---
type: article
status: Published
slug: "cicero-officiis-3"
title: "On Duties, Book III"
author: "Marcus Tullius Cicero"
tradition: "roman"
language: "la"
genre: "moral philosophy"
period: "44 BCE"
source_url: "https://thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/off3.shtml"
certainty: observed
source: "https://thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/off3.shtml"
---
# On Duties, Book III

## Original

### Book III

1. P. Scipionem, Marce fili, eum, qui primus Africanus appellatus est, dicere solitum scripsit Cato, qui fuit eius fere aequalis, numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum, quam cum solus esset. Magnifica vero vox et magno viro ac sapiente digna; quae declarat illum et in otio de negotiis cogitare et in solitudine secum loqui solitum, ut neque cessaret umquam et interdum conloquio alterius non egeret. Ita duae res, quae languorem adferunt ceteris, illum acuebant, otium et solitudo. Vellem nobis hoc idem vere dicere liceret, sed si minus imitatione tantam ingenii praestantiam consequi possumus, voluntate certe proxime accedimus. Nam et a re publica forensibusque negotiis armis impiis vique prohibiti otium persequimur et ob eam causam urbe relicta rura peragrantes saepe soli sumus.

2. Sed nec hoc otium cum Africani otio nec haec solitudo cum illa comparanda est. Ille enim requiescens a rei publicae pulcherrimis muneribus otium sibi sumebat aliquando et coetu hominum frequentiaque interdum tamquam in portum se in solitudinem recipiebat, nostrum autem otium negotii inopia, non requiescendi studio constitutum est. Extincto enim senatu deletisque iudiciis quid est, quod dignum nobis aut in curia aut in foro agere possimus?

3. Ita qui in maxima celebritate atque in oculis civium quondam vixerimus, nunc fugientes conspectum sceleratorum, quibus omnia redundant, abdimus nos quantum licet et saepe soli sumus. Sed quia sic ab hominibus doctis accepimus, non solum ex malis eligere minima oportere, sed etiam excerpere ex his ipsis, si quid inesset boni, propterea et otio fruor, non illo quidem, quo debeat is, qui quondam peperisset otium civitati, nec eam solitudinem languere patior, quam mihi adfert necessitas, non voluntas.

4. Quamquam Africanus maiorem laudem meo iudicio assequebatur. Nulla enim eius ingenii monumenta mandata litteris, nullum opus otii, nullum solitudinis munus extat; ex quo intellegi debet illum mentis agitatione investigationeque earum rerum, quas cogitando consequebatur, nec otiosum nec solum umquam fuisse; nos autem, qui non tantum roboris habemus, ut cogitatione tacita a solitudine abstrahamur, ad hanc scribendi operam omne studium curamque convertimus. Itaque plura brevi tempore eversa quam multis annis stante re publica scripsimus.

5. Sed cum tota philosophia, mi Cicero, frugifera et fructuosa nec ulla pars eius inculta ac deserta sit, tum nullus feracior in ea locus est nec uberior, quam de officiis, a quibus constanter honesteque vivendi praecepta ducuntur. Quare quamquam a Cratippo nostro, principe huius memoriae philosophorum, haec te assidue audire atque accipere confido, tamen conducere arbitror talibus aures tuas vocibus undique circumsonare, nec eas, si fieri possit, quicquam aliud audire.

6. Quod cum omnibus est faciendum, qui vitam honestam ingredi cogitant, tum haud scio an nemini potius quam tibi. Sustines enim non parvam expectationem imitandae industriae nostrae, magnam honorum, non nullam fortasse nominis. Suscepisti onus praeterea grave et Athenarum et Cratippi; ad quos cum tamquam ad mercaturam bonarum artium sis profectus, inanem redire turpissimum est dedecorantem et urbis auctoritatem et magistri. Quare quantum coniti animo potes, quantum labore contendere, si discendi labor est potius quam voluptas, tantum fac ut efficias neve committas, ut, cum omnia suppeditata sint a nobis, tute tibi defuisse videare. Sed haec hactenus; multa enim saepe ad te cohortandi gratia scripsimus; nunc ad reliquam partem propositae divisionis revertamur.

7. Panaetius igitur, qui sine controversia de officiis accuratissime disputavit quemque nos correctione quadam adhibita potissimum secuti sumus, tribus generibus propositis, in quibus deliberare homines et consultare de officio solerent, uno cum dubitarent, honestumne id esset, de quo ageretur, an turpe, altero utilene esset an inutile, tertio, si id, quod speciem haberet honesti, pugnaret cum eo, quod utile videretur, quomodo ea discerni oporteret, de duobus generibus primis tribus libris explicavit, de tertio autem genere deinceps se scripsit dicturum nec exsolvit id, quod promiserat.

8. Quod eo magis miror, quia scriptum a discipulo eius Posidonio est, triginta annis vixisse Panaetium posteaquam illos libros edidisset. Quem locum miror a Posidonio breviter esse tactum in quibusdam commentariis, praesertim cum scribat nullum esse locum in tota philosophia tam necessarium.

9. Minime vero assentior iis, qui negant eum locum a Panaetio praetermissum, sed consulto relictum, nec omnino scribendum fuisse, quia numquam posset utilitas cum honestate pugnare. De quo alterum potest habere dubitationem, adhibendumne fuerit hoc genus, quod in divisione Panaetii tertium est an plane omittendum, alterum dubitari non potest, quin a Panaetio susceptum sit, sed relictum. Nam qui e divisione tripertita duas partes absolverit, huic necesse est restare tertiam; praeterea in extremo libro tertio de hac parte pollicetur se deinceps esse dicturum.

10. Accedit eodem testis locuples Posidonius, qui etiam scribit in quadam epistola, P. Rutilium Rufum dicere solere, qui Panaetium audierat, ut nemo pictor esset inventus, qui in Coa Venere eam partem, quam Apelles inchoatam reliquisset, absolveret (oris enim pulchritudo reliqui corporis imitandi spem auferebat), sic ea, quae Panaetius praetermisisset [et non perfecisset] propter eorum, quae perfecisset, praestantiam neminem persecutum.

11. Quam ob rem de iudicio Panaetii dubitari non potest; rectene autem hanc tertiam partem ad exquirendum officium adiunxerit an secus, de eo fortasse disputari potest. Nam, sive honestum solum bonum est, ut Stoicis placet, sive, quod honestum est, id ita summum bonum est, quemadmodum Peripateticis vestris videtur, ut omnia ex altera parte collocata vix minimi momenti instar habeant, dubitandum non est quin numquam possit utilitas cum honestate contendere. Itaque accepimus Socratem exsecrari solitum eos, qui primum haec natura cohaerentia opinione distraxissent. Cui quidem ita sunt Stoici assensi, ut et, quicquid honestum esset, id utile esse censerent, nec utile quicquam, quod non honestum.

12. Quodsi is esset Panaetius, qui virtutem propterea colendam diceret, quod ea efficiens utilitatis esset, ut ii, qui res expetendas vel voluptate vel indolentia metiuntur, liceret ei dicere utilitatem aliquando cum honestate pugnare. Sed cum sit is, qui id solum bonum iudicet, quod honestum sit, quae autem huic repugnent specie quadam utilitatis, eorum neque accessione meliorem vitam fieri nec decessione peiorem, non videtur debuisse eiusmodi deliberationem introducere, in qua quod utile videretur cum eo, quod honestum est, compararetur.

13. Etenim quod summum bonum a Stoicis dicitur, convenienter naturae vivere, id habet hanc, ut opinor, sententiam, cum virtute congruere semper, cetera autem, quae secundum naturam essent, ita legere, si ea virtuti non repugnarent. Quod cum ita sit, putant quidam hanc comparationem non recte introductam nec omnino de eo genere quicquam praecipiendum fuisse. Atque illud quidem honestum, quod proprie vereque dicitur id in sapientibus est solis neque a virtute divelli umquam potest. In iis autem, in quibus sapientia perfecta non est, ipsum illud quidem perfectum honestum nullo modo, similitudines honesti esse possunt.

14. Haec enim officia, de quibus his libris disputamus, media Stoici appellant; ea communia sunt et late patent, quae et ingenii bonitate multi assequuntur et progressione discendi. Illud autem officium, quod rectum idem appellant, perfectum atque absolutum est et, ut idem dicunt, omnes numeros habet nec praeter sapientem cadere in quemquam potest.

15. Cum autem aliquid actum est, in quo media officia compareant, id cumulate videtur esse perfectum propterea, quod vulgus, quid absit a perfecto, non fere intellegit; quatenus autem intellegit, nihil putat praetermissum, quod idem in poematis, in picturis usu venit in aliisque compluribus, ut delectentur imperiti laudentque ea, quae laudanda non sint, ob eam, credo, causam, quod insit in his aliquid probi, quod capiat ignaros, qui idem, quid in unaquaque re vitii sit, nequeant iudicare. Itaque cum sunt docti a peritis, desistunt facile sententia. Haec igitur officia, de quibus his libris disserimus, quasi secunda quaedam honesta esse dicunt, non sapientium modo propria, sed cum omni hominum genere communia.

16. Itaque iis omnes, in quibus est virtutis indoles, commoventur. Nec vero, cum duo Decii aut duo Scipiones fortes viri commemorantur, aut cum Fabricius, aut Aristides iustus nominatur, aut ab illis fortitudinis aut ab his iustitiae tamquam a sapiente petitur exemplum; nemo enim horum sic sapiens, ut sapientem volumus intellegi, nec ii, qui sapientes habiti et nominati, M. Cato et C. Laelius, sapientes fuerunt, ne illi quidem septem, sed ex mediorum officiorum frequentia similitudinem quandam gerebant speciemque sapientium.

17. Quocirca nec id, quod vere honestum est, fas est cum utilitatis repugnantia comparari, nec id quod communiter appellamus honestum, quod colitur ab iis, qui bonos se viros haberi volunt, cum emolumentis umquam est comparandum tamque id honestum, quod in nostram intellegentiam cadit, tuendum conservandumque nobis est quam illud, quod proprie dicitur vereque est honestum, sapientibus; aliter enim teneri non potest, si quae ad virtutem est facta progressio. Sed haec quidem de his, qui conservatione officiorum existimantur boni.

18. Qui autem omnia metiuntur emolumentis et commodis neque ea volunt praeponderari honestate, ii solent in deliberando honestum cum eo, quod utile putant, comparare, boni viri non solent. Itaque existimo Panaetium, cum dixerit homines solere in hac comparatione dubitare, hoc ipsum sensisse, quod dixerit solere modo, non etiam oportere. Etenim non modo pluris putare, quod utile videatur quam quod honestum sit, sed etiam haec inter se comparare et in his addubitare turpissimum est. Quid ergo est quod non numquam dubitationem adferre soleat considerandumque videatur? Credo, si quando dubitatio accidit, quale sit id, de quo consideretur.

