highest honor went recently to our Milo, who bought gladiators for the sake of the republic — whose survival was bound up with my own — and crushed every mad attempt of Publius Clodius.
The justification for handouts, then, is this: either necessity or usefulness. And even in those cases, the rule of moderation is best. Lucius Philippus, son of Quintus, a man of great talent and great distinction, used to boast that he had won everything counted highest without giving a single show. Cotta said the same, and Curio. I too can make this boast, in my own modest way: measured against the eminence of the offices I won — with every vote, and each in the first year the law allowed, which none of the men I just named can say — the expense of my aedileship was truly trivial.
Better still are expenditures of another kind: walls, dockyards, harbors, aqueducts, and everything that serves the use of the republic. What is handed over on the spot, cash in the palm, gives more immediate pleasure, it is true; but these works earn more gratitude in the long run. Theaters, colonnades, new temples I criticize more gently, out of respect for Pompeius; but the most learned men do not approve of them — Panaetius himself, whom I have followed closely in these books without merely translating him, and Demetrius of Phalerum, who faults Pericles, the first man of Greece, for pouring so much money into those famous Propylaea. But this whole subject is argued carefully in the books I wrote on the republic.
The whole system of such largesse, then, is flawed in its very nature, though the times sometimes make it necessary; and even then it must be fitted to one's means and governed by moderation.
In the other kind of giving — the kind that flows from open-handedness — we should not respond the same way to cases that are not the same. The man crushed by disaster is one case; the man seeking to improve his position, with nothing actually wrong, is another. Generosity should lean more toward the stricken — unless they happen to deserve their disaster. Yet toward those who want help not to keep from being ruined but to climb a step higher, we should not shut the purse entirely, either; we should simply use judgment and care in choosing the worthy. Ennius put it perfectly: "Good deeds badly placed I count as bad deeds."
What is given to a good and grateful man bears fruit both from him and from everyone else. Once recklessness is stripped away, open-handedness is the most welcome thing there is, and people praise it all the more eagerly because the goodness of every great man is the common refuge of all. So make it your business to confer benefits on as many people as possible — benefits of a kind whose memory passes down to their children and grandchildren, so that ingratitude is simply not open to them. For everyone hates a man who forgets a kindness; everyone counts that wrong as done to themselves as well, since it scares off future generosity; and they treat the ingrate as the common enemy of the poor.
This kind of generosity is also useful to the republic: ransoming captives out of slavery, putting the less well-off on their feet. That our own order once did this as a matter of routine, we can see set out at length in a speech of Crassus. This habit of doing good I place far above the largesse of public shows. The one belongs to serious and great men; the other to flatterers of the people, so to speak, tickling the fickle crowd with a moment of pleasure.
It will be fitting, too, to be generous in giving and not harsh in collecting; and in every transaction — selling and buying, hiring and renting, dealings with neighbors over walls and boundary lines — to be fair and easy, yielding much of your own right to many, and steering clear of lawsuits as far as you properly can, and perhaps even a little farther than that. For to give up a little of your right now and then is not only open-handed; sometimes it is even profitable. You should keep an eye on the family property — letting it drain away is disgraceful — but manage it so that no suspicion of meanness or greed attaches to you. To be able to practice open-handedness without stripping your own inheritance: that is the greatest fruit money has.
Hospitality, too, is rightly praised by Theophrastus. It is a very fitting thing, at least as it seems to me, for the homes of distinguished men to stand open to distinguished guests; and it is an ornament to the republic as well that men from abroad never lack this kind of open-handedness in our city. And for those who want power by honorable means, it is enormously useful to command wealth and influence among foreign peoples through their guest-friends. Theophrastus writes that Cimon at Athens kept open house even for the Laciadae, the people of his own home district: he set things up, and gave his farm managers standing orders, that anything and everything be provided for any Laciad who stopped at his country place.
Now for kindnesses done not with money but with personal service. These go sometimes to the whole republic, sometimes to individual citizens. Protecting people's legal rights, helping them with advice, putting that kind of knowledge at the service of as many as possible — nothing does more to build both influence and goodwill.
Among the many fine things our ancestors left us, one stands out: the study and interpretation of our excellent civil law was always held in the highest honor. Right up until the present chaos, the leading men of the state kept that expertise in their own hands. Now its prestige has been wiped out, just like public office, just like every rank of distinction — and it is all the more galling because it happened in the lifetime of a man who is the equal of all his predecessors in honor and could easily have outdone every one of them in knowledge. So this kind of service wins gratitude from many people, and it is exactly suited to binding them to you by favors done.
Right next door to this art stands the power of speaking — more popular still, and more brilliant. What outshines eloquence, whether you measure by the admiration of the listeners, the hope it gives people in trouble, or the gratitude of those it has defended? That is why our ancestors gave it first place among the civilian honors. So for a man who speaks well and doesn't mind the work — who, in the tradition of our country, takes on many people's cases without grumbling and without a fee — the field of favors and grateful clients stretches wide.
The subject was prompting me to mourn, here too, the interruption of eloquence — not to say its death — except that I'd be afraid of seeming to complain on my own behalf. Still, we can see how it stands: the orators are gone, and how few show promise, how far fewer show ability, how many show nothing but nerve.
But not everyone — not even many — can be expert in the law or powerful in court. Even so, anyone can serve many people by personal effort: asking favors on their behalf, recommending them to judges and magistrates, keeping watch over another man's interests, going personally to the very experts who give opinions and the advocates who defend. People who do this earn enormous gratitude, and word of their diligence travels very far.
One warning such men don't need — it's obvious — is to take care, in wanting to help some people, not to offend others. Yet often they hurt exactly the people they shouldn't, or people it costs them to hurt. Done unknowingly, that is carelessness; done knowingly, recklessness. To anyone you offend against your will, you owe whatever apology you can make — this was unavoidable, you could not have done otherwise — and what looks like an injury will have to be made good by other services and other duties.
In helping people, we usually look at either their character or their circumstances. It is easy to say — and people say it constantly — that in placing kindnesses they follow a man's character, not his fortune. A fine sentiment. But tell me, who actually puts the cause of a poor but excellent man ahead of doing a favor for someone rich and powerful? Our goodwill leans, as a rule, toward the man from whom repayment looks quicker and easier. But we should look harder at how things really are. The poor man, if he is a good man, may not be able to return a favor, but he can certainly keep hold of it. Whoever said it, said it neatly: "Money — if you still have it, you haven't paid it back, and if you've paid it back, you no longer have it. Gratitude — if you've returned it, you still have it, and if you have it, you've already returned it."
But people who count themselves rich, honored, and blessed don't even want to be obligated by a favor. In fact they figure they have conferred a favor just by accepting one, however large; and they suspect that something is being claimed from them, or expected. As for having used a patron, or being called clients — to them that is as good as death.
Your man of slender means, on the other hand, believes that whatever is done for him was done because someone saw him, not his fortune. So he works at seeming grateful — not only to the man who earned it, but to everyone he has hopes of, and he needs many people. And if he happens to do some service in return, he doesn't talk it up; he actually talks it down.
Notice this too: defend a wealthy, fortunate man, and the gratitude stays with him alone — or at most with his children. But defend a man who is poor yet honest and modest, and every decent person of humble station — and they are a huge part of the people — sees a protector raised up for himself. That is why I think kindness is better invested with the good than with the fortunate.
We should certainly make every effort to satisfy people of every kind. But if it comes down to a contest, our authority has to be Themistocles. Asked whether he should marry his daughter to a good man who was poor or to a rich man less well thought of, he said: "I prefer a man who lacks money to money that lacks a man." But our morals have been corrupted and bent out of shape by the worship of wealth. What is the size of another man's fortune to any one of us? Maybe it helps the man who has it — and not even that, always. But suppose it does help him. Fine — he has more to spend; how is he a better man for it? If he happens to be a good man as well as a rich one, don't let the riches block him from being helped — just don't let them be the reason. Let the whole judgment turn not on how rich each man is, but on what kind of man he is.
And the last rule for favors and personal service: never fight against equity, never fight for a wrong. The foundation of lasting credit and good name is justice — without it, nothing can deserve praise.
So much for the kind of good deeds that concern individuals; next come those that concern everyone together, and the state. Some of these are of a kind that benefits the whole citizen body; some reach individuals — and those, in fact, earn the more gratitude. We should try, if we can, to do both — to serve individuals no less than the whole — but always so that it helps the republic, or at least does it no harm. Gaius Gracchus's grain giveaway was enormous, and it drained the treasury. Marcus Octavius's was moderate — bearable for the state, necessary for the common people — and so it was wholesome for citizens and republic alike.
But the man who administers the state must see to this first of all: that each person keeps what is his, and that private property is never cut into by public act. It was a destructive course Philippus took when, as tribune — the commons' own officer — he brought in his land-redistribution bill. To be fair, when the law was thrown out he took it calmly and showed real restraint. But in pushing it he played to the crowd at every turn, and one thing he said was truly bad: that "there are not two thousand men in the state who own property." A deadly speech, driving straight at an equal division of goods — and what plague could be greater than that? For this above all is why republics and cities were established in the first place: so that people could keep what was their own. Human beings may have gathered into groups at nature's prompting, but it was in hope of guarding what they had that they sought the protection of cities.
Effort should also go toward never having to levy the property tax our ancestors so often imposed because of a thin treasury and endless wars — and the precautions against that day must be taken long in advance. But if some state does meet a necessity of that kind — I'd rather say "some state" than call down the omen on ours; and anyway I am not discussing our state, but any state — then the effort must go into making everyone understand that if they want to survive, they must bow to necessity. And all who steer a state will need to see that there is a good supply of the necessities of life. What that provisioning usually looks like, and ought to, there is no need to discuss; it's obvious. The topic only needed a mention.
But the chief thing in all handling of public business and public office is to shut out even the faintest suspicion of greed. "If only," said Gaius Pontius the Samnite, "fortune had saved me for the days when Romans started taking bribes, and I had been born then! I would not have let them rule much longer." He would have had many generations to wait; this disease invaded our republic only recently. So I'm content that Pontius lived when he did, since there was that much iron in him. It is not yet a hundred and ten years since Lucius Piso carried the first law against official extortion — before it there was none. But afterward came so many laws, each new one harsher; so many men accused; so many convicted; so great a war stirred up by fear of the courts; and, once laws and courts were suppressed, such plundering and stripping of our allies — that we now stand strong through other people's weakness, not through any virtue of our own.
Panaetius praises Africanus for keeping his hands clean. Why wouldn't he? But Africanus had other, greater claims; the credit for clean hands belongs not to the man alone but to his times. Paulus took possession of the whole treasure of Macedon — it was immense — and brought so much money into our treasury that the spoils of one general put an end to the property tax forever. To his own house he brought nothing but the everlasting memory of his name. Africanus followed his father's example and was not a coin richer for flattening Carthage. And his colleague in the censorship, Lucius Mummius — was he any wealthier for leveling the wealthiest of cities to its foundations? He chose to adorn Italy rather than his own house — though with Italy adorned, his house seems to me the more adorned for it.
