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Updated: May 15, 2025
Look back through the treatises written during the last two years, and each shall appear to have been prepared in some quiet and undisturbed period of his life; but we know that the last polish given by his own hands to these three books De Officiis was added amid the heat and turmoils of the Philippics.
"The occupations of all artisans," says Cicero, "are base, and the shop can have nothing of the respectable." De Officiis, 1, i., 42. The position of the surgeon relatively to the physician, in England, is a remnant of the same prejudice, which still survives in full vigor in Italy, with regard to both trade and industry.
He was a great favorite with Christian writers later. Cicero's work, De Officiis On Duties it is best known under the Latin title, is very clear and very clever. It is, in its last half, full of "cases of conscience." I venture to suggest to the teacher of undergraduates who find ethics a dry subject, that he give them a handful of Cicero's "cases" to quarrel over.
De Natura Deorum, an examination of the principal theories regarding the nature and power of the gods; Cato Maior, on old age; Laelius, on friendship; De Fato, discussing Fate and Free Will; Paradoxa, a book setting forth certain remarkable views of the Stoics; De Officiis, a treatise on practical ethics, the application of moral principles to the questions and difficulties of ordinary life.
The De Officiis of CICERO had been translated again and again, and others of his writings. The Morals of PLUTARCH, as we have already seen, were accessible in English. The book on the History of Philosophy by the Greek DIOGENES LAERTIUS was not yet in English, but a Latin translation was extant.
Now in the De Officiis he says A good man will do nothing against the State, or in violation of his oath of good faith, for the sake of his friend, not even if he were a judge in his friend's case. . . . He will yield so far to friendship as to wish his friend's case to be worthy of succeeding, and to accommodate him as to the time of trial, within legal limits.
During the ensuing year, which is the last of his life, in the midst of the confusion and anxieties consequent on Cæsar's death, and the party warfare of his Philippics, he found time to write the De Naturâ Deorum, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Senectute, De Amicitiâ, De Officiis, and Paradoxa, besides the treatise on Rhetorical Common Places above mentioned.
But the surest indicia of inebriety in Hudson are these two. First, his nose is red. Secondly, he discourses upon a seaman's duty to his employers. Ebrius rings the changes on his 'duty to his employers' till drowsiness attacks his hearers. Cicero de officiis was all very well at a certain period of one's life, but bibulus nauta de officiis is rather too much.
Mr Burd points out that this passage is imitated directly from Cicero's "De Officiis": "Nam cum sint duo genera decertandi, unum per disceptationem, alterum per vim; cumque illud proprium sit hominis, hoc beluarum; confugiendum est ad posterius, si uti non licet superiore."
In the De Officiis he divides the entire matter into three parts, and to each part he devotes a book.
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