19. Saepe enim tempore fit, ut quod turpe plerumque haberi soleat, inveniatur non esse turpe. Exempli causa ponatur aliquid, quod pateat latius. Quod potest maius scelus quam non modo hominem, sed etiam familiarem hominem occidere? Num igitur se adstrinxit scelere, si qui tyrannum occidit quamvis familiarem? Populo quidem Romano non videtur, qui ex omnibus praeclaris factis illud pulcherrimum existimat. Vicit ergo utilitas honestatem? Immo vero honestas utilitatem secuta est. Itaque, ut sine ullo errore diiudicare possimus, si quando cum illo, quod honestum intellegimus, pugnare id videbitur, quod appellamus utile, formula quaedam constituenda est; quam si sequemur in comparatione rerum, ab officio numquam recedemus.

20. Erit autem haec formula Stoicorum rationi disciplinaeque maxime consentanea; quam quidem his libris propterea sequimur, quod, quamquam et a veteribus Academicis et a Peripateticis vestris, qui quondam idem erant, qui Academici, quae honesta sunt, anteponuntur iis, quae videntur utilia, tamen splendidius haec ab eis disserentur, quibus, quicquid honestum est idem utile videtur nec utile quicquam, quod non honestum, quam ab iis, quibus et honestum aliquid non utile aut utile non honestum. Nobis autem nostra Academia magnam licentiam dat, ut, quodcumque maxime probabile occurrat, id nostro iure liceat defendere. Sed redeo ad formulam.

21. Detrahere igitur alteri aliquid et hominem hominis incommodo suum commodum augere magis est contra naturam quam mors, quam paupertas, quam dolor, quam cetera, quae possunt aut corpori accidere aut rebus externis. Nam principio tollit convictum humanum et societatem. Si enim sic erimus adfecti, ut propter suum quisque emolumentum spoliet aut violet alterum, disrumpi necesse est eam, quae maxime est secundum naturam, humani generis societatem.

22. Ut, si unum quodque membrum sensum hunc haberet, ut posse putaret se valere, si proximi membri valitudinem ad se traduxisset, debilitari et interire totum corpus necesse esset, sic, si unus quisque nostrum ad se rapiat commoda aliorum detrahatque quod cuique possit, emolumenti sui gratia, societas hominum et communitas evertatur necesse est. Nam sibi ut quisque malit, quod ad usum vitae pertineat, quam alteri adquirere, concessum est non repugnante natura, illud natura non patitur, ut aliorum spoliis nostras facultates, copias, opes augeamus.

23. Neque vero hoc solum natura, id est iure gentium, sed etiam legibus populorum, quibus in singulis civitatibus res publica continetur, eodem modo constitutum est, ut non liceat sui commodi causa nocere alteri. Hoc enim spectant leges, hoc volunt, incolumem esse civium coniunctionem; quam qui dirimunt, eos morte, exsilio, vinclis, damno coercent. Atque hoc multo magis efficit ipsa naturae ratio, quae est lex divina et humana; cui parere qui velit (omnes autem parebunt, qui secundum naturam volent vivere), numquam committet, ut alienum appetat, et id, quod alteri detraxerit, sibi adsumat.

24. Etenim multo magis est secundum naturam excelsitas animi et magnitudo itemque comitas, iustitia, liberalitas quam voluptas, quam vita, quam divitiae; quae quidem contemnere et pro nihilo ducere comparantem cum utilitate communi magni animi et excelsi est. [Detrahere autem de altero sui commodi causa magis est contra naturam quam mors, quam dolor, quam cetera generis eiusdem.]

25. Itemque magis est secundum naturam, pro omnibus gentibus, si fieri possit, conservandis aut iuvandis, maximos labores molestiasque suscipere imitantem Herculem illum, quem hominum fama beneficiorum memor in concilio caelestium conlocavit quam vivere in solitudine non modo sine ullis molestiis sed etiam in maximis voluptatibus, abundantem omnibus copiis, ut excellas etiam pulchritudine et viribus. Quocirca optimo quisque et splendidissimo ingenio longe illam vitam huic anteponit. Ex quo efficitur, hominem naturae oboedientem homini nocere non posse.

26. Deinde qui alterum violat, ut ipse aliquid commodi consequatur, aut nihil existimat se facere contra naturam aut magis fugienda censet mortem, paupertatem, dolorem, amissionem etiam liberorum, propinquorum, amicorum, quam facere cuiquam iniuriam. Si nihil existimat contra naturam fieri hominibus violandis, quid cum eo disseras, qui omnino hominem ex homine tollat? Sin fugiendum id quidem censet, sed multo illa peiora, mortem, paupertatem, dolorem, errat in eo, quod ullum aut corporis aut fortunae vitium vitiis animi gravius existimat. Ergo unum debet esse omnibus propositum, ut eadem sit utilitas uniuscuiusque et universorum; quam si ad se quisque rapiet, dissolvetur omnis humana consortio.

27. Atque etiam si hoc natura praescribit, ut homo homini, quicumque sit, ob eam ipsam causam, quod is homo sit, consultum velit, necesse est secundum eandem naturam omnium utilitatem esse communem. Quod si ita est, una continemur omnes et eadem lege naturae, idque ipsum si ita est, certe violare alterum naturae lege prohibemur. Verum autem primum, verum igitur extremum.

28. Nam illud quidem absurdum est, quod quidam dicunt, parenti se aut fratri nihil detracturos sui commodi causa, aliam rationem esse civium reliquorum. Hi sibi nihil iuris, nullam societatem communis utilitatis causa statuunt esse cum civibus quae sententia omnem societatem distrahit civitatis. Qui autem civium rationem dicunt habendam, externorum negant, ii dirimunt communem humani generis societatem; qua sublata beneficentia, liberalitas, bonitas, iustitia funditus tollitur; quae qui tollunt, etiam adversus deos immortales impii iudicandi sunt. Ab iis enim constitutam inter homines societatem evertunt, cuius societatis artissimum vinculum est magis arbitrari esse contra naturam hominem homini detrahere sui commodi causa quam omnia incommoda subire vel externa vel corporis vel etiam ipsius animi. ~Iustitia enim una virtus omnium est domina et regina virtutum.

29. Forsitan quispiam dixerit: Nonne igitur sapiens, si fame ipse conficiatur, abstulerit cibum alteri homini ad nullam rem utili? Minime vero: non enim mihi est vita mea utilior quam animi talis affectio, neminem ut violem commodi mei gratia. Quid? si Phalarim, crudelem tyrannum et immanem, vir bonus, ne ipse frigore conficiatur, vestitu spoliare possit, nonne faciat?

30. Haec ad iudicandum sunt facillima. Nam si quid ab homine ad nullam partem utili utilitatis tuae causa detraxeris, inhumane feceris contraque naturae legem, sin autem is tu sis, qui multam utilitatem rei publicae atque hominum societati, si in vita remaneas, adferre possis si quid ob eam causam alteri detraxeris, non sit reprehendendum. Sin autem id non sit eiusmodi, suum cuique incommodum ferendum est potius quam de alterius commodis detrahendum. Non igitur magis est contra naturam morbus aut egestas aut quid eiusmodi quam detractio atque appetitio alieni, sed communis utilitatis derelictio contra naturam est; est enim iniusta.

31. Itaque lex ipsa naturae, quae utilitatem hominum conservat et continet, decernet profecto, ut ab homine inerti atque inutili ad sapientem, bonum, fortem virum transferantur res ad vivendum necessariae, qui si occiderit, multum de communi utilitate detraxerit, modo hoc ita faciat, ut ne ipse de se bene existimans seseque diligens hanc causam habeat ad iniuriam. Ita semper officio fungetur utilitati consulens hominum et ei, quam saepe commemoro, humanae societati.

32. Nam quod ad Phalarim attinet, perfacile iudicium est. Nulla est enim societas nobis cum tyrannis et potius summa distractio est, neque est contra naturam spoliare eum, si possis, quem est honestum necare, atque hoc omne genus pestiferum atque impium ex hominum communitate exterminandum est. Etenim, ut membra quaedam amputantur, si et ipsa sanguine et tamquam spiritu carere coeperunt et nocent reliquis partibus corporis, sic ista in figura hominis feritas et immanitas beluae a communi tamquam humanitatis corpore segreganda est. Huius generis quaestiones sunt omnes eae, in quibus ex tempore officium exquiritur.

33. Eiusmodi igitur credo res Panaetium persecuturum fuisse, nisi aliqui casus aut occupatio eius consilium peremisset. Ad quas ipsas consultationes ex superioribus libris satis multa praecepta sunt, quibus perspici possit, quid sit propter turpitudinem fugiendum, quid sit, quod idcirco fugiendum non sit, quod omnino turpe non sit. Sed quoniam operi inchoato, prope tamen absoluto, tamquam fastigium imponimus, ut geometrae solent non omnia docere, sed postulare, ut quaedam sibi concedantur, quo facilius quae volunt, explicent, sic ego a te postulo, mi Cicero, ut mihi concedas si potes, nihil praeter id, quod honestum sit, propter se esse expetendum. Sin hoc non licet per Cratippum, at illud certe dabis, quod honestum sit, id esse maxime propter se expetendum. Mihi utrumvis satis est et tum hoc tum illud probabilius videtur nec praeterea quicquam probabile.

34. Ac primum in hoc Panaetius defendendus est, quod non utilia cum honestis pugnare aliquando posse dixerit (neque enim ei fas erat) sed ea, quae viderentur utilia. Nihil vero utile, quod non idem honestum, nihil honestum, quod non idem utile sit, saepe testatur negatque ullam pestem maiorem in vitam hominum invasisse quam eorum opinionem, qui ista distraxerint. Itaque non ut aliquando anteponeremus utilia honestis, sed ut ea sine errore diiudicaremus, si quando incidissent, induxit eam, quae videretur esse, non quae esset, repugnantiam. Hanc igitur partem relictam explebimus nullis adminiculis, sed, ut dicitur, Marte nostro. Neque enim quicquam est de hac parte post Panaetium explicatum, quod quidem mihi probaretur, de iis, quae in manus meas venerint.

35. Cum igitur aliqua species utilitatis obiecta est, commoveri necesse est. Sed si, cum animum attenderis, turpitudinem videas adiunctam ei rei, quae speciem utilitatis attulerit, tum non utilitas relinquenda est, sed intellegendum, ubi turpitudo sit, ibi utilitatem esse non posse. Quod si nihil est tam contra naturam quam turpitudo (recta enim et convenientia et constantia natura desiderat aspernaturque contraria) nihilque tam secundum naturam quam utilitas, certe in eadem re utilitas et turpitudo esse non potest. Itemque, si ad honestatem nati sumus eaque aut sola expetenda est, ut Zenoni visum est, aut certe omni pondere gravior habenda quam reliqua omnia, quod Aristoteli placet, necesse est, quod honestum sit, id esse aut solum aut summum bonum, quod autem bonum, id certe utile, ita, quicquid honestum, id utile.

36. Quare error hominum non proborum, cum aliquid, quod utile visum est, arripuit, id continuo secernit ab honesto. Hinc sicae, hinc venena, hinc falsa testamenta nascuntur, hinc furta, peculatus, expilationes, direptionesque sociorum et civium, hinc opum nimiarum, potentiae non ferendae, postremo etiam in liberis civitatibus regnandi existunt cupiditates, quibus nihil nec taetrius nec foedius excogitari potest. Emolumenta enim rerum fallacibus iudiciis vident, poenam, non dico legum, quam saepe perrumpunt, sed ipsius turpitudinis, quae acerbissima est, non vident.