So — to bring the argument back where it started — no vice is uglier than greed, above all in leading men and those who govern the state. To treat the republic as a source of income is not merely disgraceful; it is criminal, an abomination. That is why the oracle the Pythian Apollo delivered — that Sparta would be destroyed by greed and by nothing else — seems a prophecy aimed not just at the Spartans but at every wealthy nation. And there is no easier way for the men in charge of a state to win the goodwill of the many than clean hands and self-restraint.
But the men who want to be the people's darlings, and to that end try land-redistribution schemes, so that owners are driven from their homes, or hold that borrowed money should simply be forgiven the borrowers — they are shaking the very foundations of the state. First goes harmony, which cannot exist when money is taken from some and handed to others. Then goes equity, which is destroyed root and branch if people are not allowed to keep what is theirs. For, as I said above, this is the defining mark of a city, of a state: that each person's guardianship of his own property be free and untroubled. And in wrecking the republic they don't even harvest the gratitude they are counting on. The man whose property was seized is their enemy; the man it was handed to even pretends he never wanted to take it — and most of all, when debts are forgiven, he hides his delight, afraid of looking like a man who couldn't pay. But the one who suffered the wrong remembers it, and wears his resentment openly. And even if the people wrongly given to outnumber the people unjustly robbed, they are not for that reason stronger — these things are judged by weight, not by count. And what kind of fairness is it that land held for many years, or even centuries, should go to a man who never had any, while the man who had it loses it?
It was for exactly this kind of wrong that the Spartans expelled their ephor Lysander — one of their chief magistrates — and put their king Agis to death, a thing that had never happened among them before. And from that time such discord followed that tyrants rose up, the best men were driven into exile, and a republic built superbly well fell to pieces. Nor did it fall alone: by the contagion of its ills, spreading out from Sparta wider and wider, it dragged down the rest of Greece. And our own Gracchi — sons of the great Tiberius Gracchus, grandsons of Africanus — wasn't it the fight over land that destroyed them?
Aratus of Sicyon, by contrast, is praised with good reason. His city had been held by tyrants for fifty years when he set out from Argos, slipped into Sicyon by a secret entry, and seized it. He crushed the tyrant Nicocles before anyone saw him coming, restored six hundred exiles who had been the wealthiest men of the city, and by his arrival set the republic free. But he quickly saw what a tangle the goods and property were. He thought it utterly unjust that the men he himself had restored should go without while others held their property; and yet he thought it hardly fair to unsettle fifty years of possession, because over so long a stretch much had come to be held without any wrong — by inheritance, by purchase, by dowry. So he judged that the current holders should not be stripped, and that the former owners should not go uncompensated either. Having concluded that settling the matter would take money, he announced that he wished to travel to Alexandria and gave orders that everything stay as it was until his return. He came quickly to Ptolemy, his guest-friend, then reigning as the second king since Alexandria's founding. He explained that he wanted to free his homeland and laid out the case; and this great man easily persuaded the wealthy king to help him with a great sum of money. He brought it back to Sicyon and called fifteen leading citizens into council with him. With them he examined the cases of those who were holding other men's property and of those who had lost their own; and by setting values on the estates he managed to persuade some that they would rather take the money and give up their holdings, and others that it was more convenient to have the fair value counted out in cash than to recover what had been theirs. And so it was accomplished: harmony was established, and everyone went away without a complaint.
A great man — he deserved to have been born in our republic! That is how to deal with fellow citizens: not, as we have now watched twice, planting the spear in the forum and putting citizens' property under the auctioneer's cry. That Greek thought — and this is what a wise and outstanding man thinks — that everyone had to be looked after. And this is the highest reasoning and wisdom of a good citizen: not to split the interests of the citizens apart, but to hold everyone together under one standard of fairness. "Let them live in another man's house rent-free." Why, exactly? So that after I have bought, built, maintained, and spent, you can enjoy what is mine against my will? What is that but robbing some people of their own and giving others what isn't theirs? And these clean slates — the cancellation of debts — what is the argument for them, except that you buy a farm with my money, and then you have the farm and I don't have my money?
That is why we must see to it that debt never grows to where it can harm the state — and there are many ways to guard against that — and not, if it does happen, let the rich lose what is theirs while debtors pocket what belongs to others. For nothing holds a republic together more powerfully than good faith — its credit — and there can be no credit unless paying what one owes is a necessity. Never was the push to escape payment pressed harder than in my consulship. Men of every type and every rank tried it with weapons and armed camps. I stood against them so firmly that this whole evil was removed from the republic. Never was debt greater; never was it paid down better or more easily — for once the hope of cheating was cut away, the necessity of paying followed. But the man who is the victor now, though beaten then, went on to carry out what he had planned back when it no longer even mattered to him. So great was his appetite for wrongdoing that wrongdoing itself delighted him, even without a reason.
From this kind of largesse, then — giving to some what is taken from others — the men who guard the state will keep far away. Above all they will work to see that everyone keeps his own under fair law and fair courts; that the weaker are not cheated because they stand low; that envy never blocks the rich from keeping or recovering what belongs to them; and beyond that, by every means they can, in war or at home, to make the state greater in power, in territory, in revenues.
This is the work of great men; it was the standing practice of our ancestors. Whoever pursues duties of this kind will do the republic the greatest service and win for himself both gratitude and glory.
Now, in these rules about the useful, Antipater of Tyre — a Stoic who died recently at Athens — thinks Panaetius passed over two things: the care of health, and of money. My guess is the great philosopher skipped them because they are easy; they are certainly useful. Health is kept by knowing your own body; by watching what tends to do it good or harm; by restraint in all your eating and daily habits, passing up pleasures for the body's sake; and finally by the skill of the professionals whose science covers these things.
As for a family fortune, it should be sought only by means that carry no disgrace; kept by diligence and thrift; and increased by the same. Xenophon the Socratic worked through all of this very neatly in the book called the Oeconomicus — which I translated from Greek into Latin when I was about the age you are now. But this whole subject — how money is made, how it is invested (I wish I could add: how it is spent) — is discussed more usefully by certain excellent gentlemen who sit at the middle Janus, Rome's banking row, than by any philosophers in any school. Still, these things are worth learning; they belong to advantage, and advantage is what this book has been about.
But the comparison of useful things — this was the fourth topic, the one Panaetius left out — is often necessary. Advantages of the body get weighed against external advantages, external against bodily, the body's own against each other, and external against external. Against externals, the body's advantages are compared like this: you would rather be healthy than rich. Externals against the body: better to be rich than to have enormous physical strength. The body's own against each other: good health ranked above pleasure, strength above speed. And externals against externals: glory above riches, city rents above farm income.
To this class of comparison belongs the famous answer of old Cato. Asked what paid best on an estate, he said: "Good grazing." What next? "Fairly good grazing." What third? "Poor grazing." What fourth? "Plowing." And when the questioner said, "What about lending at interest?" Cato answered: "What about killing a man?"
From this and many other cases, the lesson should be clear: comparisons of advantages are made all the time, and this fourth category rightly belongs in the search for our duties.
The rest we'll pursue next.
Cato — who was nearly his contemporary — records, Marcus my son, that Publius Scipio, the first to be called Africanus, used to say that he was never less idle than when idle, never less alone than when alone. A magnificent saying, and worthy of a great and wise man. It tells us that even at leisure his thoughts were on public business, and that in solitude he talked things over with himself — so that he was never at a standstill, and sometimes had no need of anyone else's conversation. The two things that make other men go slack — leisure and solitude — only sharpened him. I wish I could honestly say the same of myself. But if I cannot match such greatness of mind by imitation, I come as close as I can in wanting to. Shut out from the republic and from work in the courts by the arms of traitors, I am pursuing a life of leisure; that is why I have left the city, and as I wander the countryside I am often alone.
But this leisure of mine should not be set beside the leisure of Africanus, nor this solitude beside his. He was resting from the most splendid services to his country when he took time for himself now and then, and withdrew from the crowds and the press of people into solitude as into a harbor. My leisure comes from having no work to do, not from any desire for rest. With the senate snuffed out and the courts destroyed, what is there worthy of me to do in the senate house or in the forum? So I, who once lived in the fullest publicity, before the eyes of my fellow citizens, now flee the sight of the criminals who swarm on every side; I hide myself as much as I am allowed, and I am often alone. But the learned have taught me that among evils one should not only choose the least, but also squeeze out of those very evils whatever good may be in them. So I am making use of my leisure — though it is not the leisure owed to a man who once won peace and quiet for the whole state — and I refuse to let this solitude sit slack, though necessity imposed it on me, not choice.
And yet, in my judgment, Africanus earned the higher praise. No written monuments of his genius survive; no work of his leisure, no product of his solitude exists. From that we should understand that with his mind always in motion, always chasing down the questions his thinking pursued, he was never idle and never alone. I do not have that kind of strength — silent thought alone cannot pull me out of my solitude — so I have turned all my effort and care to this work of writing. And the result is that I have written more in the short time since the republic fell than I did in all the years it stood.
Now the whole of philosophy, my Cicero, is fertile and fruitful, with no part of it left untilled or abandoned; but no ground in it is richer or more productive than the subject of duties, from which flow the rules for living a steady and honorable life. So although I trust you are hearing these things constantly from our friend Cratippus, the leading philosopher of the age, I still think it good for such words to ring in your ears from every direction — and, if it were possible, for you to hear nothing else. That goes for everyone who intends to lead an honorable life, but for no one, perhaps, more than for you. People expect you — and not a little — to imitate my industry; they expect much from you in public honors, and something, perhaps, in matching my name. You have also taken on a heavy responsibility in Athens and in Cratippus. You went to them as a man goes to market for the finest learning, and to come home empty-handed would be an utter disgrace, shaming the city's authority and your teacher's alike. So strain your mind as hard as it will go; work as hard as effort allows (if learning is really labor and not pleasure); and see to it that you deliver. Do not let anyone say that when I supplied everything you needed, you were the one who failed yourself.
But enough of that. I have written to you often, and at length, to spur you on. Let us get back to the remaining part of our plan.
Panaetius, then — beyond any dispute the most careful writer on duties, and the one I have chiefly followed, with some corrections of my own — laid out three headings under which people deliberate and weigh questions of duty: first, whether the act in question is right or shameful; second, whether it is useful or not; third, when something with the look of the right clashes with what seems useful, how the two ought to be told apart. The first two headings he worked through in three books; the third he said he would take up in its turn — and he never made good on the promise. That surprises me all the more because his student Posidonius records that Panaetius lived thirty years after publishing those books. And I am surprised that Posidonius touched the subject only briefly in certain notebooks of his — especially since he writes that no topic in all of philosophy is so essential.
