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On the Intention of Cicero's De Officiis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Douglas Kries
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Abstract

Recent scholarship has yielded a great deal of information on Cicero's De officiis; this essay, however, seeks to move beyond information about the work in favor of an interpretation of Cicero's intention in writing it. To this end, the essay analyzes the genre and intended audience of De officiis, the allegedly Stoic teaching contained in it, and the puzzle presented by its crucial third book. The understanding of Cicero's intention that emerges from these investigations is then briefly compared with Cicero's teaching in De finibus. Theessay ultimately claims that De officiis should be interpreted as advocating a sort of Stoicism for the unphilosophical even while urging the views of the Peripatetics on the more sophisticated.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , Fall 2003 , pp. 375 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2003

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References

1. In his impressive new commentary on Ambrose's book, Davidson argues persuasively that the title of the work was originally not De officiis ministrorum, as it has come to be known in recent centuries, but simply De officiis. See Davidson, Ivor J., Ambrose De officiis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1: 1–2.Google Scholar

2. The works cited in notes 5 and 6 below each contain more extensive treatments of the influence of Cicero's De officiis.

3. Winterbottom, M., De offlciis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar All Latin quotations from De officiis will be taken from this edition.

4. Griffin, M. T. and Atkins, E. M., Cicero On Duties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

5. Walsh, P. G., On Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. All English quotations from De officiis used in this essay will be taken from Walsh's translation.

6. Dyck, Andrew R., A Commentary on Cicero, De Offlciis (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).Google Scholar

7 Dyck, , Commentary on Cicero, pp. 39 and 37.Google Scholar

8. Griffin, and Atkins, , Cicero on Duties, p. xix.Google Scholar

9. Dyck, , Commentary on Cicero, p. 39.Google Scholar

10. Griffin, and Atkins, , Cicero on Duties, p. xxviii.Google Scholar

11. Walsh, , On Obligations, p. xvi.Google Scholar

12. Although Dyck, Commentary on Cicero, emphasizes De officiis as an act of parenting by Cicero, he does note (p. 16) that the work was also addressed to a larger audience.

13. Letters to Atticus, trans. Bailey, D. R. Shackleton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15.13a.2, #417.Google Scholar Cicero also connects the theme of duty to the theme of father and son early on in De officiis: “I intend to begin with the subject most suited to both your years and my paternal authority” (1.4).

14. De divinatione 2.1.Google Scholar

15. Pro Murena 29.61–31, 66;Google Scholar cf. De finibus 4.74.Google Scholar

16. Other texts in which Cicero is often thought to assume the position of the Stoics include his De legibus and his Paradoxa Stoicorum. There is not space to comment thoroughly on those works in this article, but they are addressed obliquely in the conclusion of the present essay.

17. Nicgorski, Walter, “Cicero's Paradoxes and His Idea of Utility,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Dyck, , Commentary on Cicero, p. 17;Google ScholarWalsh, , On Obligations, p. xxix.Google Scholar

19. Dyck's commentary emphasizes “source-criticism” as an appropriate approach to De officiis, and so he emphasizes Cicero's reliance on Panaetius. He gives an argument to justify his approach on pp.18–21 (Commentary on Cicero)Google Scholar. I have suggested, to the contrary, that Cicero seems critical of Panaetius, which would mean that source-criticism may notbe a good approach to Cicero's book, especially since it is impossible to compare it with Panaetius's lost work. Whatever one decides about using source-criticism for Books 1 and 2 of De officiis, it seems that source-criticism will not work well for Book 3, since Cicero himself indicates that he is not following Panaetius in this final book: “So now I shall complete the remaining part of this work with no props to lean on, battling it out by myself, as the saying goes” (3.34).

20. Cicero begins Book 3 with praise of Scipio Africanus and even says that he is Cicero's superior. But by paragraph 16 even this Scipio is demoted to the status of being common or at least to being inferior to the Stoic sage.

21. See also 1.8. For analysis of this aspect of the teaching of Stoicism, see Kidd, I.G., “Stoic Intermediates and the End of Man,” in Problems in Stoicism, ed. Long, A. A. (London: The Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 150–72.Google Scholar(Originally published under a different title in Classical Quarterly [1955[: 181–94);Google Scholar also “Moral Actions and Rules in Stoic Ethics,” in The Stoics, ed. Rist, John M. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978), pp. 247–49 ff:Google Scholar See also Rist, John M., Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), esp. chaps. 5, 6, and 10.Google Scholar

22. Cicero's generous stance in Book 3 toward those who are confused about the honorable and the useful conflicts with his harsh remarks toward them in Book 2(2.10).

23. This analogy is, of course, not as perfect as it might be. An arm cut off from a body cannot be even an arm any longer, for its very function is to be a part of a greater body. An arm has no end outside of the body to which it belongs. Yet, even if one admits that a human being can only be perfected in and through a political community, it does not follow that a human being is only a part that can have no function or end outside of the city. Given what he says about the Peripatetic insistence that human ends are not reducible to virtue only, one wonders if Cicero does not know the limitations of the analogy he is using.

24. The serious analysis these cases deserve is not possible here, but they generally involve a pattern whereby a case implying the need for a distinction between honor and utility is proposed and Cicero vigorously appeals to his rule and reasserts the lack of such a distinction.

25. There are also rich new resources for students of De finibus, namely a new critical text in the Oxford Classical Texts series as well as a new translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series. See Reynolds, L. D., De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum Libri Quinque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);Google ScholarWoolf, Raphael, trans., and Annas, Julia, ed., Cicero: On Moral Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

26. With the exception of the later Phillipics, De officiis is the last work of Cicero's pen. De finibus was completed during the summer of 45 B.C.; the aborted visit to Athens was to take place during the summer of 44. Cicero entered Rome to confront Antony in September of 44 but soon recognized Antony's growing political power and withdrew. Work on De officiis began in late October and the first two books were completed by November 5, even as Cicero was beginning the series of attacks on Antony that would ultimately culminate in his death in December of 43.

27. See De divinatione 2.1Google Scholar.

28. 5.9–23. Piso is not sure whether Aristotle or Nicomachusis the author of the Nicomachean Ethics (5.12), but of course we do not know for sure whether thework Cicero would have known by that name was the same as the work we know by that name. On the important question of what Aristotle's texts were like during Cicero's time, see therecent treatment by Barnes, Jonathan,“Roman Aristotle,” in Philosophia Togata, ed. Barnes, Jonathan and Griffin, Mariam. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 2: 1–69.Google Scholar Texts in the Nicomachean Ethics as it presently exists that would support Piso's interpretation of Peripatetic ethics include 1.8.1099a31–b8; 1.10.1100b22–1101a20; 10.7.1177a28–35; 10.8.1178a24–68,1178b33–1179a17;cf. also the implications of 4.1–2.

29. Cicero: On Moral Ends, 143, n. 55.Google Scholar It should be noted that Cicero himself employs an argument very much like that of Piso as one part of his refutation of Cato in Book 4 (4.3–15). In Cicero's eyes, it seems that the argument of Piso's Old Academy, while unsound, might still be useful for refuting Stoicism.

30. Of course, Cicero has already rejected the fundamental premise of the Stoic position in Book 4 of De flnibus. His point here in Book 5 is that if the premise is once accepted, the Stoics accurately reason about what it implies. To use the language of introductory logic, Cicero thinks that the position of the Stoics is valid (that is, their conclusion follows from their premises) but unsound (their premises are not all true).

31. Cicero calls attention to this fact by including a short discussion of the education of the absent young Lucullus at the beginning of the conversation (3.9).

32. Colish, Marcia L., The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. vol. I, Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), p. 151.Google Scholar

33. Nicgorski, , “Cicero's Paradoxes and His Idea of Utility,” p. 570.Google Scholar