37. Quam ob rem hoc quidem deliberantium genus pellatur e medio ( est enim totum sceleratum et impium), qui deliberant, utrum id sequantur, quod honestum esse videant, an se scientes scelere contaminent; in ipsa enim dubitatione facinus inest, etiamsi ad id non pervenerint. Ergo ea deliberanda omnino non sunt, in quibus est turpis ipsa deliberatio.

38. Atque etiam ex omni deliberatione celandi et occultandi spes opinioque removenda est; satis enim nobis, si modo in philosophia aliquid profecimus, persuasum esse debet, si omnes deos hominesque celare possimus, nihil tamen avare, nihil iniuste, nihil libidinose, nihil incontinenter esse faciendum. Hinc ille Gyges inducitur a Platone, qui cum terra discessisset magnis quibusdam imbribus, descendit in illum hiatum aeneumque equum, ut ferunt fabulae, animadvertit, cuius in lateribus fores essent; quibus apertis corpus hominis mortui vidit magnitudine invisitata anulumque aureum in digito; quem ut detraxit, ipse induit (erat autem regius pastor), tum in concilium se pastorum recepit. Ibi cum palam eius anuli ad palmam converterat, a nullo videbatur, ipse autem omnia videbat; idem rursus videbatur, cum in locum anulum inverterat. Itaque hac oportunitate anuli usus reginae stuprum intulit eaque adiutrice regem dominum interemit, sustulit quos obstare arbitrabatur, nec in his eum facinoribus quisquam potuit videre. Sic repente anuli beneficio rex exortus est Lydiae. Hunc igitur ipsum anulum si habeat sapiens, nihil plus sibi licere putet peccare, quam si non haberet; honesta enim bonis viris, non occulta quaeruntur.

39. Atque hoc loco philosophi quidam minime mali illi quidem, sed non satis acuti, fictam et commenticiam fabulam prolatam dicunt a Platone, quasi vero ille aut factum id esse aut fieri potuisse defendat. Haec est vis huius anuli et huius exempli: si nemo sciturus, nemo ne suspicaturus quidem sit, cum aliquid divitiarum, potentiae, dominationis, libidinis causa feceris, si id diis hominibusque futurum sit semper ignotum, sisne facturus? Negant id fieri posse. Quamquam potest id quidem, sed quaero, quod negant posse, id si posset, quidnam facerent. Urgent rustice sane. Negant enim posse et in eo perstant, hoc verbum quid valeat non vident. Cum enim quaerimus, si celare possint, quid facturi sint, non quaerimus, possintne celare, sed tamquam tormenta quaedam adhibemus, ut si responderint se impunitate proposita facturos, quod expediat, facinorosos se esse fateantur, si negent, omnia turpia per se ipsa fugienda esse concedant. Sed iam ad propositum revertamur.

40. Incidunt multae saepe causae, quae conturbent animos utilitatis specie, non, cum hoc deliberetur, relinquendane sit honestas propter utilitatis magnitudinem (nam id quidem improbum est), sed illud, possitne id, quod utile videatur, fieri non turpiter. Cum Collatino collegae Brutus imperium abrogabat, poterat videri facere id iniuste; fuerat enim in regibus expellendis socius Bruti consiliorum et adiutor. Cum autem consilium hoc principes cepissent, cognationem Superbi nomenque Tarquiniorum et memoriam regni esse tollendam, quod erat utile, patriae consulere, id erat ita honestum, ut etiam ipsi Collatino placere deberet. Itaque utilitas valuit propter honestatem, sine qua ne utilitas quidem esse potuisset.

41. At in eo rege, qui urbem condidit, non item. Species enim utilitatis animum pepulit eius; cui cum visum esset utilius solum quam cum altero regnare, fratrem interemit. Omisit hic et pietatem et humanitatem, ut id, quod utile videbatur, neque erat, assequi posset, et tamen muri causa opposuit, speciem honestatis nec probabilem nec sane idoneam. Peccavit igitur, pace vel Quirini vel Romuli dixerim.

42. Nec tamen nostrae nobis utilitates omittendae sunt aliisque tradendae, cum his ipsi egeamus, sed suae cuique utilitati, quod sine alterius iniuria fiat, serviendum est. Scite Chrysippus, ut multa, "qui stadium, inquit, currit, eniti et contendere debet quam maxime possit, ut vincat, supplantare eum, quicum certet, aut manu depellere nullo modo debet; sic in vita sibi quemque petere, quod pertineat ad usum, non iniquum est, alteri deripere ius non est".

43. Maxime autem perturbantur officia in amicitiis, quibus et non tribuere, quod recte possis et tribuere quod non sit aequum, contra officium est. Sed huius generis totius breve et non difficile praeceptum est. Quae enim videntur utilia, honores, divitiae, voluptates, cetera generis eiusdem, haec amicitiae numquam anteponenda sunt. At neque contra rem publicam neque contra ius iurandum ac fidem amici causa vir bonus faciet, ne si iudex quidem erit de ipso amico; ponit enim personam amici, cum induit iudicis. Tantum dabit amicitiae, ut veram amici causam esse malit, ut orandae litis tempus, quoad per leges liceat, accomodet.

44. Cum vero iurato sententia dicendast, meminerit deum se adhibere testem, id est, ut ego arbitror, mentem suam, qua nihil homini dedit deus ipse divinius. Itaque praeclarum a maioribus accepimus morem rogandi iudicis, si eum teneremus, qvae salva fide facere possit. Haec rogatio ad ea pertinet, quae paulo ante dixi honeste amico a iudice posse concedi. Nam si omnia facienda sint, quae amici velint, non amicitiae tales, sed coniurationes putandae sint.

45. Loquor autem de communibus amicitiis; nam in sapientibus viris perfectisque nihil potest esse tale. Damonem et Phintiam Pythagoreos ferunt hoc animo inter se fuisse, ut, cum eorum alteri Dionysius tyrannus diem necis destinavisset et is, qui morti addictus esset, paucos sibi dies commendandorum suorum causa postulavisset, vas factus est alter eius sistendi, ut si ille non revertisset, moriendum esset ipsi. Qui cum ad diem se recepisset, admiratus eorum fidem tyrannus petivit, ut se ad amicitiam tertium adscriberent.

46. Cum igitur id, quod utile videtur in amicitia, cum eo, quod honestum est, comparatur, iaceat utilitatis species, valeat honestas. Cum autem in amicitia, quae honesta non sunt, postulabuntur, religio et fides anteponatur amicitiae; sic habebitur is, quem exquirimus dilectus officii. Sed utilitatis specie in republica saepissime peccatur, ut in Corinthi disturbatione nostri; durius etiam Athenienses, qui sciverunt, ut Aeginetis, qui classe valebant, pollices praeciderentur. Hoc visum est utile; nimis enim imminebat propter propinquitatem Aegina Piraeo. Sed nihil, quod crudele, utile; est enim hominum naturae, quam sequi debemus, maxima inimica crudelitas.

47. Male etiam, qui peregrinos urbibus uti prohibent eosque exterminant, ut Pennus apud patres nostros, Papius nuper. Nam esse pro cive, qui civis non sit, rectum est non licere, quam legem tulerunt sapientissimi consules Crassus et Scaevola. Usu vero urbis prohibere peregrinos, sane inhumanum est. Illa praeclara, in quibus publicae utilitatis species prae honestate contemnitur. Plena exemplorum est nostra res publica cum saepe, tum maxime bello Punico secundo, quae Cannensi calamitate accepta maiores animos habuit quam unquam rebus secundis; nulla timoris significatio, nulla mentio pacis. Tanta vis est honesti, ut speciem utilitatis obscuret.

48. Athenienses cum Persarum impetum nullo modo possent sustinere statuerentque, ut urbe relicta, coniugibus et liberis Troezene depositis, naves conscenderent libertatemque Graeciae classe defenderent, Cyrsilum quendam suadentem, ut in urbe manerent Xerxemque reciperent, lapidibus obruerunt. Atque ille utilitatem sequi videbatur, sed ea nulla erat repugnante honestate.

49. Themistocles post victoriam eius belli, quod cum Persis fuit, dixit in contione se habere consilium rei publicae salutare, sed id sciri non opus esse; postulavit, ut aliquem populus daret, quicum communicaret; datus est Aristides. Huic ille, classem Lacedaemoniorum, quae subducta esset ad Gytheum, clam incendi posse quo facto frangi Lacedaemoniorum opes necesse esset. Quod Aristides cum audisset, in contionem magna exspectatione venit dixitque perutile esse consilium, quod Themistocles adferret, sed minime honestum. Itaque Athenienses, quod honestum non esset, id ne utile quidem putaverunt totamque eam rem, quam ne audierant quidem, auctore Aristide repudiaverunt. Melius hi quam nos, qui piratas immunes, socios vectigales habemus. Maneat ergo, quod turpe sit, id numquam esse utile, ne tum quidem, cum id, quod utile esse putes, adipiscare; hoc enim ipsum, utile putare quod turpe sit, calamitosum est.

50. Sed incidunt, ut supra dixi, saepe causae, cum repugnare utilitas honestati videatur, ut animadvertendum sit, repugnetque plane an possit cum honestate coniungi. Eius generis hae sunt quaestiones: Si exempli gratia vir bonus Alexandrea Rhodum magnum frumenti numerum advexerit in Rhodiorum inopia et fame summaque annonae caritate, si idem sciat complures mercatores Alexandrea solvisse navesque in cursu frumento onustas petentes Rhodum viderit, dicturusne sit id Rhodiis an silentio suum quam plurimo venditurus? Sapientem et bonum virum fingimus; de eius deliberatione et consultatione quaerimus, qui celaturus Rhodios non sit, si id turpe iudicet, sed dubitet, an turpe non sit.

51. In huiusmodi causis aliud Diogeni Babylonio videri solet, magno et gravi Stoico, aliud Antipatro, discipulo eius, homini acutissimo; Antipatro omnia patefacienda, ut ne quid omnino, quod venditor norit, emptor ignoret, Diogeni venditorem, quatenus iure civili constitutum sit, dicere vitia oportere, cetera sine insidiis agere et, quoniam vendat, velle quam optime vendere. "Advexi, exposui, vendo meum non pluris, quam ceteri, fortasse etiam minoris, cum maior est copia; cui fit iniuria?"

52. Exoritur Antipatri ratio ex altera parte: "Quid ais? tu, cum hominibus consulere debeas et servire humanae societati eaque lege natus sis et ea habeas principia naturae, quibus parere et quae sequi debeas, ut utilitas tua communis sit utilitas vicissimque communis utilitas tua sit, celabis homines, quid iis adsit commoditatis et copiae? Respondebit Diogenes fortasse sic: "Aliud est celare, aliud tacere, neque ego nunc te celo, si tibi non dico, quae natura deorum sit, qui sit finis bonorum, quae tibi plus prodessent cognita quam tritici vilitas. Sed non, quicquid tibi audire utile est, idem mihi dicere necesse est."

53. "Immo vero," inquiet ille "necesse est, si quidem meministi esse inter homines natura coniunctam societatem." "Memini," inquiet ille, "sed num ista societas talis est, ut nihil suum cuiusque sit? Quod si ita est, ne vendendum quidem quicquam est, sed donandum."
Vides in hac tota disceptatione non illud dici "quamvis hoc turpe sit, tamen, quoniam expedit, faciam", sed ita expedire, ut turpe non sit, ex altera autem parte, ea re, quia turpe sit, non esse faciendum.

54. Vendat aedes vir bonus, propter aliqua vitia, quae ipse norit, ceteri ignorent, pestilentes sint et habeantur salubres, ignoretur in omnibus cubiculis apparere serpentes, sint, male materiatae et ruinosae, sed hoc praeter dominum nemo sciat; quaero, si haec emptoribus venditor non dixerit aedesque vendiderit pluris multo. quam se venditurum putarit, num id iniuste aut improbe fecerit? "Ille vero" inquit Antipater. "Quid est enim aliud erranti viam non monstrare, quod Athenis execrationibus publicis sanctum est, si hoc non est, emptorem pati ruere et per errorem in maximam fraudem incurrere. Plus etiam est quam viam non monstrare; nam est scientem in errorem alterum inducere."

55. Diogenes contra "Num te emere coegit, qui ne hortatus quidem est? Ille, quod non placebat, proscripsit, tu quod placebat, emisti. Quod si qui proscribunt villam bonam beneque aedificatam non existimantur fefellisse, etiam si illa nec bona est nec aedificata ratione, multo minus, qui domum non laudarunt. Ubi enim iudicium emptoris est, ibi fraus venditoris quae potest esse? Sin autem dictum non omne praestandum est, quod dictum non est, id praestandum putas? Quid vero est stultius quam venditorem eius rei, quam vendat, vitia narrare? Quid autem tam absurdum quam si domini iussu ita praeco praedicet: "6domum pestilentem vendo?"

56. Sic ergo in quibusdam causis dubiis ex altera parte defenditur honestas, ex altera ita de utilitate dicitur, ut id, quod utile videatur, non modo facere honestum sit, sed etiam non facere turpe. Haec est illa, quae videtur utilium fieri cum honestis saepe dissensio. Quae diiudicanda sunt; non enim, ut quaereremus, exposuimus, sed ut explicaremus.

57. Non igitur videtur nec frumentarius ille Rhodios nec hic aedium venditor celare emptores debuisse. Neque enim id est celare, quicquid reticeas, sed cum, quod tu scias, id ignorare emolumenti tui causa velis eos, quorum intersit id scire. Hoc autem celandi genus quale sit et cuius hominis, quis non videt? Certe non aperti, non simplicis, non ingenui, non iusti, non viri boni, versuti potius obscuri, astuti, fallacis, malitiosi, callidi, veteratoris, vafri. Haec tot et alia plura nonne inutile est vitiorum subire nomina?

58. Quod si vituperandi qui reticuerunt, quid de iis existimandum est, qui orationis vanitatem adhibuerunt? C. Canius, eques Romanus, nec infacetus et satis litteratus, cum se Syracusas otiandi, ut ipse dicere solebat, non negotiandi causa contulisset, dictitabat se hortulos aliquos emere velle, quo invitare amicos et ubi se oblectare sine interpellatoribus posset. Quod cum percrebuisset, Pythius ei quidam, qui argentariam faceret Syracusis, venales quidem se hortos non habere, sed licere uti Canio, si vellet, ut suis, et simul ad cenam hominem in hortos invitavit in posterum diem. Cum ille promisisset, tum Pythius, qui esset ut argentarius apud omnes ordines gratiosus, piscatores ad se convocavit et ab iis petivit, ut ante suos hortulos postridie piscarentur, dixitque quid eos facere vellet. Ad cenam tempori venit Canius; opipare a Pythio adparatum convivium, cumbarum ante oculos multitudo, pro se quisque, quod ceperat, adferebat; ante pedes Pythii pisces abiciebantur.

59. Tum Canius "quaeso", inquit, "quid est hoc, Pythi? tantumne piscium? tantumne cumbarum?" Et ille: "Quid mirum?" inquit, "hoc loco est Syracusis quidquid est piscium, hic aquatio, hac villa isti carere non possunt." Incensus Canius cupiditate contendit a Pythio, ut venderet. Gravate ille primo. Quid multa? impetrat. Emit homo cupidus et locuples tanti, quanti Pythius voluit, et emit instructos. Nomina facit, negotium conficit. Invitat Canius postridie familiares suos, venit ipse mature, scalmum nullum videt. Quaerit ex proximo vicino, num feriae quaedam piscatorum essent, quod eos nullos videret. "Nullae, quod sciam," ille, "sed hic piscari nulli solent. Itaque heri mirabar quid accidisset."

60. Stomachari Canius, sed quid faceret? Nondum enim C. Aquilius, collega et familiaris meus, protulerat de dolo malo formulas; in quibus ipsis, cum ex eo quaereretur, quid esset dolus malus, respondebat, cum esset aliud simulatum, aliud actum. Hoc quidem sane luculente, ut ab homine perito definiendi. Ergo et Pythius et omnes aliud agentes, aliud simulantes perfidi, improbi, malitiosi. Nullum igitur eorum factum potest utile esse, cum sit tot vitiis inquinatum.

61. Quod si Aquiliana definitio vera est, ex omni vita simulatio dissimulatioque tollenda est. Ita nec ut emat melius nec ut vendat quicquam simulabit aut dissimulabit vir bonus. Atque iste dolus malus et legibus erat vindicatus, ut tutela duodecim tabulis, circumscriptio adulescentium lege Plaetoria et sine lege iudiciis, in quibus additur ex fide bona. Reliquorum autem iudiciorum haec verba maxime excellunt: in arbitrio rei uxoriae melivs aeqvivs, in fiducia vt inter bonos bene agier. Quid ergo? aut in eo, qvod melivs aeqvivs, potest ulla pars inesse fraudis? aut cum dicitur inter bonos bene agier, quicquam agi dolose aut malitiose potest? Dolus autem malus in simulatione, ut ait Aquilius, continetur. Tollendum est igitur ex rebus contrahendis omne mendacium. Non inlicitatorem venditor, non qui contra se liceatur emptor apponet. Uterque si ad eloquendum venerit, non plus quam semel eloquetur.

62. Quintus quidem Scaevola, Publi filius, cum postulasset, ut sibi fundus, cuius emptor erat, semel indicaretur idque venditor ita fecisset, dixit se pluris aestumare; addidit centum milia. Nemo est, qui hoc viri boni fuisse neget; sapientis negant, ut si minoris quam potuisset vendidisset. Haec igitur est illa pernicies, quod alios bonos alios sapientes existimant. Ex quo Ennius "nequiquam sapere sapientem, qui ipse sibi prodesse non quiret". Vere id quidem, si, quid esset prodesse mihi cum Ennio conveniret.

63. Hecatonem quidem Rhodium, discipulum Panaetii, video in iis libris, quos de officio scripsit Q. Tuberoni, dicere, sapientis esse nihil contra mores, leges, instituta facientem habere rationem rei familiaris. Neque enim solum nobis divites esse volumus, sed liberis, propinquis, amicis maximeque rei publicae. Singulorum enim facultates et copiae divitiae sunt civitatis. Huic Scaevolae factum, de quo paulo ante dixi, placere nullo modo potest. Etenim omnino tantum se negat facturum compendii sui causa, quod non liceat.

64. Huic nec laus magna tribuenda nec gratia est. Sed sive et simulatio et dissimulatio dolus malus est, perpaucae res sunt, in quibus non dolus malus iste versetur, sive vir bonus est is, qui prodest quibus potest, nocet nemini, certe istum virum bonum non facile reperimus. Numquam igitur est utile peccare, quia semper est turpe, et, quia semper est honestum virum bonum esse, semper est utile.

65. Ac de iure quidem praediorum sanctum apud nos est iure civili, ut in iis vendendis vitia dicerentur, quae nota essent venditori. Nam cum ex duodecim tabulis satis esset ea praestari, quae essent lingua nuncupata, quae qui infitiatus esset, dupli poena subiret, a iuris consultis etiam reticentiae poena est constituta; quicdquid enim esset in praedio vitii, id statuerunt, si venditor sciret, nisi nominatim dictum esset, praestari oportere.

66. Ut, cum in arce augurium augures acturi essent iussissentque Ti. Claudium Centumalum, qui aedes in Caelio monte habebat, demoliri ea, quorum altitudo officeret auspiciis, Claudius proscripsit insulam [vendidit], emit P. Calpurnius Lanarius. Huic ab auguribus illud idem denuntiatum est. Itaque Calpurnius cum demolitus esset cognossetque Claudium aedes postea proscripsisse, quam esset ab auguribus demoliri iussus, arbitrum illum adegit QUICQUID SIBI DARE FACERE OPORTERET EX FIDE BONA. M. Cato sententiam dixit, huius nostri Catonis pater (ut enim ceteri ex patribus, sic hic, qui illud lumen progenuit, ex filio est nominandus)is igitur iudex ita pronuntiavit, cum in vendundo rem eam scisset et non pronuntiasset, emptori damnum praestari oportere.

67. Ergo ad fidem bonam statuit pertinere notum esse emptori vitium, quod nosset venditor. Quod si recte iudicavit, non recte frumentarius ille, non recte aedium pestilentium venditor tacuit. Sed huiusmodi reticentiae iure civili comprehendi non possunt; quae autem possunt diligenter tenentur. M. Marius Gratidianus, propinquus noster, C. Sergio Oratae vendiderat aedes eas, quas ab eodem ipse paucis ante annis emerat. Eae serviebant, sed hoc in mancipio Marius non dixerat; adducta res in iudicium est. Oratam Crassus, Gratidianum defendebat Antonius. Ius Crassus urgebat, "quod vitii venditor non dixisset sciens, id oportere praestari", aequitatem Antonius, "quoniam id vitium ignotum Sergio non fuisset, qui illas aedes vendidisset, nihil fuisse necesse dici nec eum esse deceptum, qui id, quod emerat, quo iure esset, teneret". Quorsus haec? Ut illud intellegas, non placuisse maioribus nostris astutos.

68. Sed aliter leges, aliter philosophi tollunt astutias; leges, quatenus manu tenere possunt, philosophi, quatenus ratione et intellegentia. Ratio ergo hoc postulat, ne quid insidiose, ne quid simulate, ne quid fallaciter. Suntne igitur insidiae tendere plagas, etiam si excitaturus non sis, nec agitaturus? Ipsae enim ferae nullo insequente saepe incidunt. Sic tu aedes proscribas, tabulam tamquam plagam ponas, [domum propter vitia vendas,] in eam aliquis incurrat inprudens?

69. Hoc quamquam video propter depravationem consuetudinis neque more turpe haberi neque aut lege sanciri aut iure civili, tamen naturae lege sanctum est. Societas est enim (quod etsi saepe dictum est, dicendum est tamen saepius), latissime quidem quae pateat, omnium inter omnes, interior eorum, qui eiusdem gentis sint, propior eorum, qui eiusdem civitatis. Itaque maiores aliud ius gentium, aliud ius civile esse voluerunt, quod civile, non idem continuo gentium, quod autem gentium, idem civile esse debet. Sed nos veri iuris germanaeque iustitiae solidam et expressam effigiem nullam tenemus, umbra et imaginibus utimur. Eas ipsas utinam sequeremur! feruntur enim ex optimis naturae et veritatis exemplis.

70. Nam quanti verba illa: UTI NE PROPTER TE FIDEMVE TUAM CAPTUS FRAUDATUSVE SIM! quam illa aurea: UT INTER BONOS BENE AGIER OPORTET ET SINE FRAUDATIONE!Sed, qui sint "boni" et quid sit "bene agi," magna quaestio est. Q. quidem Scaevola, pontifex maximus, summam vim esse dicebat in omnibus iis arbitriis, in quibus adderetur EX FIDE BONA, fideique bonae nomen existimabat manare latissime, idque versari in tutelis, societatibus, fiduciis, mandatis, rebus emptis, venditis, conductis, locatis, quibus vitae societas contineretur; in iis magni esse iudicis statuere, praesertim cum in plerisque essent iudicia contraria, quid quemque cuique praestare oporteret.

71. Quocirca astutiae tollendae sunt eaque malitia, quae vult illa quidem videri se esse prudentiam, sed abest ab ea distatque plurimum; prudentia est enim locata in dilectu bonorum et malorum, malitia, si omnia quae turpia sunt, mala sunt, mala bonis ponit ante. Nec vero in praediis solum ius civile ductum a natura malitiam fraudemque vindicat, sed etiam in mancipiorum venditione venditoris fraus omnis excluditur. Qui enim scire debuit de sanitate, de fuga, de furtis, praestat edicto aedilium. Heredum alia causa est.

72. Ex quo intellegitur, quoniam iuris natura fons sit, hoc secundum naturam esse, neminem id agere, ut ex alterius praedetur inscitia. Nec ulla pernicies vitae maior inveniri potest quam in malitia simulatio intellegentiae, ex quo ista innumerabilia nascuntur, ut utilia cum honestis pugnare videantur. Quotus enim quisque reperietur, qui impunitate et ignoratione omnium proposita abstinere possit iniuria.

73. Periclitemur, si placet, et in iis quidem exemplis, in quibus peccari volgus hominum fortasse non putet. Neque enim de sicariis, veneficis, testamentariis, furibus, peculatoribus, hoc loco disserendum est, qui non verbis sunt et disputatione philosophorum, sed vinclis et carcere fatigandi, sed haec consideremus, quae faciunt ii, qui habentur boni. L. Minuci Basili locupletis hominis falsum testamentum quidam e Graecia Romam attulerunt. Quod quo facilius obtinerent, scripserunt heredes secum M. Crassum et Q. Hortensium, homines eiusdem aetatis potentissimos. Qui cum illud falsum esse suspicarentur, sibi autem nullius essent conscii culpae, alieni facinoris munusculum non repudiaverunt. Quid ergo? Satin est hoc, ut non deliquisse videantur? Mihi quidem non videtur, quamquam alterum vivum amavi, alterum non odi mortuum.

74. Sed cum Basilus M. Satrium sororis filium nomen suum ferre voluisset eumque fecisset heredem (hunc dico patronum agri Piceni et Sabini; o turpe notam temporum [nomen illorum]!), non erat aequum principes civis rem habere, ad Satrium nihil praeter nomen pervenire. Etenim si is, qui non defendit iniuriam neque propulsat a suis, cum potest, iniuste facit, ut in primo libro disserui, qualis habendus est is, qui non modo non repellit, sed etiam adiuvat iniuriam? Mihi quidem etiam verae hereditates non honestae videntur, si sunt malitiosis blanditiis, officiorum non veritate, sed simulatione quaesitae. Atqui in talibus rebus aliud utile interdum, aliud honestum videri solet. Falso; nam eadem utilitatis quae honestatis est regula.

75. Qui hoc non perviderit, ab hoc nulla fraus aberit, nullum facinus. Sic enim cogitans "est istuc quidem honestum, verum hoc expedit", res a natura copulatas audebit errore divellere, qui fons est fraudium, maleficiorum, scelerum omnium. Itaque si vir bonus habeat hanc vim, ut, si digitis concrepuerit, possit in locupletium testamenta nomen eius inrepere, hac vi non utatur, ne si exploratum quidem habeat id omnino neminem umquam suspicaturum. At dares hanc vim M. Crasso, ut digitorum percussione heres posset scriptus esse, qui re vera non esset heres, in foro, mihi crede, saltaret. Homo autem iustus isque, quem sentimus virum bonum, nihil cuiquam, quod in se transferat, detrahet. Hoc qui admiratur, is se, quid sit vir bonus, nescire fateatur.

76. At vero, si qui voluerit animi sui complicatam notionem evolvere, iam se ipse doceat eum virum bonum esse, qui prosit, quibus possit, noceat nemini nisi lacessitus iniuria. Quid ergo? Hic non noceat, qui quodam quasi veneno perficiat, ut veros heredes moveat, in eorum locum ipse succedat? "Non igitur faciat" dixerit quis, "quod utile sit, quod expediat?" Immo intellegat nihil nec expedire nec utile esse, quod sit iniustum. Hoc qui non didicerit, bonus vir esse non poterit.

77. C. Fimbriam consularem audiebam de patre nostro puer iudicem M. Lutatio Pinthiae fuisse, equiti Romano sane honesto, cum is sponsionem fecisset ni vir bonvs esset. Itaque ei dixisse Fimbriam se illam rem numquam iudicaturum, ne aut spoliaret fama probatum hominem, si contra iudicavisset, aut statuisse videretur virum bonum esse aliquem, cum ea res innumerabilibus officiis et laudibus contineretur. Huic igitur viro bono, quem Fimbria etiam, non modo Socrates noverat, nullo modo videri potest quicquam esse utile, quod non honestum sit. Itaque talis vir non modo facere, sed ne cogitare quidem quicquam audebit, quod non audeat praedicare. Haec non turpe est dubitare philosophos, quae ne rustici quidem dubitent? a quibus natum est id, quod iam contritum est vetustate proverbium. Cum enim fidem alicuius bonitatemque laudant, dignum esse dicunt, quicum in tenebris mices. Hoc quam habet vim nisi illam, nihil expedire quod non deceat, etiam si id possis nullo refellente optinere?

78. Videsne hoc proverbio neque Gygi illi posse veniam dari neque huic, quem paulo ante fingebam digitorum percussione hereditates omnium posse converrere? Ut enim, quod turpe est, id, quamvis occultetur, tamen honestum fieri nullo modo potest, sic, quod honestum non est, id utile ut sit effici non potest adversante et repugnante natura.

79. At enim cum permagna praemia sunt, est causa peccandi. C. Marius, cum a spe consulatus longe abesset et iam septimum annum post praeturam iaceret neque petiturus umquam consulatum videretur, Q. Metellum, cuius legatus erat, summum virum et civem cum ab eo, imperatore suo, Romam missus esset, apud populum Romanum criminatus est, bellum illum ducere, si se consulem fecissent, brevi tempore aut vivum aut mortuum Iugurtham se in potestatem populi Romani redacturum. Itaque factus est ille quidem consul, sed a fide iustitiaque discessit, qui optimum et gravissimum civem, cuius legatus et a quo missus esset, in invidiam falso crimine adduxerit.

80. Ne noster quidem Gratidianus officio viri boni functus est tum, cum praetor esset, collegiumque praetorium tribuni plebi adhibuissent, ut res nummaria de communi sententia constitueretur; iactabatur enim temporibus illis nummus sic, ut nemo posset scire, quid haberet. Conscripserunt communiter edictum cum poena atque iudicio constitueruntque, ut omnes simul in rostra post meridiem escenderent. Et ceteri quidem alius alio: Marius ab subselliis in rostra recta idque, quod communiter compositum fuerat, solus edixit. Et ea res, si quaeris, ei magno honori fuit; omnibus vicis statuae, ad eas tus, cerei. Quid multa? Nemo umquam multitudini fuit carior.

81. Haec sunt, quae conturbent in deliberatione non numquam, cum id, in quo violatur aequitas, non ita magnum, illud autem, quod ex eo paritur, permagnum videtur, ut Mario praeripere collegis et tribunis plebi popularem gratiam non ita turpe, consulem ob eam rem fieri, quod sibi tum proposuerat, valde utile videbatur. Sed omnium una regula est, quam tibi cupio esse notissimam: aut illud, quod utile videtur, turpe ne sit, aut si turpe est, ne videatur esse utile. Quid igitur? possumusne aut illum Marium virum bonum iudicare aut hunc? Explica atque excute intellegentiam tuam, ut videas, quae sit in ea [species] forma et notio viri boni. Cadit ergo in virum bonum mentiri, emolumenti sui causa criminari, praeripere, fallere? Nihil profecto minus.

82. Est ergo ulla res tanti aut commodum ullum tam expetendum, ut viri boni et splendorem et nomen amittas? Quid est, quod afferre tantum utilitas ista, quae dicitur, possit, quantum auferre, si boni viri nomen eripuerit, fidem iustitiamque detraxerit? Quid enim interest, utrum ex homine se convertat quis in beluam an hominis figura immanitatem gerat beluae?
Quid? qui omnia recta et honesta neglegunt, dummodo potentiam consequantur, nonne idem faciunt, quod is, qui etiam socerum habere voluit eum, cuius ipse audacia potens esset. Utile ei videbatur plurimum posse alterius invidia. Id quam iniustum in patriam et quam turpe esset, non videbat. Ipse autem socer in ore semper Graecos versus de Phoenissis habebat, quos dicam ut potero; incondite fortasse sed tamen, ut res possit intellegi:

'Nam si violandum est ius, regnandi gratia,
Violandum est; aliis rebus pietatem colas.'

Capitalis Eteocles vel potius Euripides, qui id unum quod omnium sceleratissimum fuerit, exceperit.

83. Quid igitur minuta colligimus, hereditates, mercaturas, venditiones fraudulentas? Ecce tibi, qui rex populi Romani dominusque omnium gentium esse concupiverit idque perfecerit. Hanc cupiditatem si honestam quis esse dicit, amens est; probat enim legum et libertatis interitum earumque oppressionem taetram et detestabilem gloriosam putat. Qui autem fatetur honestum non esse in ea civitate, quae libera fuerit quaeque esse debeat, regnare, sed ei, qui id facere possit, esse utile, qua hunc obiurgatione aut quo potius convitio a tanto errore coner avellere? Potest enim, di immortales, cuiquam esse utile foedissimum et taeterrimum parricidium patriae, quamvis is, qui se eo obstrinxerit, ab oppressis civibus parens nominetur? Honestate igitur dirigenda utilitas est, et quidem sic, ut haec duo verbo inter se discrepare, re unum sonare videantur.

84. Non habeo ad volgi opinionem quae maior utilitas quam regnandi esse possit, nihil contra inutilius ei, qui id iniuste consecutus sit, invenio, cum ad veritatem coepi revocare rationem. Possunt enim cuiquam esse utiles angores, sollicitudines, diurni et nocturni metus, vita insidiarum periculorumque plenissima? 'Multi iniqui atque infideles regno, pauci benivoli' inquit Accius. At cui regno? quod a Tantalo et Pelope proditum iure optinebatur. Nam quanto plures ei regi putas, qui exercitu populi Romani populum ipsum Romanum oppressisset civitatemque non modo liberam, sed etiam gentibus imperantem servire sibi coegisset?

85. Hunc tu quas conscientiae labes in animo censes habuisse, quae vulnera? Cuius autem vita ipsi potest utilis esse, cum eius vitae ea condicio sit, ut qui illam eripuerit, in maxima et gratia futurus sit et gloria? Quod si haec utilia non sunt, quae maxime videntur, quia plena sunt dedecoris ac turpitudinis, satis persuasum esse debet, nihil esse utile, quod non honestum sit.

86. Quamquam id quidem cum saepe alias, tum Pyrrhi bello a C. Fabricio consule iterum et a senatu nostro iudicatum est. Cum enim rex Pyrrhus populo Romano bellum ultro intulisset cumque de imperio certamen esset cum rege generoso ac potente, perfuga ab eo venit in castra Fabricii eique est pollicitus, si praemium sibi proposuisset, se, ut clam venisset, sic clam in Pyrrhi castra rediturum et eum veneno necaturum. Hunc Fabricius reducendum curavit ad Pyrrhum idque eius factum laudatum a senatu est. Atqui si speciem utilitatis opinionemque quaerimus, magnum illud bellum perfuga unus et gravem adversarium imperii sustulisset, sed magnum dedecus et flagitium, quicum laudis certamen fuisset, eum non virtute, sed scelere superatum.

87. Utrum igitur utilius vel Fabricio, qui talis in hac urbe qualis Aristides Athenis fuit, vel senatui nostro qui numquam utilitatem a dignitate seiunxit, armis cum hoste certare an venenis? Si gloriae causa imperium expetundum est, scelus absit, in quo non potest esse gloria; sin ipsae opes expetuntur quoquo modo, non poterunt utiles esse cum infamia. Non igitur utilis illa L. Philippi Q. f. sententia, quas civitates L. Sulla pecunia accepta ex senatus consulto liberavisset, ut eae rursus vectigales essent, neque iis pecuniam, quam pro libertate dederant, redderemus. Ei senatus est assensus. Turpe imperio! Piratarum enim melior fides quam senatus. 'At aucta vectigalia, utile igitur.' Quousque audebunt dicere quicquam utile, quod non honestum?

88. Potest autem ulli imperio, quod gloria debet fultum esse et benevolentia sociorum, utile esse odium et infamia? Ego etiam cum Catone meo saepe dissensi. Nimis mihi praefracte videbatur aerarium vectigaliaque defendere, omnia publicanis negare, multa sociis, cum in hos benefici esse deberemus, cum illis sic agere, ut cum colonis nostris soleremus, eoque magis, quod illa ordinum coniunctio ad salutem rei publicae pertinebat. Male etiam Curio, cum causam Transpadanorum aequam esse dicebat, semper autem addebat "vincat utilitas". Potius doceret non esse aequam, quia non esset utilis rei publicae, quam cum utilem diceret non esse, aequam fateretur.

89. Plenus est sextus liber de officiis Hecatonis talium quaestionum, sitne boni viri in maxima caritate annonae familiam non alere. In utramque partem disputat, sed tamen ad extremum utilitate, ut putat, officium dirigit magis quam humanitate. Quaerit, si in mari iactura facienda sit, equine pretiosi potius iacturam faciat an servuli vilis. Hic alio res familiaris, alio ducit humanitas. "Si tabulam de naufragio stultus arripuerit, extorquebitne eam sapiens, si potuerit?" Negat, quia sit iniurium. Quid? dominus navis eripietne suum? Minime, non plus quam navigantem in alto eicere de navi velit, quia sua sit. Quoad enim perventum est eo, quo sumpta navis est, non domini est navis, sed navigantium.

90. Quid? si una tabula sit, duo naufragi, eique sapientes, sibine uterque rapiat an alter cedat alteri? Cedat vero, sed ei, cuius magis intersit vel sua vel rei publicae causa vivere. Quid? si haec paria in utroque? Nullum erit certamen, sed quasi sorte aut micando victus alteri cedet alter Quid? si pater fana expilet, cuniculos agat ad aerarium, indicetne id magistratibus filius? Nefas id quidem est, quin etiam defendat patrem si arguatur. Non igitur patria praestat omnibus officiis? Immo vero, sed ipsi patriae conducit pios habere cives in parentes. Quid? si tyrannidem occupare, si patriam prodere conabitur pater, silebitne filius? Immo vero obsecrabit patrem, ne id faciat. Si nihil proficiet, accusabit, minabitur etiam; ad extremum, si ad perniciem patriae res spectabit, patriae salutem anteponet saluti patris.

91. Quaerit etiam, si sapiens adulterinos nummos acceperit imprudens pro bonis, cum id rescierit, soluturusne sit eos, si cui debeat, pro bonis. Diogenes ait, Antipater negat, cui potius assentior. Qui vinum fugiens vendat sciens, debeatne dicere. Non necesse putat Diogenes, Antipater viri boni existimat. Haec sunt quasi controversiae iura Stoicorum. In mancipio vendundo dicendane vitia, non ea, quae nisi dixeris, redhibeatur mancipium iure civili, sed haec, mendacem esse, aleatorem, furacem, ebriosum. Alteri dicenda videntur, alteri non videntur.

92. Si quis aurum vendens orichalcum se putet vendere, indicetne ei vir bonus aurum illud esse, an emat denario, quod sit mille denarium? Perspicuum est iam et quid mihi videatur et quae sit inter eos philosophos, quos nominavi, controversia. Pacta et promissa semperne servanda sint, qvae nec vi nec dolo malo, ut praetores solent, facta sint. Si quis medicamentum cuipiam dederit ad aquam intercutem pepigeritque, si eo medicamento sanus factus esset, ne illo medicamento umquam postea uteretur, si eo medicamento sanus factus sit et annis aliquot post inciderit in eundem morbum nec ab eo, quicum pepigerat, impetret, ut iterum eo liceat uti, quid faciendum sit. Cum sit is inhumanus, qui non concedat, nec ei quicquam fiat iniuriae, vitae et saluti consulendum.

93. Quid? si qui sapiens rogatus sit ab eo, qui eum heredem faciat, cum ei testamento sestertium milies relinquatur, ut antequam hereditatem adeat luce palam in foro saltet, idque se facturum promiserit, quod aliter heredem eum scripturus ille non esset, faciat quod promiserit necne? Promisisse nollem et id arbitror fuisse gravitatis; quoniam promisit, si saltare in foro turpe ducet, honestius mentietur, si ex hereditate nihil ceperit, quam si ceperit, nisi forte eam pecuniam in rei publicae magnum aliquod tempus contulerit, ut vel saltare, cum patriae consulturus sit, turpe non sit.

94. Ac ne illa quidem promissa servanda sunt, quae non sunt iis ipsis utilia, quibus illa promiseris. Sol Phaetonti filio, ut redeamus ad fabulas, facturum se esse dixit, quidquid optasset. Optavit, ut in currum patris tolleretur; sublatus est; atque is ante quam constitit ictu fulminis deflagravit; quanto melius fuerat in hoc promissum patris non esse servatum. Quid? quod Theseus exegit promissum a Neptuno? Cui cum tres optationes Neptunus dedisset, optavit interitum Hippolyti filii, cum is patri suspectus esset de noverca; quo optato impetrato, Theseus in maximis fuit luctibus.

95. Quid? quod Agamemnon cum devovisset Dianae, quod in suo regno pulcherrimum natum esset illo anno, immolavit Iphigeniam, qua nihil erat eo quidem anno natum pulchrius. Promissum potius non faciendum, quam tam taetrum facinus admittendum fuit. Ergo et promissa non facienda nonnumquam neque semper deposita reddenda. Si gladium quis apud te sana mente deposuerit, repetat insaniens, reddere peccatum sit, officium non reddere. Quid? si is, qui apud te pecuniam deposuerit, bellum inferat patriae, reddasne depositum? Non credo, facies enim contra rem publicam, quae debet esse carissima. Sic multa, quae honesta natura videntur esse, temporibus fiunt non honesta. Facere promissa, stare conventis, reddere deposita commutata utilitate fiunt non honesta. Ac de iis quidem, quae videntur esse utilitates contra iustitiam simulatione prudentiae, satis arbitror dictum.

96. Sed quoniam a quattuor fontibus honestatis primo libro officia duximus, in eisdem versemur, cum docebimus, ea, quae videantur esse utilia neque sint, quam sint virtutis inimica. Ac de prudentia quidem, quam vult imitari malitia, itemque de iustitia, quae semper est utilis, disputatum est. Reliquae sunt duae partes honestatis quarum altera in animi excellentis magnitudine et praestantia cernitur, altera in conformatione et moderatione continentiae et temperantiae.

97. Utile videbatur Ulixi, ut quidem poetae tragici prodiderunt, nam apud Homerum, optimum auctorem, talis de Ulixe nulla suspicio est, sed insimulant eum tragoediae simulatione insaniae militiam subterfugere voluisse. Non honestum consilium, at utile, ut aliquis fortasse dixerit, regnare et Ithacae vivere otiose cum parentibus, cum uxore, cum filio. Ullum tu decus in cotidianis laboribus cum hac tranquillitate conferendum putas? Ego vero istam contemnendam et abiciendam, quoniam quae honesta non sit ne utilem quidem esse arbitror.

98. Quid enim auditurum putas fuisse Ulixem, si in illa simulatione perseverasset? Qui cum maximas res gesserit in bello, tamen haec audiat ab Aiace

"Cuius ipse princeps iuris iurandi fuit,
Quod omnes scitis, solus neglexit fidem.
Furere adsimulare, ne coiret, institit.
Quod ni Palamedi perspicax prudentia
Istius percepset malitiosam audaciam
Fide sacratae ius perpetuo falleret."

99. Illi vero non modo cum hostibus, verum etiam cum fluctibus, id quod fecit, dimicare melius fuit quam deserere consentientem Graeciam ad bellum barbaris inferendum. Sed omittamus et fabulas et externa; ad rem factam nostramque veniamus. M. Atilius Regulus, cum consul iterum in Africa ex insidiis captus esset duce Xanthippo Lacedaemonio, imperatore autem patre Hannibalis Hamilcare, iuratus missus est ad senatum, ut nisi redditi essent Poenis captivi nobiles quidam, rediret ipse Carthaginem. Is cum Romam venisset, utilitatis speciem videbat, sed eam, ut res declarat, falsam iudicavit; quae erat talis: manere in patria, esse domui suae cum uxore, cum liberis, quam calamitatem accepisset in bello communem fortunae bellicae iudicantem tenere consularis dignitatis gradum. Quis haec negat esse utilia? quem censes? Magnitudo animi et fortitudo negat.

100. Num locupletiores quaeris auctores? Harum enim est virtutum proprium nihil extimescere, omnia humana despicere, nihil, quod homini accidere possit intolerandum putare. Itaque quid fecit? In senatum venit, mandata exposuit, sententiam ne diceret, recusavit; quamdiu iure iurando hostium teneretur, non esse se senatorem. Atque illud etiam, ("O stultum hominem," dixerit quispiam, "et repugnantem utilitati suae!"), reddi captivos negavit esse utile; illos enim adulescentes esse et bonos duces, se iam confectum senectute. Cuius cum valuisset auctoritas, captivi retenti sunt, ipse Carthaginem rediit, neque eum caritas patriae retinuit nec suorum. Neque vero tum ignorabat se ad crudelissimum hostem et ad exquisita supplicia proficisci, sed ius iurandum conservandum putabat. Itaque tum, cum vigilando necabatur, erat in meliore causa, quam si domi senex captivus, periurus consularis remansisset.

101. At stulte, qui non modo non censuerit captivos remittendos, verum etiam dissuaserit. Quo modo stulte? etiamne, si rei publicae conducebat? Potest autem, quod inutile rei publicae sit, id cuiquam civi utile esse? Pervertunt homines ea, quae sunt fundamenta naturae, cum utilitatem ab honestate seiungunt. Omnes enim expetimus utilitatem ad eamque rapimur nec facere aliter ullo modo possumus. Nam quis est, qui utilia fugiat? aut quis potius, qui ea non studiosissime persequatur? Sed quia nusquam possumus nisi in laude, decore, honestate utilia reperire, propterea illa prima et summa habemus, utilitatis nomen non tam splendidum quam necessarium ducimus.

102. Quid est igitur, dixerit quis, in iure iurando? num iratum timemus Iovem? At hoc quidem commune est omnium philosophorum, non eorum modo, qui deum nihil habere ipsum negotii dicunt, nihil exhibere alteri, sed eorum etiam, qui deum semper agere aliquid et moliri volunt, numquam nec irasci deum nec nocere. Quid autem iratus Juppiter plus nocere potuisset, quam nocuit sibi ipse Regulus? Nulla igitur vis fuit religionis, quae tantam utilitatem perverteret. An ne turpiter faceret? Primum minima de malis? Non igitur tantum mali turpitudo ista habebat, quantum ille cruciatus. Deinde illud etiam apud Accium:

"Fregistin fidem?
Neque dedi neque do infideli cuiquam."

quamquam ab impio rege dicitur, luculente tamen dicitur.

103. Addunt etiam, quemadmodum nos dicamus videri quaedam utilia, quae non sint, sic se dicere videri quaedam honesta, quae non sunt, ut hoc ipsum videtur honestum conservandi iuris iurandi causa ad cruciatum revertisse, sed fit non honestum, quia, quod per vim hostium esset actum, ratum esse non debuit. Addunt etiam, quicquid valde utile sit, id fieri honestum, etiam si antea non videretur. Haec fere contra Regulum. Sed prima videamus.

104. Non fuit Juppiter metuendus ne iratus noceret, qui neque irasci solet nec nocere. Haec quidem ratio non magis contra Reguli, quam contra omne ius iurandum valet. Sed in iure iurando non qui metus, sed quae vis sit, debet intellegi. Est enim ius iurandum affirmatio religiosa; quod autem affirmate, quasi deo teste promiseris, id tenendum est. Iam enim non ad iram deorum, quae nulla est, sed ad iustitiam et ad fidem pertinet. Nam praeclare Ennius:

"O Fides alma apta pinnis et ius iurandum Iovis."

Qui ius igitur iurandum violat, is fidem violat, quam in Capitolio vicinam Iovis optimi maximi, ut in Catonis oratione est, maiores nostri esse voluerunt.

105. At enim ne iratus quidem Juppiter plus Regulo nocuisset, quam sibi nocuit ipse Regulus. Certe, si nihil malum esset nisi dolere. Id autem non modo non summum malum, sed ne malum quidem esse maxima auctoritate philosophi affirmant. Quorum quidem testem non mediocrem, sed haud scio an gravissimum Regulum nolite quaeso vituperare. Quem enim locupletiorem quaerimus quam principem populi Romani, qui retinendi officii causa cruciatum subierit voluntarium? Nam quod aiunt minima de malis, id est, ut turpiter potius quam calamitose; an est ullum maius malum turpitudine? Quae si in deformitate corporis habeat aliquid offensionis, quanta illa depravatio et foeditas turpificati animi debet videri?

106. Itaque nervosius qui ista disserunt, solum audent malum dicere id, quod turpe sit, qui autem remissius, ii tamen non dubitant summum malum dicere. Nam illud quidem "Neque dedi neque do infideli cuiquam" idcirco recte a poeta, quia, cum tractaretur Atreus, personae serviendum fuit. Sed si hoc sibi sument, nullam esse fidem, quae infideli data sit, videant, ne quaeratur latebra periurio.

107. Est autem ius etiam bellicum fidesque iuris iurandi saepe cum hoste servanda. Quod enim ita iuratum est, ut mens conciperet fieri oportere, id servandum est; quod aliter, id si non fecerit, nullum est periurium. Ut, si praedonibus pactum pro capite pretium non attuleris, nulla fraus est, ne si iuratus quidem id non feceris. Nam pirata non est ex perduellium numero definitus, sed communis hostis omnium; cum hoc nec fides debet nec ius iurandum esse commune.

108. Non enim falsum iurare periurare est, sed quod ex animi tvi sententia iuraris, sicut verbis concipitur more nostro, id non facere periurium est. Scite enim Euripides: "Iuravi lingua, mentem iniuratam gero". Regulus vero non debuit condiciones pactionesque bellicas et hostiles perturbare periurio. Cum iusto enim et legitimo hoste res gerebatur, adversus quem et totum ius fetiale et multa sunt iura communia. Quod ni ita esset, numquam claros viros senatus vinctos hostibus dedidisset.

109. At vero T. Veturius et Sp. Postumius, cum iterum consules essent, quia, cum male pugnatum apud Caudium esset, legionibus nostris sub iugum missis, pacem cum Samnitibus fecerant, dediti sunt iis, iniussu enim populi senatusque fecerant. Eodemque tempore Ti. Numicius, Q. Maelius, qui tum tribuni pl. erant, quod eorum auctoritate pax erat facta, dediti sunt, ut pax Samnitium repudiaretur. Atque huius deditionis ipse Postumius, qui dedebatur, suasor et auctor fuit. Quod idem multis annis post C. Mancinus, qui, ut Numantinis, quibuscum sine senatus auctoritate foedus fecerat, dederetur, rogationem suasit eam, quam L. Furius, Sex. Atilius ex senatus consulto ferebant; qua accepta est hostibus deditus. Honestius hic quam Q. Pompeius, quo, cum in eadem causa esset, deprecante accepta lex non est. Hic ea, quae videbatur utilitas, plus valuit quam honestas, apud superiores utilitatis species falsa ab honestatis auctoritate superata est.

110. At non debuit ratum esse, quod erat actum per vim. Quasi vero forti viro vis possit adhiberi. Cur igitur ad senatum proficiscebatur, cum praesertim de captivis dissuasurus esset? Quod maximum in eo est, id reprehenditis. Non enim suo iudicio stetit, sed suscepit causam, ut esset iudicium senatus; cui nisi ipse auctor fuisset, captivi profecto Poenis redditi essent. Ita incolumis in patria Regulus restitisset. Quod quia patriae non utile putavit, idcirco sibi honestum et sentire illa et pati credidit. Nam quod aiunt, quod valde utile sit, id fieri honestum, immo vero esse, non fieri. Est enim nihil utile, quod idem non honestum, nec quia utile, honestum, sed, quia honestum, utile. Quare ex multis mirabilibus exemplis haud facile quis dixerit hoc exemplo aut laudabilius aut praestantius.

111. Sed ex tota hac laude Reguli unum illud est admiratione dignum, quod captivos retinendos censuit. Nam quod rediit, nobis nunc mirabile videtur, illis quidem temporibus aliter facere non potuit. Itaque ista laus non est hominis, sed temporum. Nullum enim vinculum ad astringendam fidem iure iurando maiores artius esse voluerunt. Id indicant leges in duodecim tabulis, indicant sacratae, indicant foedera, quibus etiam cum hoste devincitur fides, indicant notiones animadversionesque censorum, qui nulla de re diligentius quam de iure iurando iudicabant.

112. L. Manlio A. f., cum dictator fuisset, M. Pomponius tr. pl. diem dixit, quod is paucos sibi dies ad dictaturam gerendam addidisset; criminabatur etiam, quod Titum filium, qui postea est Torquatus appellatus, ab hominibus relegasset et ruri habitare iussisset. Quod cum audivisset adulescens filius negotium exhiberi patri, accurisse Romam et cum primo luci Pomponii domum venisse dicitur. Cui cum esset nuntiatum, qui illum iratum allaturum ad se aliquid contra patrem arbitraretur, surrexit e lectulo remotisque arbitris ad se adulescentem iussit venire. At ille, ut ingressus est, confestim gladium destrinxit iuravitque se illum statim interfecturum, nisi ius iurandum sibi dedisset se patrem missum esse facturum. Iuravit hoc terrore coactus Pomponius; rem ad populum detulit, docuit, cur sibi causa desistere necesse esset, Manlium missum fecit. Tantum temporibus illis ius iurandum valebat. Atque hic T. Manlius is est, qui ad Anienem Galli, quem ab eo provocatus occiderat, torque detracto cognomen invenit, cuius tertio consulatu Latini ad Veserim fusi et fugati, magnus vir in primis et qui perindulgens in patrem, idem acerbe severus in filium.

113. Sed, ut laudandus Regulus in conservando iure iurando, sic decem illi, quos post Cannensem pugnam iuratos ad senatum misit Hannibal, se in castra redituros ea, quorum erant potiti Poeni, nisi de redimendis captivis impetravissent, si non redierunt, vituperandi. De quibus non omnes uno modo; nam Polybius, bonus auctor inprimis, ex decem nobilissimis, qui tum erant missi, novem revertisse dicit re a senatu non impertrata; unum ex decem, qui paulo post, quam erat egressus e castris, redisset, quasi aliquid esset oblitus, Romae remansisse. Reditu enim in castra liberatum se esse iure iurando interpretabatur, non recte. Fraus enim distringit, non dissolvit periurium. Fuit igitur stulta calliditas, perverse imitata prudentiam. Itaque decrevit senatus, ut ille veterator et callidus, vinctus ad Hannibalem duceretur.

114. Sed illud maximum: octo hominum milia tenebat Hannibal, non quos in acie cepisset, aut qui periculo mortis diffugissent, sed qui relicti in castris fuissent a Paulo et a Varrone consulibus. Eos senatus non censuit redimendos, cum id parva pecunia fieri posset, ut esset insitum militibus nostris aut vincere aut emori. Qua quidem re audita fractum animum Hannibalis scribit idem, quod senatus populusque Romanus rebus afflictis tam excelso animo fuisset. Sic honestatis comparatione ea, quae videntur utilia, vincuntur.