I flatly disagree with those who say Panaetius did not overlook this topic but left it out deliberately — that it never should have been written at all, because advantage can never conflict with the right. On one point there is room for doubt: whether this heading, the third in Panaetius's scheme, ought to have been included or dropped entirely. On the other there is no room at all: Panaetius took it on and then left it unwritten. A man who has finished two parts of a three-part plan necessarily has the third still ahead of him; besides, at the end of his third book he promises to deal with this part in its turn. And Posidonius is a weighty witness to the same fact. He writes in one of his letters that Publius Rutilius Rufus, who had studied under Panaetius, used to say that just as no painter could be found to finish the portion of the Venus of Cos that Apelles left incomplete — the beauty of her face killed all hope of matching it in the rest of the body — so no one ever took up what Panaetius had passed over and left undone, because what he had finished was too excellent to follow.
About Panaetius's intention, then, there can be no doubt. Whether he was right to bolt this third part onto the inquiry about duty is perhaps open to argument. For whether the right is the only good, as the Stoics hold, or whether — as your Peripatetics believe — the right is the highest good in such a way that everything piled on the other side of the scale would barely register a feather's weight, one thing is certain: advantage can never genuinely compete with the right. That is why, we are told, Socrates used to curse the men who first pried apart in theory what nature had joined together. The Stoics agreed with him fully: they held that whatever is right is useful, and that nothing is useful that is not right.
If Panaetius were the sort of man to say that virtue is worth cultivating because it produces advantage — like the philosophers who measure what is desirable by pleasure or by freedom from pain — then he could consistently say that advantage sometimes fights the right. But he is a man who judges that the right is the only good, and that the things which clash with it under some appearance of usefulness make life no better by arriving and no worse by leaving. So he should not, the argument runs, have introduced a deliberation in which what seems useful gets weighed against what is right. After all, when the Stoics name the highest good "living in agreement with nature," what they mean, as I understand it, is this: always be in harmony with virtue, and from everything else that accords with nature, choose only what does not fight against virtue. Since that is so, some people think this whole comparison was wrongly introduced, and that no instruction on the topic should have been given at all.
And yet the right in its true and proper sense exists only in the wise, and can never be torn away from virtue. In those whose wisdom is not perfect, that perfect right cannot exist at all — only likenesses of it. The duties we discuss in these books are the ones the Stoics call "middle" duties. They are common property, and their reach is wide; many people attain them through natural goodness of heart and through progress in learning. The duty they call "right" duty is another matter: complete and absolute, "having all the numbers," as the same school puts it, and possible for no one but the wise man. But when some act is done in which the middle duties show themselves, it looks fully complete, because ordinary people generally cannot see how far it falls short of perfection; as far as their understanding reaches, they think nothing is missing. The same thing happens with poems, paintings, and plenty else: the untrained enjoy and praise work that deserves no praise. The reason, I suppose, is that such work contains some genuine merit that catches the inexpert, who cannot judge the flaws in any given piece. So when the experts set them straight, they give up their opinion readily enough.
These duties, then, the ones I am discussing in these books, are said by the Stoics to be a kind of second-tier right — not the private property of the wise, but shared with the whole human race. And so they stir everyone in whom there is any natural bent toward virtue. When the two Decii or the two Scipios are remembered as brave men, or Fabricius or Aristides is called just, no one is citing them as models of courage or justice the way one would cite a truly wise man. None of them was wise in the sense we want "wise" to carry. Even the men who were considered wise and carried the name — Marcus Cato, Gaius Laelius — were not; not even the famous Seven Sages. It was their constant practice of the middle duties that gave them a certain likeness to wise men, the outward look of wisdom.
So then: the truly right may never lawfully be weighed against a conflicting advantage — and the right as we commonly use the word, the kind cultivated by people who want to be counted good men, must never be weighed against profit either. We ordinary people are bound to guard and preserve the right that falls within our understanding just as strictly as the wise must guard what is right in the proper and true sense. Otherwise, whatever ground we have gained on the road to virtue cannot be held.
So much for those who count as good men because they keep their duties.
But those who measure everything by profits and gains, and refuse to let the right outweigh them — they are the ones who habitually, when deliberating, weigh the right against what they consider useful. Good men do not. So I believe that when Panaetius said people "tend to" hesitate over this comparison, he meant exactly what he said: that they tend to, not that they ought to. For it is utterly shameful not merely to value what seems useful above what is right, but even to compare the two at all — even to hesitate between them.
What is it, then, that does sometimes raise a doubt and seem to need thinking through? I believe it is this: the occasional uncertainty about what kind of act you are actually looking at. Circumstances often make something that is usually considered shameful turn out not to be shameful. Let me set out one example with a very wide reach. What greater crime can there be than to kill — not just a human being — but a close friend? Well then: has a man bound himself to a crime if he kills a tyrant, however close a friend? The Roman people do not think so; of all glorious deeds, they judge that one the most beautiful. Did advantage defeat the right, then? No — the right led the way, and advantage followed close behind.
So, in order that we may judge without error whenever what we call the useful seems to clash with what we understand to be right, some formula must be laid down; if we follow it when comparing courses of action, we will never desert our duty. And this formula will agree most closely with the reasoning and teaching of the Stoics. I follow them in these books for a simple reason. The older Academics, and your Peripatetics (who were once the same school as the Academics), do rank what is right above what seems useful; but these questions are argued more brilliantly by people who hold that whatever is right is useful and nothing useful that is not right, than by people who allow that something right can fail to be useful and something useful can fail to be right. And our own Academy grants us generous freedom: whatever strikes us as most probable, we are entitled to defend on our own authority. But back to the formula.
Here it is, then. For one man to take something from another — to grow his own gain out of another man's loss — is more against nature than death, than poverty, than pain, than anything else that can strike our bodies or our outward possessions. Before anything else, it destroys human community and fellowship. For if we reach the point where each of us is ready to rob or wrong his neighbor for his own profit, then the fellowship of the human race — the thing most in accord with nature — necessarily breaks apart. Suppose each limb of the body got the idea that it could be strong by pulling its neighboring limb's health over to itself: the whole body would inevitably weaken and die. In the same way, if each of us grabs other people's goods for himself, taking whatever he can from everyone for his own gain, human society and community are inevitably overturned. That each man should prefer to win the necessities of life for himself rather than for someone else — nature has no quarrel with that. What nature will not allow is this: that we build up our means, our resources, and our wealth out of other people's plunder.
Nor is it only nature — that is, the law of nations — that lays this down. The laws of individual peoples, which hold each state's commonwealth together, decree the very same thing: no one may harm another for his own benefit. This is what laws aim at, this is what they want — that the union of citizens stay unbroken; and whoever tears it apart they punish with death, exile, chains, or fines.
And nature's own reason drives the point home far more forcefully still — reason, which is law both divine and human. Anyone willing to obey it (and all will obey it who want to live according to nature) will never bring himself to covet another man's property or to pocket what he has stripped from someone else. For loftiness and greatness of spirit — and likewise courtesy, justice, generosity — are far more in accord with nature than pleasure, than life itself, than riches; and to look down on those things, to count them as nothing when set against the common advantage, is the mark of a great and lofty spirit. But to strip another man for your own benefit is more against nature than death, than pain, than everything of that kind.
Likewise, it is more in accord with nature to shoulder the greatest labors and troubles to preserve and help all nations — if such a thing could be done — imitating the great Hercules, whom human gratitude, remembering his good deeds, seated in the council of the gods, than to live off by yourself in solitude, not merely free of every burden but wallowing in pleasures, rich in everything, outstanding even in beauty and strength. That is why every man of the finest and most brilliant nature prefers the first life to the second, and by a wide margin. From which it follows that a man who obeys nature cannot harm his fellow man.
Next: a man who wrongs another to gain some benefit for himself either thinks he is doing nothing against nature, or he judges that death, poverty, pain — even the loss of children, relatives, and friends — are more to be avoided than doing anyone an injustice. If he thinks nothing against nature happens when human beings are wronged, what is the point of arguing with him? He has stripped the human out of the human being. But if he grants that injustice should be avoided, yet ranks death, poverty, and pain as far worse, he is making a mistake: he is counting damage to body or fortune as heavier than damage to the soul.
So there should be one goal set before us all: that the advantage of each individual and the advantage of everyone together be one and the same. If each man snatches it for himself alone, the whole human partnership will dissolve.
Go further. If nature prescribes that one human being should want to look out for another — whoever he may be, for the simple reason that he is human — then by that same nature the advantage of all is necessarily common. And if that is so, we are all held together by one and the same law of nature; and if that too is so, then certainly the law of nature forbids us to wrong one another. Now the first premise is true; therefore the conclusion is true as well. As for the position some people take — that they would take nothing from a parent or a brother for their own gain, but that the rest of their fellow citizens are another matter — it is absurd. Such men declare that they share no bond of right with their fellow citizens, no partnership for the common advantage; and that opinion tears the fellowship of the state to pieces.
Others say that fellow citizens must be respected but foreigners need not be; these men rip up the common fellowship of the human race. And when that is gone, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice are destroyed to the root — and the men who destroy them must be judged impious even toward the immortal gods. For it was the gods who set up the fellowship among human beings that these men overturn; and the tightest bond of that fellowship is the conviction that it is more against nature for one man to strip another for his own gain than to endure every hardship there is — loss of goods, harm to the body, even wounds to the soul itself — provided justice is not involved; for justice is the one virtue that is mistress and queen of all the rest.
Perhaps someone will say: "Well then — if a wise man were starving to death, wouldn't he take food from another man, some fellow useful for nothing at all?" Not at all. For my life is not more useful to me than a certain disposition of my soul: that I wrong no one for my own gain. "What about this, then: if a good man could strip the clothes off Phalaris — that cruel and monstrous tyrant — to keep from freezing to death, wouldn't he do it?"
These cases are very easy to judge. If you take something from a man who is useful for nothing, purely for your own advantage, you have acted inhumanly and against nature's law. But if you are someone who, by staying alive, could bring great advantage to the state and to human society, and for that reason you take something from another — that is not to be condemned. Where the case is not like that, each man must bear his own hardship rather than strip away what belongs to someone else. Sickness, then, or want, or anything of the kind is not more against nature than seizing and coveting what is another's — but abandoning the common advantage is against nature, because it is unjust. And so nature's own law, which preserves and protects the advantage of mankind, will surely decree that the necessities of life pass from an idle and useless person to a man who is wise, good, and brave — a man whose death would subtract a great deal from the common good. Only let him take care that self-regard and self-love never become his pretext for doing wrong. On those terms, he will always do his duty, watching out for the advantage of mankind and for that human fellowship I return to so often.
As for Phalaris, the judgment could not be simpler. We have no fellowship with tyrants — rather, the widest possible gulf — and there is nothing against nature in stripping a man, if you can, whom it is right to kill; indeed this whole pestilent, godless breed ought to be driven out of human society altogether. Just as certain limbs are amputated when they begin to lose their blood and, as it were, their breath, and start to harm the rest of the body, so this savagery — a wild beast in the shape of a man — must be cut away from the common body of humanity.
