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As to man's duty to his neighbor, a subject as to which Pagans before and even after the time of Cicero seem to have had but vague ideas, the treatise De Officiis is full of it, as indeed is the whole course of his life. "Omne officium, quod ad conjunctionem hominum et ad societatem tuendam valet, anteponendum est illi officio, quod cognitione et scientia continetur."
But Cicero certainly has a right to be his own interpreter since in the De Officiis as I think, he explains in full and in accordance with the highest moral principle, what he means here, and we have a double right to insist on this interpretation first, because the De Officiis was written so very little while after the De Amicitia, and both at so ripe an age, that a change of opinion on important matters was improbable and secondly, because in the later treatise he expressly refers to the former as giving in full his views on friendship, and thus virtually sanctions that treatise.
His essays on "Old Age" and "on Friendship," his De Officiis or "Whole Duty of Man," as we may paraphrase it, are good and pleasant reading such as we can all enjoy. The Octavian family came originally from Velitræ, in the country of the Volsci; and the branch to which Augustus belonged was rich and honorable.
And all that he did on his own part was, to supply an introduction prefixed to the new book from the ample collection of prefaces for future works which he had beside him; to impart a certain popular character, inasmuch as he interwove Roman examples and references, and sometimes digressed to subjects irrelevant but more familiar to the writer and the reader, such as the treatment of the deportment of the orator in the -De Officiis-; and to exhibit that sort of bungling, which a man of letters, who has not attained to philosophic thinking or even to philosophic knowledge and who works rapidly and boldly, shows in the reproduction of dialectic trains of thought.
When he was not studying, or joking, or rhyming, during those two short years of college life, he read: Cudworth's "Intellectual System," Hobbes's "Dialogues," Bacon's "Essays," Plutarch's "Morals," Cicero's "De Officiis," Montaigne's "Essays," Rousseau's "Émile," Demosthenes's "Orations," Aristotle's "Politics," Ralt's "Dictionary of Trade," and the "Lex Mercatoria."
Handbooks of ethics may edify the intellect, and "Cicero de Officiis" be the favourite reading of rogues. I knew a university student who at his examination cribbed Kant's panegyric of the moral law from a concealed text-book. The legend of Death's marriage recalls to me that of John L. Sullivan's. It is said that the famous bruiser was in like grievous plight.
Nihil per libertos servosque publicae rei: non studiis privatis nec ex commendatione aut precibus centurionum milites ascire, sed optimum quemque fidissimum putare: omnia scire, non omnia exsequi: parvis peccatis veniam, magnis severitatem commodare: nec poena semper, sed saepius poenitentia contentus esse: officiis et administrationibus potius non peccaturos praeponere, quam damnare, cum peccassent.
I had begun to feel the need of some hard and engrossing work to take off my thoughts alike from my great sorrow and my pressing anxieties about my English home, so that I wished to return to my Latin studies again, and the Abbe helped me to read Cicero de Officiis again, and likewise some of the writings of St. Gregory the Great.
Cicero, in the most perfect of his works the treatise De Officiis, an essay in which he instructs his son as to the way in which a man should endeavor to live so as to be a gentleman inveighs both against trade and usury.
Indeed, since Proust's death last year the two have frequently been compared, and on more than the mere alliterative ground that is in their names. Of Petronius we are told "illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu.