Ciceros On Duties

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Summary of Cicero’s, On Duties

This excerpt from the book, On the Good Life, is a letter from Cicero to his son. I couldn’t even imagine getting something like this from my father. It is full of great advice on how to live your life in such a way that you are regarded as a highly favorable person with impeccable morals. I agree with most of what Cicero has to say in his excerpt, On Duties. In this review I will summarize Cicero’s’ main arguments and his ideas for a better person and nation.
I believe that Cicero wrote this book for intelligent individuals who wanted to attain power in life through morally positive avenues; it was written almost as an academic piece. It was also written as a gage with which a person who was reading it could weigh himself.
Cicero begins the volume by relating to us why he has chosen Philosophy as his current field of study, his only field of study. He had once been a political leader but since the government “lay under domination of a single individual” (120) he was angry and sorrowful that he had lost some of his good friends to the uprising. That he was no longer able to practice politics deeply saddened Cicero. So to forget his sorrows he took up philosophy. Cicero believed that the best method for learning was philosophy because it literally meant love of wisdom. Even though Cicero thought himself a philosopher he was quick to disagree with those philosophers who he saw as tricky and misleading to the public. Cicero believed that the only way to “attain the objects of their desires” was “by moral goodness, both in thought and in action” (125). This leads us to Cicero’s classification of expediency and how it affects us as humans.
Cicero classified the “things that go towards the maintenance of human life” (125) as either animate or inanimate. The inanimate objects consist of gold and silver and things from the earth. He then further classifies the animate into rationa...