Of this sort are all the questions in which duty has to be worked out from the circumstances of the moment.
These, I believe, are the matters Panaetius would have gone on to pursue, if some accident or press of business had not cut short his plan. For questions of just this kind, his earlier books supply rules in plenty, from which one can see what must be avoided because it is shameful, and what need not be avoided because it is not shameful at all.
But since I am now setting the rooftop, so to speak, on a work begun and very nearly finished, I will do what the geometers do. They make a practice of not proving everything; they ask that certain things be granted them, so that they can explain what they want more easily. In the same way I ask you, my Cicero, to grant me — if you can — that nothing is worth seeking for its own sake except what is right. If Cratippus will not allow you that much, you will at least grant this: that what is right is the thing most worth seeking for its own sake. Either one is enough for me; sometimes the first, sometimes the second seems the more probable — and beyond these two, nothing seems probable at all.
And first, Panaetius deserves a defense on one point. He never said that the truly useful could sometimes clash with the right — his own principles barred him from saying it — only that what seemed useful could. That nothing is useful which is not also right, and nothing right which is not also useful, he attests again and again; and he says that no greater plague has ever invaded human life than the thinking of those who pulled these two apart. So the conflict he introduced was one that seems to exist, not one that does — and his purpose was never that we should sometimes prefer the useful to the right, but that we should be able to judge between them without error if they ever appeared to collide. This part, then, the part he left behind, I will finish out with no reinforcements — fighting, as the saying goes, under my own flag. For nothing worked out on this subject since Panaetius, at least nothing that has come into my hands, satisfies me at all.
When something flashes an appearance of advantage at us, we can't help being stirred. But if, when you look closely, you see moral wrong attached to the very thing that carried the appearance of advantage, the conclusion is not that advantage must be sacrificed. The conclusion is that where there is wrongdoing, there was never any advantage to begin with. And if nothing is so contrary to nature as shameful conduct — for nature demands what is right, harmonious, and consistent, and rejects their opposites — and nothing so in accord with nature as advantage, then surely advantage and wrongdoing cannot live in the same act.
Consider it from another side. If we are born for moral goodness, and it is either the only thing worth pursuing, as Zeno held, or at least outweighs everything else put together, as Aristotle believes, then what is right must be either the sole good or the highest good. But whatever is good is certainly useful. So whatever is right is useful.
Here is where dishonest men go wrong: the moment they grab hold of something that looks useful, they cut it loose from the question of right. This is where daggers come from, and poisons, and forged wills; this is the root of theft, embezzlement of public money, the fleecing and plundering of allies and citizens; from this grows the craving for excessive wealth, for power no one should hold, and finally — even in free states — for kingship itself, and nothing fouler or uglier than that craving can be imagined. Their judgment is fooled: they see the profits, but they don't see the penalty. I don't mean the penalty of the law, which they often smash through — I mean the penalty of the wrongdoing itself, which is the bitterest of all.
So let us throw this whole breed of deliberators out of the discussion — the lot of them are criminal and godless — the ones who sit weighing whether to follow what they can see is right or to knowingly dirty their hands with crime. The crime is already in the hesitation, even if they never go through with it. Some things should not be deliberated at all, because the deliberating itself is a disgrace.
And banish from every deliberation the hope, the very thought, of covering it up and getting away with it. If we have made any progress in philosophy at all, we should be thoroughly convinced of this: even if we could hide our act from every god and every human being, we must still do nothing greedy, nothing unjust, nothing lustful, nothing out of control.
This is where Plato brings in the famous Gyges. After heavy rains had split the earth open, Gyges climbed down into the chasm and noticed — so the story goes — a bronze horse with doors set in its sides. He opened them and found the body of a dead man of superhuman size, with a gold ring on its finger. He pulled off the ring and put it on — he was one of the king's shepherds — and then rejoined the shepherds' gathering. There he made a discovery: whenever he turned the ring's bezel in toward his palm, he became invisible to everyone, while he himself saw everything; turn it back, and he was visible again. Using the opening the ring gave him, he seduced the queen, and with her help murdered the king, his own master; he removed everyone he thought stood in his way, and in all these crimes not one person could see him. And so, by the kindness of a ring, he suddenly rose to be king of Lydia.
Now, if a wise man held that very ring, he would not think himself one bit freer to do wrong than if he didn't have it. Good men are after what is right, not what can be hidden.
At this point certain philosophers — not bad men, just not very sharp — object that Plato has served up a made-up, fanciful tale. As if he were claiming it actually happened, or even could happen! The whole force of the ring, the whole point of the example, is this: if no one would ever know, no one would even suspect, when you did something for money, power, mastery, or lust — if the act would stay hidden from gods and men forever — would you do it? They answer that it can't happen. Of course it can't. But my question is: if the thing they call impossible were possible, what would they do? They dig in like clods. It can't happen, they insist, and they stick to that — they can't see what the word "if" is doing. When we ask what they would do if they could hide it, we are not asking whether they can hide it. We are putting them on a kind of rack: if they answer that with impunity guaranteed they would do whatever paid best, they confess they are criminals; if they say they would not, they concede that everything shameful must be avoided for its own sake.
But let's get back to the subject.
Cases come up all the time that throw the mind into confusion with an appearance of advantage. The question in these cases is not whether to abandon what is right for the sake of some huge advantage — that is simply wicked — but whether the apparently useful thing can be done without doing wrong. When Brutus stripped his colleague Collatinus of his command, it could look like an injustice; Collatinus had been Brutus's partner and right hand in the plot that drove out the kings. But the leading men had decided that every relative of Superbus, the very name of the Tarquins, and every reminder of the monarchy had to go. The useful course — looking out for the country — was so clearly right that even Collatinus himself should have approved it. Advantage won the day because of moral goodness; without that, there would have been no advantage at all.
Not so with the king who founded our city. There, the appearance of advantage struck home. It seemed more useful to him to reign alone than to share the throne with another — so he killed his brother. He threw away family duty and human feeling to grab something that seemed useful and wasn't, and then he offered the wall as his excuse — a show of rightness that was neither believable nor remotely adequate. He did wrong, then — with all due respect to Quirinus, or to Romulus, let me say it.
And yet we are not required to neglect our own advantages and hand them over to others when we need them ourselves. Each of us should serve his own interest, as far as he can without wronging anyone else. Chrysippus put it neatly, as he usually does: "A man running a race ought to strain and drive with everything he has to win; but trip the man he's racing, or shove him off with a hand — never. So in life: it isn't unfair for each of us to seek what serves our needs; we have no right to snatch it from someone else."
It is in friendships that duties get most tangled. To refuse a friend what you rightly could do for him is a breach of duty; so is doing for him what is not fair. But for this whole class of cases the rule is short and easy. The things that look like advantages — offices, riches, pleasures, and the rest — must never be ranked above friendship. But a good man will never act against the state, or against his oath and good faith, for a friend's sake — not even if he sits as judge over that very friend. He takes off the role of friend when he puts on the role of judge. He will grant friendship only this much: he will hope his friend's case is the true one, and he will accommodate the timing of the trial as far as the laws allow. But when the moment comes to give a verdict under oath, let him remember that he is calling God as his witness — which means, as I understand it, his own mind, the most divine thing God has given to man. That is why the custom our ancestors handed down — if only we still kept it — is such a fine one: to ask of the juror only "what he can do without breaking faith." That request covers exactly what I said a moment ago a judge may honorably grant a friend. Because if we were bound to do everything our friends wanted, such things would have to be counted conspiracies, not friendships. And I am speaking of ordinary friendships; among perfectly wise men, nothing of the kind can even arise.
They tell of Damon and Phintias, the Pythagoreans, that the bond between them ran this deep: when the tyrant Dionysius had fixed the day of execution for one of them, and the condemned man asked for a few days to put his family's affairs in order, the other stood surety for his return — on the terms that if his friend did not come back, he himself would die. When the friend returned on the appointed day, the tyrant was so struck by their good faith that he begged them to enroll him as the third member of their friendship.
So then: when what looks like advantage in a friendship is weighed against what is right, let the appearance of advantage fall flat and the right prevail. And when a friend asks for what is not right, let conscience and good faith come before friendship. That gives us what we are looking for — a way of choosing between duties.
In public affairs, wrong is done through the appearance of advantage more often than anywhere else — as our own people did in the destruction of Corinth. The Athenians were harsher still: they decreed that the Aeginetans, whose strength was their fleet, should have their thumbs cut off. It seemed useful; Aegina sat too close to Piraeus and loomed too large. But nothing cruel is useful. Cruelty is the greatest enemy of human nature, and human nature is what we ought to follow. Those who bar foreigners from the use of their cities and drive them out do wrong too — Pennus did it in our fathers' time, Papius recently. It is right, of course, that a man who is not a citizen not pass himself off as one; that law was carried by Crassus and Scaevola, the wisest of consuls. But shutting foreigners out of the use of the city altogether is plainly inhuman.
Splendid, by contrast, are the cases where the appearance of public advantage is treated with contempt next to moral goodness. Our republic is full of such examples, and never more than in the Second Punic War: after the catastrophe at Cannae, Rome showed greater spirit than she ever showed in success — not one sign of fear, not one mention of peace. Such is the force of the right: it eclipses the appearance of advantage.
When the Athenians could not withstand the Persian onslaught by any means, and decided to abandon their city, place their wives and children at Troezen, board the ships, and defend the freedom of Greece with their fleet, a man named Cyrsilus urged them to stay in the city and let Xerxes in. They stoned him to death. And yet he seemed to be pursuing advantage — but there was no advantage in it, because the right stood against it.
After the victory in the war with Persia, Themistocles announced in the assembly that he had a plan for the safety of the state, but that it must not be publicly known; he asked the people to appoint someone he could share it with. They appointed Aristides. Themistocles told him that the Spartan fleet, hauled ashore at Gytheum, could be secretly set on fire — and with that done, Spartan power would inevitably be broken. Aristides heard him out, then walked into the assembly, where everyone waited on his word, and said that the plan Themistocles brought was extremely useful — and anything but right. And so the Athenians reasoned that what was not right was not even useful, and on Aristides' word they rejected the whole scheme without so much as hearing it. They were better at this than we are — we let pirates sail free of tribute while our allies pay it.
Let this stand fixed, then: what is shameful is never useful, not even when you gain the thing you thought useful. The mere act of thinking a shameful thing useful — that is the disaster. But as I said above, cases keep arising in which advantage seems to clash with the right, and we have to look carefully: is the clash real, or can the two be reconciled? Questions of this kind: suppose, for example, a good man has shipped a large cargo of grain from Alexandria to Rhodes, at a time when the Rhodians are suffering shortage and famine and grain is fetching extreme prices. Suppose he also knows that several merchants have set sail from Alexandria, and on his voyage he has seen their ships, loaded with grain, making for Rhodes. Does he tell the Rhodians? Or does he keep quiet and sell his own stock for the best price he can get? We are imagining a wise and good man. The question concerns the inner deliberation of someone who would not hide the facts from the Rhodians if he judged that shameful — but who is genuinely unsure whether it is shameful.
In cases like these, Diogenes of Babylon, a great and weighty Stoic, tends to answer one way, and his student Antipater, one of the sharpest minds alive, another. Antipater says everything must be laid open, so that the buyer is ignorant of nothing at all that the seller knows. Diogenes says the seller must declare defects as far as the civil law requires, and beyond that deal without trickery — and, since he is selling, sell for the best price he can.
"I shipped it, I put it on the market, I sell my goods for no more than the others charge — maybe less, now that supply is larger. Who is wronged?"
Up rises Antipater's argument on the other side: "What are you saying? You, who ought to look out for your fellow men and serve human society — you who were born on those terms, and carry those first principles of nature which you are bound to obey and follow, that your advantage should be the common advantage and the common advantage in turn yours — you will hide from people the relief and plenty that is on its way to them?"
Diogenes will perhaps answer: "Hiding is one thing; staying silent is another. I am not hiding anything from you right now just because I don't tell you the nature of the gods or the highest good — things that would profit you far more to know than the fact that wheat is about to get cheap. I am under no obligation to tell you everything it would be useful for you to hear."
"Oh yes you are," the other will say, "if you remember that nature has bound human beings together in one society."
"I remember," he will reply. "But is that society the kind in which nothing belongs to anyone? If so, then nothing should be sold at all — only given away."
You see that in this whole dispute, nobody says, "This is shameful, but it pays, so I'll do it." One side argues that it pays and is not shameful; the other, that precisely because it is shameful, it must not be done.
Suppose a good man is selling a house because of certain defects that he knows and no one else does. It is unhealthy, but has the reputation of being healthy; nobody knows that snakes turn up in every bedroom; it is badly timbered and near collapse — but no one knows that except the owner. My question: if the seller doesn't tell the buyers, and sells the house for far more than he expected to get, has he acted unjustly or dishonestly?
"He certainly has," says Antipater. "At Athens, refusing to show a lost man the road is banned under public curses. What is this, if not that — letting a buyer rush ahead and run, through his own mistake, into a ruinous loss? In fact it is worse than not showing the road. It is knowingly leading another man astray."
Diogenes takes the other side: "Did he force you to buy? He didn't even encourage you. He listed for sale what he no longer wanted; you bought what you did want. If people who advertise 'a fine, well-built villa' aren't judged to have cheated anyone even when the place is neither fine nor sensibly built, then surely those who simply didn't praise their house are cheating even less. Where the buyer is free to use his own judgment, what fraud can there be on the seller's part? And if not even everything that is said has to be made good, do you really think what was never said must be? What could be more foolish than a seller reciting the defects of the thing he's selling? What could be more absurd than an auctioneer crying out, on the owner's orders, 'Unhealthy house for sale'?"
So this is how it goes in certain doubtful cases: on one side, the right is defended; on the other, advantage is argued in such a way that doing the apparently useful thing is not merely right — failing to do it would be shameful. This is that clash which seems to break out so often between the useful and the right. And these cases have to be decided; I didn't set them out to raise questions, but to settle them. My verdict, then: the grain merchant should not have kept the Rhodians in the dark, and this house-seller should not have kept his buyers there. Not everything you keep quiet about counts as hiding. Hiding is when, for your own profit, you want people to remain ignorant of something you know — people with a real stake in knowing it. And who can't see what sort of hiding that is, and what sort of man practices it? Certainly not an open man, not a straightforward one, not honest, not just, not good. No — a shifty man, murky, cunning, deceitful, malicious, crafty, a sly old hand at fraud. Isn't it obviously bad business to take on so many names for vice — and plenty more besides?
If those who merely kept quiet deserve blame, what should we think of those who added outright lies? Gaius Canius, a Roman knight, a witty and reasonably well-read man, had taken himself to Syracuse — for loafing, as he liked to put it, not for lawyering. He kept telling everyone he wanted to buy a little estate with gardens where he could invite his friends and enjoy himself without interruptions. Word got around, and a certain Pythius, who ran a banking house at Syracuse, told him he had just such gardens. They weren't for sale, but Canius could treat them as his own, if he liked — and in the same breath he invited the man to dinner in the gardens the next day. Canius accepted. Then Pythius, who as a banker had pull with people of every class, called the local fishermen to him, asked them to do their fishing in front of his gardens the next day, and told them exactly what he wanted them to do. Canius came to dinner on time. Pythius had laid on a magnificent spread. Before their eyes bobbed a whole crowd of little boats; one fisherman after another came up with his catch, and the fish were tossed down at Pythius's feet.
"Tell me, Pythius," said Canius, "what is this? So many fish? So many boats?"
"No surprise," said Pythius. "This is where all the fish in Syracuse are. This is where the fresh water comes in. These men can't do without this place."
Canius caught fire with desire and pressed Pythius to sell. Pythius dragged his feet — at first. To make a long story short, he got his way. The man was rich, and he wanted the place badly: he bought at the price Pythius named, and bought it furnished. Pythius entered the debt in his books and closed the deal. The next day Canius invited his friends over and arrived early himself. Not a single oar-pin in sight. He asked his nearest neighbor whether it was some fishermen's holiday — he couldn't see a soul out there.
"Not that I know of," said the neighbor. "But nobody fishes here. Yesterday I couldn't work out what on earth was happening."
Canius was livid. But what could he do? My colleague and friend Gaius Aquilius had not yet published his legal formulas on malicious fraud. When people asked him what "malicious fraud" in those formulas meant, he would answer: when one thing is pretended and another done. A brilliant definition, as you would expect from a master of the craft. So Pythius — and everyone else who does one thing while pretending another — is faithless, dishonest, and malicious. And nothing such men do can be useful, stained as it is with so many vices.
Now, if Aquilius's definition is correct, then pretense and cover-up must be banished from the whole of life. A good man will not pretend or conceal anything, whether to buy on better terms or to sell on them. Besides, this "malicious fraud" was already punished by the laws: in guardianship, by the Twelve Tables; in the swindling of the young, by the Plaetorian law; and, even without a statute, in every trial where the words "in good faith" are added to the formula. In other proceedings, these phrases stand out above the rest: in the arbitration over a wife's property, "the better and the fairer"; in cases of trust, "honest dealing, as between honest men." Well then — can any scrap of fraud hide inside "the better and the fairer"? Can anything be done deceitfully or maliciously under "honest dealing, as between honest men"? Malicious fraud, as Aquilius says, lives in pretense. So every lie must be cleared out of our contracts. The seller will not plant a fake bidder to run the price up; the buyer will not plant a man to bid low against him and hold it down; and if either comes to naming a price, he will name it once, and once only. Indeed, when Quintus Scaevola, son of Publius, asked that the price of a farm he was buying be named once and for all, and the seller named it, Scaevola said he valued it higher — and added a hundred thousand sesterces. No one denies that was the act of a good man; people deny it was the act of a wise one — as they would if he had sold for less than he could have gotten. There it is, the poisonous idea: the world counts some men good and other men wise. That is what lets Ennius say, "The wise man's wisdom is wasted if it cannot profit himself." True enough — if Ennius and I could only agree on what "profit" means.
Hecaton of Rhodes, a student of Panaetius, says in the books on duty he wrote for Quintus Tubero that "it is a wise man's part to look after his family fortune while doing nothing against custom, law, or institutions. For we want wealth not for ourselves alone, but for our children, relatives, and friends, and above all for the state; the means and resources of individuals are the riches of the city." A man like Hecaton can hardly approve of Scaevola's act, which I described a moment ago; for he openly declares that the only profit-seeking he will refrain from is the kind the law forbids. No great praise for such a man, and no gratitude either.
Either way the conclusion holds. If pretense and cover-up are both malicious fraud, then very few dealings are free of malicious fraud; and if the good man is the one who helps whom he can and harms no one, then that good man is certainly not easy to find.
So: doing wrong is never useful, because it is always shameful; and because being a good man is always right, it is always useful.
As for the law of real estate, our civil law made this binding: in a sale, the defects known to the seller must be declared. Under the Twelve Tables it was enough to make good whatever had been formally stated aloud — and whoever denied his own statement paid double damages. But the jurists went further and established a penalty for silence as well: they ruled that any defect in a property, if the seller knew of it, must be made good unless it had been expressly declared. Here is a case. The augurs were preparing to take the auspices from the citadel, and they ordered Tiberius Claudius Centumalus, who owned a house on the Caelian Hill, to demolish the parts whose height blocked their view of the sky. Claudius promptly put the building up for sale, and Publius Calpurnius Lanarius bought it. The augurs then served the same notice on him. So Calpurnius did the demolishing — and when he learned that Claudius had listed the house only after the augurs had ordered him to tear it down, he hauled him before an arbiter on the formula "whatever he ought to give or do for him in good faith." The verdict was delivered by Marcus Cato — the father of our own Cato (other men take their distinguishing name from their fathers; this man, who fathered that shining light, deserves to be named from his son). Sitting as judge, he ruled: "since the seller knew the fact at the time of sale and did not declare it, he must make good the buyer's loss."
So he laid down the principle that good faith requires the buyer to be told of any defect the seller knows. If his ruling was right, then our grain merchant was wrong to keep silent, and so was the seller of the unhealthy house. Not every silence of this kind can be caught by the civil law; but the ones that can be caught are dealt with firmly. Marcus Marius Gratidianus, a relative of ours, had sold to Gaius Sergius Orata a house he himself had bought from that same Orata a few years earlier. The house carried a servitude — a standing legal claim on the property — but Marius had said nothing about it in the formal transfer. The case went to court. Crassus appeared for Orata; Antonius defended Gratidianus. Crassus pressed the letter of the law: "a defect the seller knew and did not declare must be made good." Antonius pressed fairness: "since the defect was hardly unknown to Sergius — he had sold the house himself — there was no need to say anything, and no one was deceived who knew exactly what legal condition came with the thing he bought."
Why am I telling you all this? So that you will understand: our ancestors had no patience with sharp operators.
But the laws get rid of sharp practice in one way and philosophers in another: the laws, as far as they can lay hands on it; philosophers, as far as reason and understanding can reach it. And what reason demands is this: nothing done by ambush, nothing by pretense, nothing by fraud. Well then — is it an ambush to set out nets, even if you have no plan to flush the game and drive it in? Wild animals fall into nets often enough with no one chasing them. Would you do the same with a house — post it for sale, put up the notice-board like a net, and let some unsuspecting buyer run into it because you are selling the place for its defects?
Custom has slipped so far that this kind of thing is not considered shameful by common opinion, I know, and no statute or civil law forbids it. But the law of nature forbids it. For there is a fellowship — I have said it often, but it needs saying oftener still — that stretches at its widest over everyone, all of us bound to all; a closer one among people of the same nation; a nearer one still among citizens of the same state. That is why our ancestors held the law of nations to be one thing and the civil law another. What belongs to the civil law does not automatically belong to the law of nations; but what belongs to the law of nations ought also to be civil law. The trouble is that we possess no solid, sharply drawn likeness of true law and genuine justice. We make do with a shadow and a few sketches — and I wish we were faithful even to those, for they are drawn from nature's and truth's best models. Think how much weight there is in that old formula: "That I not be trapped and defrauded because of you and my good faith in you!" And how much gold in this one: "As between good men, there must be good faith in dealing, and no fraud!" But who counts as a "good man," and what "good faith in dealing" really means — that is a very large question.
Quintus Scaevola, the chief priest, used to say that the greatest force lay in all those arbitrations to which the words "as good faith requires" were attached. He held that the phrase "good faith" reached extremely wide: it lived in guardianships and partnerships, in trusts and commissions, in buying and selling, in hiring and letting — all the dealings that hold the fellowship of life together. In these cases, he said, it takes a judge of real stature to settle what each party owes the other, especially since most of them allow counter-claims.
So away with sharp practice, and away with the malice that wants so badly to pass for practical wisdom, and is nothing like it, and stands miles away from it. Practical wisdom lies in choosing between good things and bad. Malice — since everything shameful is bad — puts the bad ahead of the good.
And it is not only in land sales that the civil law, drawing on nature, punishes malice and fraud. In the sale of slaves, too, every kind of fraud by the seller is shut out. Under the aediles' ruling, the seller — who is the one in a position to know — is answerable for the slave's health, for whether he is a runaway, for whether he is a thief. Heirs who have just come into ownership are a different case.
Since nature is the wellspring of law, the lesson is this: it is according to nature that no one should make his profit out of another's ignorance. And you will find no greater plague in life than malice wearing the mask of understanding. That is the source of those countless cases where the useful seems to fight against the right. For how many people will you find who could hold back from wrongdoing if they were promised total secrecy and total impunity?
Let us put this to the test, if you like — and in exactly those cases where ordinary opinion probably sees no wrong at all. There is no need, here, to discuss hired killers, poisoners, will-forgers, thieves, and embezzlers of public money; those men are to be worn down not with philosophers' words and arguments but with chains and a prison cell. Let us look instead at what is done by men who are considered good.
Certain men brought a forged will from Greece to Rome — the will of Lucius Minucius Basilus, a rich man. To push it through more easily, they wrote in as co-heirs Marcus Crassus and Quintus Hortensius, the most powerful men of the day. These two suspected the will was a fake; but since they were conscious of no guilt of their own, they did not refuse a little gift born of another man's crime. What then? Is that enough to clear them? I cannot think so — though I loved one of them while he lived, and do not hate the other now that he is dead. Basilus had wanted his sister's son, Marcus Satrius, to carry his name, and had made him his heir. (I mean the Satrius who is now "patron" of Picenum and the Sabine country — and what a shameful brand upon the times that title is!) It was not fair that two leading citizens should take the property while nothing came to Satrius but the name. For if a man does wrong who fails to ward off and repel an injury when he can — as I argued in the first book — what are we to make of the man who does not merely fail to push the injury back but actually helps it along? For my part, even genuine inheritances do not look right to me if they were hunted down by calculated flattery — by attentions that only impersonated duty instead of meaning it.
And yet in cases like these, one course will sometimes look useful and another look right. The look is a lie: the measure of advantage is the very same as the measure of the right. Whoever fails to see through this will be capable of any fraud, any crime. For if he reasons, "Yes, that is the right thing — but this is the profitable one," he will dare, in his blindness, to tear apart two things nature has joined — and that tearing is the source of every fraud, every misdeed, every crime there is.
So then: suppose a good man had this power — that by snapping his fingers he could slip his name into rich men's wills. He would not use it, not even if he were absolutely certain that no one would ever suspect a thing. But give that power to a Marcus Crassus — the power to get himself written in as heir when he was no heir at all — and believe me, he would dance in the forum. The just man, though, the one we mean when we say "a good man," will take nothing from anyone to move it into his own pocket. Anyone astonished by that should admit he does not know what a good man is. But let anyone unfold the idea of a good man that lies folded up in his own mind, and he will teach himself the answer at once: a good man is one who helps whom he can and harms no one — unless he has been provoked by a wrong. Well then: is a man doing no harm who works a kind of poison to push the true heirs aside and slide into their place? "So he shouldn't do what is useful, what pays?" someone will say. No — he should understand that nothing pays and nothing is useful if it is unjust. Whoever has not learned that lesson cannot be a good man.
When I was a boy I used to hear from my father about Gaius Fimbria, the ex-consul, who was judge in a case involving Marcus Lutatius Pinthia, a thoroughly honorable Roman knight. Pinthia had staked a legal wager, forfeit "if he were not a good man." Fimbria told him he would never decide that case: he did not want to strip a well-regarded man of his reputation by ruling against him, and he did not want to be seen ruling that anyone positively was a good man — a thing built out of countless duties and countless merits.
To this good man, then — a man even a Fimbria could recognize, not only a Socrates — nothing can possibly look useful that is not right. Such a man will not dare to do, or even to think, anything he would not dare to announce out loud. Isn't it a disgrace that philosophers dither over questions that even farmhands never dither over? For it was farmhands who coined the proverb that is now worn smooth with age: when they praise someone's good faith and decency, they call him "a man you could match fingers with in the dark." What does that mean, if not this — that nothing unfitting pays, even when you could get away with it and no one could ever prove a thing?
Do you see that under this proverb there is no pardon for the famous Gyges, and none for the man I invented a moment ago, who could sweep up everyone's inheritances with a snap of his fingers? What is shameful cannot be made right no matter how well it is hidden; and in just the same way, what is not right cannot be made useful, because nature refuses and fights back.
"But surely," comes the objection, "when the prize is enormous, there is a reason to do wrong."
Gaius Marius was a long way from any hope of the consulship. Six years and more after his praetorship he was still lying flat, and it looked as though he would never even stand for the office. He was serving as a deputy to Quintus Metellus, a great man and a great citizen, and when Metellus — his own commander — sent him to Rome, Marius stood before the Roman people and accused him of dragging out the war. Make me consul, he said, and in short order I will deliver Jugurtha, alive or dead, into the power of the Roman people. So he was made consul, yes — but he walked away from good faith and justice, since by a false charge he dragged into public hatred an excellent and highly respected citizen, whose deputy he was, and on whose orders he had come.
Even our own kinsman Gratidianus once fell short of a good man's duty. In his praetorship, the tribunes of the people called in the college of praetors to fix a standard for the currency by joint resolution — for in those days the coinage was pitching about so wildly that no one could tell what he was worth. Together they drafted an edict, penalty and procedure included, and agreed that they would all mount the rostra — the speakers' platform — together that afternoon. The others scattered, each his own way; but Gratidianus went straight from the benches to the rostra and published alone what had been composed by all of them together. And that move, if you want to know, brought him enormous honor: statues in every street, incense and candles burning before them. In short, no one was ever dearer to the crowd.
These are the cases that sometimes tangle our deliberations — when the point where fairness is violated looks small, and what the violation buys looks huge. To Gratidianus it did not seem so very shameful to snatch the people's favor away from his colleagues and the tribunes; but to become consul by it — which was exactly what he had in view — seemed extremely useful. But there is one rule for every case, and I want you to know it cold: either the thing that looks useful must not be shameful — or, if it is shameful, it must not look useful. What follows, then? Can we call the great Marius a good man, or this one? Unfold your understanding, shake it out, and see what shape and idea of "a good man" it holds. Does it fit a good man to lie for his own profit, to smear, to snatch ahead of others, to deceive? Nothing could fit less.
Is there anything worth so much, then — any advantage so desirable — that you would give up the shine and the name of a good man for it? What can this so-called advantage bring you that is worth what it takes away, if it robs you of the name of a good man and strips off your good faith and your justice? What difference does it make whether a man turns into a beast, or keeps a man's shape and carries a beast's savagery inside it?
Then what about those who trample everything right and honorable so long as they end up with power? Aren't they doing exactly what the man did who wanted for a father-in-law the very man whose audacity would make him powerful? It seemed useful to him to be supreme while the hatred fell on the other man; and he could not see how unjust to his country that was, and how shameful. As for the father-in-law himself, he was forever quoting the Greek lines from the Phoenician Women — I will give them as best I can, clumsily perhaps, but clearly enough for the point:
If law must ever be broken, break it for a throne;
in everything else, keep your duty to the gods.
Eteocles deserved the executioner for that — or rather Euripides did — for carving out one exception, and making it the wickedest crime of them all! So why are we collecting the petty stuff — inheritances, sharp trades, fraudulent sales? Here, look at this: a man who longed to be king of the Roman people and master of every nation — and who did it. Anyone who calls that ambition right is out of his mind, for he is approving the death of law and liberty and counting their hideous, detestable suppression as glory. And anyone who admits it is not right to reign as king in a state that was free and ought to be free, yet insists it is useful for the man who can pull it off — with what scolding, or rather what shout, could I try to drag him back from a mistake that size? By the immortal gods, can the foulest, ugliest murder of all — the murder of one's own country — be useful to anybody, even if the man who has bound himself to that crime is called "father" by the very citizens he has crushed? No: advantage must be steered by the right, and steered so completely that the two words sound different to the ear but ring as one single thing in fact.
By the crowd's standards, I do not know what greater advantage there could be than to reign. But when I start calling the reckoning back to truth, I find nothing more disadvantageous for the man who got there unjustly. Can anguish be useful to anyone? Can worry, fear by day and by night, a life crammed to the brim with plots and dangers?
"Many are hostile to a throne, many faithless, few devoted," says Accius. But what throne did he mean? A legitimate one, handed down from Tantalus and Pelops. How many more enemies, do you think, had that king who used the Roman people's own army to crush the Roman people themselves — who forced a state that was not merely free but the commander of nations to be his slave? What stains do you think that man carried on his conscience, what wounds? And can a man's life be useful to himself when the terms of it are these: whoever takes that life will earn the greatest gratitude and the greatest glory? If even these things are not useful — the things that look most useful of all — because they are full of disgrace and shame, then we should be thoroughly persuaded by now that nothing is useful that is not right.
That very judgment, in fact, has been handed down many times, and never more memorably than in the war with Pyrrhus, by the consul Gaius Fabricius — in his second consulship — and by our senate. King Pyrrhus had made war on the Roman people unprovoked; the contest was for supremacy, against a generous and powerful king. A deserter slipped out of his camp and into the camp of Fabricius, and promised that, for a price, he would slip back into Pyrrhus's camp as secretly as he had left it — and poison the king. Fabricius had the man escorted back to Pyrrhus, and the senate praised him for it. And yet, if we go by the mere look of advantage and the common notion of it, one deserter would have ended that grinding war and removed a formidable rival to our supremacy. But it would have been a deep disgrace and scandal to have beaten, by crime instead of by courage, the man with whom the contest was a contest for glory.
Which was more useful, then — for Fabricius, who was to this city what Aristides was to Athens, and for our senate, which never split advantage from honor — to fight the enemy with steel or with poison? If supremacy is to be sought for glory's sake, then keep crime out of it, for there can be no glory in crime. If it is raw power that is wanted, at any cost, that power cannot be useful with infamy hanging on it.
So that famous motion of Lucius Philippus, son of Quintus, was not useful. Certain states, by decree of the senate, had bought their exemption from tribute with a lump sum paid to Lucius Sulla. Philippus moved that they be made tributary again — and that we keep the money they had paid for their freedom. The senate agreed. A disgrace to our empire! Pirates keep better faith than the senate did. "But the revenues went up — so it was useful." How long will people have the nerve to call a thing useful that is not right? Can hatred and infamy be useful to any empire — an empire that ought to stand on glory and the goodwill of its allies?
I often disagreed even with my dear Cato on this. He seemed to me too unbending in guarding the treasury and the revenues: he refused the tax contractors everything, and the allies much, when we ought to have been generous to the allies and dealt with the contractors the way we habitually deal with our own tenants — all the more because harmony between the orders mattered to the safety of the republic. Curio was wrong too, when he kept saying the cause of the peoples beyond the Po was just, but always added: "Let advantage win!" Better to have argued that their cause was not just, because it was not useful to the republic, than to admit it was just while calling it useless.
The sixth book of Hecato's On Duties is full of questions like this one: "In a famine, when grain is at its dearest, is it a good man's part to stop feeding his slaves?"
He argues it both ways, but in the end he steers duty by advantage, as he reckons advantage, rather than by humanity.
He asks: if cargo must be thrown overboard at sea, should a man jettison an expensive horse or a cheap slave? Here his property pulls him one way, humanity the other.
"If a fool has grabbed a plank from a shipwreck, will a wise man wrench it away from him if he can?"
No, says Hecato — that would be an injustice.
"What about the ship's owner? Won't he seize the plank, since it is his?"
"Not at all — no more than he would be willing to throw a passenger overboard on the open sea because the ship is his. Until she reaches the port she was hired for, the ship belongs not to her owner but to her passengers."
"What if there is one plank and two shipwrecked men — both of them wise? Should each grab it for himself, or should one give way to the other?"
"One should give way — to the one whose life is worth more, for his own sake or for the republic's."
"And if they are equal on both counts?"
"Then there will be no struggle. One will yield to the other as if the point were settled by lot or by a round of matching fingers."
"What if a father robs temples, or digs a tunnel into the treasury — should his son report it to the magistrates?"
"That would be an unholy act. In fact he should defend his father if he is charged."
"Doesn't our country, then, come before every other duty?"
"Certainly — but it serves the country itself to have citizens devoted to their parents."
"And what if the father tries to seize a tyranny, or to betray his country — will the son keep silent?"
"Hardly. He will beg his father not to do it. If that gets him nowhere, he will accuse him, and threaten him too; and at the end, if the matter points toward the country's destruction, he will put the country's survival above his father's."
Hecato also asks: if a wise man unknowingly accepts counterfeit coins as good ones, will he — once he finds out — pass them off as good to settle a debt? Diogenes says yes; Antipater says no, and I side with him.
If a man knowingly sells wine that is going off, must he say so? Diogenes thinks it is not required; Antipater thinks a good man would. These are like the disputed points of law among the Stoics. "In selling a slave, must his faults be declared — not just the ones the civil law makes you declare on pain of taking the slave back, but the rest of it: that he is a liar, a gambler, a thief, a drunk?" One says they must be declared; the other says not.
"If a man selling gold thinks he is selling brass, should a good man tell him it is gold — or buy for one denarius what is worth a thousand?"
By now it is clear enough what I think, and what the dispute between the philosophers I have named comes down to.
Must pacts and promises always be kept — the ones, as the praetors' formula runs, "made neither by force nor by criminal fraud"?
Suppose a man gives someone a remedy for dropsy, on the condition that, if it cures him, he will never use it again. It cures him; some years later the same disease returns; and the man he made the bargain with will not grant him leave to use it a second time. What should he do? Since the one refusing is being inhuman, and since no injury is done to him by the remedy's use, the sick man should look to his own life and health.
Now suppose a wise man is asked, by someone about to make him his heir with a hundred million sesterces in the will, to dance in broad daylight in the open forum before he enters on the inheritance. He promises to do it, because otherwise the man would not have written him in. Should he keep the promise or not? I wish he had never made it; that, I think, would have been the dignified course. But since he did promise: if he holds that dancing in the forum is shameful, he will act more honorably by breaking the promise and taking nothing from the inheritance than by taking it — unless, perhaps, he puts the money toward some grave crisis of the republic. In that case, since he would be serving his country, it would not even be shameful to dance.
Nor do those promises bind that are not useful to the very people you made them to. To go back to the old stories: the Sun told his son Phaethon he would do whatever the boy wished. He wished to be taken up into his father's chariot. He was taken up — and before he ever touched down, he was burned to ashes by a bolt of lightning. How much better it would have been if that father's promise had gone unkept! And what of the promise Theseus called in from Neptune? Neptune had granted him three wishes, and he wished for the death of his son Hippolytus, when the boy had fallen under his father's suspicion over his stepmother. The wish was granted — and Theseus was plunged into the blackest grief. And what of Agamemnon, who had vowed to Diana the most beautiful thing born that year in his kingdom? He sacrificed Iphigenia — for nothing born that year was more beautiful than she. Better to have broken the promise than to commit a crime that hideous.
So promises are sometimes not to be made good, and deposits are not always to be returned. A man in his right mind leaves a sword with you; gone mad, he demands it back. To return it would be a sin; not to return it, a duty. And if a man who deposited money with you makes war on your country — do you hand back the deposit? I think not: you would be acting against the republic, which ought to be dearest of all. So it is with many things: right by nature, they become, as circumstances change, not right. Keeping a promise, standing by an agreement, returning a deposit — let the advantage shift, and they stop being right.
And about these things — the seeming advantages that cut against justice under a mask of practical wisdom — I think enough has now been said.
But since in the first book we drew our duties from the four wellsprings of moral goodness, let us stay with the same four as we show how the things that seem useful, and are not, are the enemies of virtue. Practical wisdom, which malice tries to counterfeit, has been dealt with, and so has justice, which is always useful. Two parts of moral goodness remain: one is seen in the greatness and preeminence of a surpassing spirit, the other in the shaping and governing of restraint and self-control.
Ulysses thought he had spotted an advantage — at least as the tragic poets tell it. (In Homer, the best authority we have, there is no hint of any such suspicion about him; but the tragedies charge him with trying to dodge the war by faking madness.) The plan was not right — but it was useful, someone may say: to stay king and live at ease in Ithaca with his parents, his wife, his son. Do you really think any glory won in daily toil and danger can compare with a calm like that?
I think that calm deserves to be despised and thrown away — because what is not right, I hold, is not even useful. What do you think Ulysses would have had to listen to if he had kept up that pretense? He performed the greatest feats of the whole war, and even so he has to hear this from Ajax:
He was the one who first proposed the oath —
you all know it — and he alone broke faith.
He set about feigning madness, so he would not have to sail;
and had Palamedes' sharp practical wisdom
not seen through his malicious daring,
he would have cheated the sacred bond of his word forever.
No: better for him to fight not only the enemy but the very waves — which is what he did — than to desert a Greece united to carry the war against the barbarians.
But enough of legends and foreign examples; let us come to a real deed, and one of our own. Marcus Atilius Regulus, in his second consulship, was captured in Africa in an ambush — Xanthippus the Spartan led the operation, and the commander-in-chief was Hamilcar, Hannibal's father. Regulus was sent to the senate under oath: unless certain noble prisoners were returned to the Carthaginians, he would come back to Carthage himself. When he reached Rome, he saw the appearance of advantage plainly enough — but he judged it false, as the outcome proves. The advantage looked like this: stay in your own country, be at home with your wife and children, write off the defeat you suffered as the common luck of war, and keep your standing and rank as an ex-consul. Who denies those are advantages? Who do you suppose? Greatness of spirit denies it, and courage.
Are you looking for weightier authorities than those? It is the special mark of these virtues to fear nothing, to look down on everything merely human, to count nothing that can happen to a man unbearable. So what did he do? He came into the senate and delivered his instructions. He refused to give his own vote: so long as he was bound by his oath to the enemy, he said, he was not a senator. And then this — "What a fool," someone will say, "arguing against his own interest!" — he declared that returning the prisoners was not useful. They were young men and good officers; he was already worn down by old age. His authority carried the day: the prisoners were kept, and he himself went back to Carthage. Love of his country did not hold him back, nor love of his own family. And he was not ignorant, even then, that he was setting out to face an utterly cruel enemy and tortures worked out with care; but he thought an oath must be kept. And so, when they were killing him by keeping him from sleep, he was still better off than if he had stayed home — an old man, a prisoner, an ex-consul who had broken his word.
"But it was stupid of him. He didn't just fail to vote for sending the prisoners back — he actually argued against it."
Stupid how? Even if it was what the republic needed? And can something that is useless to the state ever be useful to any one of its citizens?
People tear up the very foundations nature laid when they cut advantage loose from moral goodness. All of us seek the useful; we are pulled toward it, and we cannot possibly do otherwise. Who runs away from what benefits him? Or rather, who does not chase it as eagerly as he can? But because we can find the useful nowhere except in what is praiseworthy, what is fitting, and what is right, we treat those as first and highest — and we count the name of the useful not so much a splendid thing as a necessary one.
"Then what is there in an oath?" someone will ask. "We're not afraid Jupiter will be angry, are we? All philosophers hold this in common — not only those who say god has no business of his own and imposes none on anyone else, but also those who insist god is always doing and driving something — that god never grows angry and never does harm. And what could an angry Jupiter have done to Regulus that was worse than what Regulus did to himself? So religious scruple had no force strong enough to cancel that much advantage."
"Or was he afraid of acting shamefully? Well, first: of evils, choose the least. Did that shame really hold as much evil as that torture did? And second, there is the passage in Accius:
'You broke your word?'
'I gave no word to the faithless, and I give none.'
A wicked king says it — but it is brilliantly said."
They add a further argument: just as we say some things look useful that are not, so, they say, some things look right that are not. "Take this very case. Going back to torture for the sake of keeping an oath looks right — but it turns out not to be right, because what an enemy extracted by force never should have stood."
And they add, last of all: whatever is extremely useful becomes right by being so useful, even if it did not look right before.
Those, roughly, are the charges against Regulus. Let us take them in order.
"There was no reason to fear that Jupiter would harm him in anger — he is not in the habit of anger, or of doing harm."
This argument cuts no more against Regulus's oath than against every oath ever sworn. But with an oath, what you must understand is not what there is to fear but what force it carries. An oath is a religious affirmation: what you have promised firmly, as if with god as your witness, must be kept. The question is no longer about the anger of the gods — there is no such thing — but about justice and good faith. Ennius says it magnificently: "O gracious Good Faith on wings, and oath in Jupiter's name!" Whoever violates his oath violates Good Faith herself — the goddess our ancestors wanted dwelling on the Capitol, "next-door neighbor to Jupiter Best and Greatest," as Cato's speech has it.
"But even an angry Jupiter could not have hurt Regulus more than Regulus hurt himself."
Quite true — if pain were the only evil. But philosophers of the greatest authority insist that pain is not only not the greatest evil — it is no evil at all. And for that doctrine Regulus is no minor witness; he may well be the weightiest witness there is, so kindly do not run him down. What better authority could we want than a leading man of the Roman people, who walked into torture of his own free will rather than fail his duty?
As for "of evils, the least" — meaning, choose shame over disaster — is there any evil greater than shame? If deformity in a body offends us, how hideous should the warping and fouling of a degraded soul appear! That is why the stricter thinkers on these questions dare to say that the shameful is the only evil, and even the laxer ones do not hesitate to call it the greatest.
And as for the line, "I gave no word to the faithless, and I give none" — the poet was right to write it, because he was working out Atreus and had to serve the character. But if people adopt it as a principle — that word given to the faithless is no word at all — let them make sure they are not simply hunting a hiding-place for perjury.
There is also such a thing as the law of war, and good faith sworn in an oath must often be kept even with an enemy. For what you swear with your mind grasping that it ought to be done — that must be kept. What you swear otherwise, and then fail to do, is no perjury. If you never deliver the ransom you agreed to pay pirates for your life, that is no fraud — not even if you swore it and then didn't. A pirate does not count among lawful enemies; he is the common foe of all mankind, and with him there can be no shared good faith and no binding oath. For swearing something false is not what makes perjury. Perjury is swearing "from the judgment of your own heart," as our Roman formula runs, and then not doing it. Euripides put it shrewdly: "My tongue swore; my mind swore nothing."
Regulus, though, had no business wrecking by perjury the terms and treaties of war made with an enemy. That war was being waged with a just and lawful enemy — and toward such an enemy the whole fetial law applies, along with many laws that nations hold in common. If that were not so, the senate would never have delivered up famous men of ours, in chains, to an enemy.
And yet it has. Titus Veturius and Spurius Postumius, in their second consulship, after the battle went badly at Caudium and our legions were sent under the yoke, made peace with the Samnites — and were handed over to them, because they had made it without the order of the people and the senate. At the same time Tiberius Numicius and Quintus Maelius, tribunes of the people just then, were handed over too, because the peace had been made with their backing — all so the peace with the Samnites could be repudiated. And Postumius, the very man being surrendered, was the one who urged and moved the surrender.
Many years later Gaius Mancinus did the same. He had made a treaty with the Numantines without the senate's authority, and he himself argued for the bill — brought by Lucius Furius and Sextus Atilius on the senate's decree — that he be handed over to them; when it passed, he was delivered to the enemy. He acted more honorably than Quintus Pompeius, who, in exactly the same position, pleaded for himself until the bill was rejected. In that case, what looked like advantage counted for more than the right; in the earlier cases, the false appearance of advantage was defeated by the authority of moral goodness.
"But what was done under force should never have stood." — As if force could be applied to a brave man!
"Then why did he make the journey to the senate at all, especially when he intended to argue against returning the prisoners?"
Now you are attacking the greatest thing in the whole deed. He did not stand on his own private judgment; he took up the case precisely so that the judgment would be the senate's. And if he had not led the argument himself, the prisoners would certainly have been returned to the Carthaginians — and Regulus would have stayed in his country, untouched. Because he thought that was not useful for his country, he believed it was right for him to declare his view, and to suffer for it.
As for their claim that what is extremely useful becomes right — no. It is right; it does not become right. For nothing is useful that is not at the same time right; and a thing is not right because it is useful — it is useful because it is right.
So out of all our store of astonishing examples, it would be hard to name one more praiseworthy, or more magnificent, than this.
Yet in all this praise of Regulus, one thing alone truly deserves our wonder: that he voted to keep the prisoners. His going back looks miraculous to us now; but in those days he could not have done otherwise. That glory belongs not to the man but to the times. For our ancestors wanted no bond drawn tighter for securing good faith than an oath. The laws of the Twelve Tables show it; the "sacred" laws show it; the treaties show it, in which good faith is pledged even to an enemy; and so do the inquests and penalties of the censors, who judged no matter more strictly than an oath.
Lucius Manlius, Aulus's son, had been dictator, and Marcus Pomponius, a tribune of the people, set a day to try him for adding a few extra days to his dictatorship. Pomponius also charged that Manlius had banished his own son Titus — later called Torquatus — from human company and ordered him to live in the country. When the young son heard that his father was in trouble on his account, the story goes that he ran to Rome and turned up at Pomponius's door at first light. The visitor was announced; Pomponius, assuming the angry young man was bringing him fresh ammunition against the father, rose from his bed, cleared the room, and ordered him shown in. The moment he was inside, the young man drew his sword and swore he would kill the tribune on the spot unless he swore an oath to drop the case against his father. Terrified into it, Pomponius swore. He laid the matter before the people, explained why he had no choice but to abandon the case, and released Manlius. That is how much an oath counted in those days.
And this Titus was the Titus Manlius who, at the Anio, killed the Gaul who had challenged him to single combat, stripped off his torque — his neck-ring — and won his surname from it; the man in whose third consulship the Latins were routed and scattered at the Veseris. A great man among the greatest — and one who, endlessly indulgent toward his father, was bitterly severe toward his own son.
But if Regulus deserves praise for keeping his oath, then those ten men Hannibal sent to the senate after the battle of Cannae deserve blame — if they failed to return. They had sworn to come back to the camp the Carthaginians had captured unless they won the ransoming of the prisoners. The accounts differ. Polybius, an especially good authority, says that of the ten distinguished nobles sent, nine returned when the senate refused; one of the ten, who shortly after leaving camp had doubled back as though he had forgotten something, stayed in Rome — reading his return to camp as a release from his oath. He read it wrongly: trickery tightens the knot of perjury; it never unties it. His was a stupid cunning, perversely playing at practical wisdom. So the senate decreed that the sly old operator be led back to Hannibal in chains.
But here is the greatest thing in the story. Hannibal held eight thousand men — not soldiers he had captured in battle, not men who had run from mortal danger, but troops the consuls Paulus and Varro had left behind in camp. The senate voted not to ransom them, though it could have been done for a small sum — so that it would be stamped into our soldiers that they must conquer or die. When Hannibal heard that, the same writer says, his spirit broke: the senate and people of Rome, in the depths of disaster, had stood that tall. That is how things that merely seem useful lose, when they are set beside moral goodness.
Gaius Acilius, who wrote his history in Greek, says there were more of them — several who went back to camp by the same trick to slip free of their oath — and that the censors branded them with every mark of disgrace.
Let that close this topic. For one thing is now transparent: acts done with a timid, low, groveling, broken spirit — as Regulus's act would have been if he had voted about the prisoners what suited himself rather than the republic, or if he had chosen to stay home — are not useful, because they are disgraceful, foul, and shameful.
There remains the fourth part, the one made up of what is fitting, moderation, modesty, restraint, and self-control.
Can anything be useful, then, that runs against a chorus of virtues like that? And yet the Cyrenaics, followers of Aristippus, and the philosophers called Annicerians located all good in pleasure, and held that virtue deserved praise only because it produced pleasure. Those schools have gone out of fashion, and now Epicurus flourishes — the promoter and sponsor of very nearly the same doctrine. If our plan is to defend moral goodness and hold on to it, these are the men we must fight to a finish, "with men and horses," as the saying goes.
For if, as Metrodorus writes, not just advantage but the whole of a happy life rests on a sound bodily constitution and the settled expectation that it will stay sound, then this advantage — and in their accounting the highest advantage there is — will be at war with moral goodness. First of all, where will practical wisdom find a place in that system? Scouting out delicious sensations from every corner? What miserable servitude for a virtue, to wait on pleasure! And what would wisdom's job be — to choose among pleasures intelligently? Suppose nothing were more delightful than that; what could you imagine more shameful?
Again: a man who calls pain the greatest evil — what room is there in his philosophy for courage, which is precisely contempt for pain and hardship? Yes, Epicurus speaks bravely enough about pain in many places, as he does. But what matters is not what he says; it is what it is consistent for him to say — a man who has drawn the boundary of good at pleasure and of evil at pain.
The same if I listen to him on restraint and self-control. He says a great deal, in a great many places; but "the water sticks," as we say — the argument stops flowing. How can a man praise self-control while placing the highest good in pleasure? Self-control is the enemy of the appetites, and the appetites are pleasure's hunting pack.
And yet on these three virtues they dodge and weave as best they can, and not stupidly. They bring in practical wisdom as the knowledge that procures pleasures and drives off pains. Courage, too, they work free somehow, by teaching it as a technique for disregarding death and enduring pain. They even usher in self-control — not easily, to be sure, but as best they can: the height of pleasure, they say, is capped by the mere removal of pain. But justice wobbles — no, justice lies flat on the ground, and with it every virtue that lives in community and in the fellowship of the human race. For there can be no goodness, no generosity, no courtesy — any more than there can be friendship — if these things are not sought for their own sake but are charged to the account of pleasure or profit.
Let us pull it together briefly, then.
Just as I have shown that there is no advantage that is contrary to moral goodness, so I say that all pleasure is contrary to moral goodness. Which makes Calliphon and Dinomachus, in my judgment, deserve all the more blame: they imagined they could settle the dispute by coupling pleasure with moral goodness — like yoking a beast to a man. Moral goodness does not accept the match; she scorns it; she shoves it away. Nor can the highest end of goods and evils, which ought to be a single simple thing, be mixed and blended out of utter opposites. But that is a large subject, and I have treated it more fully elsewhere. Back to the matter at hand.
How the question is to be decided, whenever what looks like advantage clashes with the right, I have argued fully enough above. But if pleasure, too, is going to claim a look of advantage, it can have no possible union with moral goodness. To grant pleasure something: it may add a pinch of seasoning to life, perhaps. Advantage it will add none — that is certain.
Here, then, Marcus my son, is a gift from your father — a great one, in my own opinion; but it will be worth exactly what your welcome makes of it. You will have to take these three books in as house-guests among your notes from Cratippus. But just as you would sometimes have listened to me too, if I had come to Athens myself — and I would have come, had my country not called me back, in a voice I could not mistake, from the middle of the journey — so now, since my voice has traveled to you in these volumes, give them whatever time you can. And you can give them as much as you choose. When I learn that you take joy in this kind of knowledge, then I will talk with you — in person, and soon, I hope; and for as long as you are away, from here, across the distance.
Farewell, then, my Cicero, and be sure of this: you are already very dear to me, but you will be far dearer still if you take delight in advice and teaching like this.