115. C. Acilius autem, qui Graece scripsit historiam, plures ait fuisse, qui in castra revertissent eadem fraude, ut iure iurando liberarentur eosque a censoribus omnibus ignominiis notatos. Sit iam huius loci finis. Perspicuum est enim ea, quae timido animo, humili, demisso fractoque fiant, quale fuisset Reguli factum, si aut de captivis quod ipsi opus esse videretur, non quod rei publicae, censuisset aut domi remanere voluisset, non esse utilia, quia sint flagitiosa, foeda, turpia.

116. Restat quarta pars, quae decore, moderatione, modestia, continentia, temperantia continetur. Potest igitur quicquam utile esse, quod sit huic talium virtutum choro contrarium? Atqui ab Aristippo Cyrenaici atque Annicerii philosophi nominati omne bonum in voluptate posuerunt virtutemque censuerunt ob eam rem esse laudandam, quod efficiens esset voluptatis. Quibus obsoletis floret Epicurus, eiusdem fere adiutor auctorque sententiae. Cum his "viris" equisque, ut dicitur, si honestatem tueri ac retinere sententia est, decertandum est.

117. Nam si non modo utilitas, sed vita omnis beata corporis firma constitutione eiusque constitutionis spe explorata, ut a Metrodoro scriptum est, continetur, certe haec utilitas et quidem summa (sic enim censent), cum honestate pugnabit. Nam ubi primum prudentiae locus dabitur? an ut conquirat undique suavitates? Quam miser virtutis famulatus servientis voluptati. Quod autem munus prudentiae? an legere intellegenter voluptates? fac nihil isto esse iucundius, quid cogitari potest turpius? Iam, qui dolorem summum malum dicat, apud eum quem habet locum fortitudo, quae est dolorum laborumque contemptio? Quamvis enim multis locis dicat Epicurus, sicuti dicit, satis fortiter de dolore, tamen non id spectandum est, quid dicat, sed quid consentaneum sit ei dicere, qui bona voluptate terminaverit, mala dolore. Et si illum audiam de continentia et temperantia, dicit ille quidem multa multis locis, sed aqua haeret, ut aiunt. Nam qui potest temperantiam laudare is, qui ponat summum bonum in voluptate? Est enim temperantia libidinum inimica, libidines autem consectatrices voluptatis.

118. Atque in his tamen tribus generibus quoquo modo possunt, non incallide tergiversantur. Prudentiam introducunt scientiam suppeditantem voluptates, depellentem dolores. Fortitudinem quoque aliquo modo expediunt, cum tradunt rationem neglegendae mortis, perpetiendi doloris. Etiam temperantiam inducunt non facillime illi quidem, sed tamen quoquo modo possunt. Dicunt enim voluptatis magnitudinem doloris detractione finiri. Iustitia vacillat vel iacet potius omnesque eae virtutes, quae in communitate cernuntur et in societate generis humani. Neque enim bonitas nec liberalitas nec comitas esse potest, non plus quam amicitia, si haec non per se expetantur, sed ad voluptatem utilitatemve referantur.

119. Conferamus igitur in pauca. Nam ut utilitatem nullam esse docuimus, quae honestati esset contraria, sic omnem voluptatem dicimus honestati esse contrariam. Quo magis reprehendendos Calliphontem et Dinomachum iudico, qui se dirempturos controversiam putaverunt, si cum honestate voluptatem tamquam cum homine pecudem copulavissent. Non recipit istam coniunctionem honestas, aspernatur, repellit. Nec vero finis bonorum et malorum, qui simplex esse debet, ex dissimillimis rebus misceri et temperari potest. Sed de hoc (magna enim res est) alio loco pluribus; nunc ad propositum.

120. Quemadmodum igitur, si quando ea, quae videtur utilitas, honestati repugnat, diiudicanda res sit, satis est supra disputatum. Sin autem speciem utilitatis etiam voluptas habere dicetur, nulla potest esse ei cum honestate coniunctio. Nam, ut tribuamus aliquid voluptati, condimenti fortasse non nihil, utilitatis certe nihil habebit.

121. Habes a patre munus, Marce fili, mea quidem sententia magnum, sed perinde erit, ut acceperis. Quamquam hi tibi tres libri inter Cratippi commentarios tamquam hospites erunt recipiendi, sed, ut, si ipse venissem Athenas, quod quidem esset factum, nisi me e medio cursu clara voce patria revocasset, aliquando me quoque audires, sic, quoniam his voluminibus ad te profecta vox est mea, tribues iis temporis, quantum poteris, poteris autem quantum voles. Cum vero intellexero te hoc scientiae genere gaudere, tum et praesens tecum propediem, ut spero, et dum aberis, absens loquar. Vale igitur, mi Cicero, tibique persuade esse te quidem mihi carissimum, sed multo fore cariorem, si talibus monumentis praeceptisque laetabere.

## Translation — Mouseia

> Complete machine-assisted Musean translation made directly from the Latin, with source-language review. All 121 sections follow the Latin Library numbering; six transcription repairs are documented in the source record.

### Book III

1. My son Marcus, Cato, who was roughly his contemporary, writes that Publius Scipio, the first to be called Africanus, used to say that he was never less idle than when he had leisure, and never less alone than when he was alone. A splendid saying, worthy of a great and wise man! It shows that in his leisure he would think about his work, and in solitude converse with himself, so that he was never inactive and sometimes had no need of another person’s conversation. Thus two things that make others languid—leisure and solitude—sharpened his powers. I wish we could truthfully say the same of ourselves. Yet if we cannot match such exceptional gifts by imitation, at least in our desire to do so we come very close. For impious arms and violence have barred us from public life and the business of the courts, and so we seek leisure; and because of this, having left the city to wander through the countryside, we are often alone.

2. But neither this leisure nor this solitude can compare with Africanus’s. He would sometimes take his leisure as a rest from the noblest duties of state, and at times withdraw from the crowds and gatherings of people into solitude as into a harbor. Our leisure, by contrast, has been imposed by a lack of work, not a desire for rest. With the Senate extinguished and the courts destroyed, what can we do in the Senate house or the forum that is worthy of us?

3. Thus we, who once lived amid the greatest throngs and in full view of our fellow citizens, now avoid the sight of the criminals who swarm everywhere, hide ourselves as far as we can, and are often alone. But learned men have taught us not only to choose the least among evils, but also to extract whatever good those very evils may contain. I therefore make use of my leisure—though it is not the kind that a man who once secured peace for his country ought to enjoy—and do not let the solitude imposed on me by necessity, not choice, lapse into idleness.

4. Still, Africanus deserves greater praise, in my judgment. No written record of his genius survives, no work produced in leisure, no gift of solitude. We must therefore conclude that the activity of his mind and his investigation of the matters he pursued in thought kept him from ever being idle or alone. But we, who lack the strength to escape solitude through silent reflection, have turned all our energy and attention to this work of writing. And so, in the short time since the republic was overthrown, we have written more than in the many years when it stood.

5. Yet although the whole field of philosophy, my dear Cicero, is fertile and fruitful, with no part left uncultivated or neglected, no region within it is richer or more productive than the subject of duties, from which we derive the principles of a steadfast and morally upright life. So although I trust that you constantly hear and learn these things from our Cratippus, the foremost philosopher of our time, I still think it beneficial for such voices to sound around you on every side, and, if possible, for your ears to hear nothing else.

6. Everyone who intends to enter on an upright life should do this, but I doubt whether anyone should do so more than you. You bear a considerable expectation that you will match my diligence, a great expectation that you will match my public honors, and perhaps some expectation that you will match my reputation. You have also taken on a heavy responsibility toward both Athens and Cratippus. Since you have traveled to them as though to a market for the liberal arts, it would be deeply shameful to return empty-handed, discrediting both the city’s prestige and your teacher’s. So bring to bear all the effort your mind can muster, all the exertion you can sustain—if learning is an exertion rather than a pleasure—and do not let it appear that, when I had supplied you with everything, you alone failed yourself. But enough of this: I have often written you at length to encourage you. Let us now return to the remaining part of the division we proposed.

7. Panaetius, then, who unquestionably gave the most thorough account of duties, and whom we have chiefly followed, with certain corrections, set out three kinds of question on which people commonly deliberate and seek advice about duty. First, they ask whether the action under consideration is morally right or wrong; second, whether it is advantageous or disadvantageous; and third, when something apparently right conflicts with something apparently advantageous, how the two should be distinguished. He explained the first two kinds in three books. He wrote that he would discuss the third next, but did not fulfill his promise.

8. I find this all the more surprising because his pupil Posidonius writes that Panaetius lived for thirty years after publishing those books. I am also surprised that Posidonius touched only briefly on this subject in some notes, especially since he writes that no subject in the whole of philosophy is so essential.

9. I entirely disagree with those who deny that Panaetius left this subject unfinished and say instead that he deliberately set it aside, and ought never to have written about it at all, because advantage can never conflict with moral goodness. One of these points is open to question: whether the third kind of inquiry in Panaetius’s division should have been included or omitted altogether. The other admits of no doubt: Panaetius undertook it but left it unfinished. A man who completes two parts of a threefold division necessarily has a third remaining. Besides, at the end of his third book he promises to discuss this part next.

10. There is also the authoritative testimony of Posidonius. In one of his letters he writes that Publius Rutilius Rufus, who had studied under Panaetius, used to say that no one had pursued the subjects Panaetius left untouched [and unfinished], because of the excellence of what he had completed—just as no painter had been found to finish the part of the Coan Venus that Apelles had left only begun, since the beauty of her face destroyed any hope of rendering the rest of her body to match.

11. There can therefore be no doubt about Panaetius’s intention. Whether he was right to add this third part to the inquiry into duty is perhaps open to debate. For whether moral goodness is the only good, as the Stoics hold, or whether it is the highest good in the sense maintained by your Peripatetics—so that everything placed in the opposite scale scarcely has the slightest weight—there can be no doubt that advantage can never contend with moral goodness. Thus we are told that Socrates used to curse those who first separated in thought what nature had joined together. The Stoics agreed with him so fully that they held whatever was morally right to be advantageous, and nothing advantageous that was not morally right.

12. Now if Panaetius were the sort of thinker to say that virtue should be cultivated because it produces advantage, as do those who measure the things worth seeking by pleasure or freedom from pain, he would be entitled to say that advantage sometimes conflicts with moral goodness. But he holds that only what is morally right is good, and that the things opposed to it, despite some appearance of advantage, neither make life better by their presence nor worse by their absence. He therefore seems to have had no reason to introduce a deliberation in which what appears advantageous is weighed against what is morally right.

13. For what the Stoics call the highest good, living in agreement with nature, means, as I understand it, always being in accord with virtue, and choosing other things that conform to nature only if they do not conflict with virtue. Since this is so, some think that this comparison was wrongly introduced and that no instruction at all should have been given on this kind of question. Now moral goodness in its strict and true sense belongs only to the wise and can never be separated from virtue. But in those whose wisdom is not complete, that perfect moral goodness itself cannot exist at all, though likenesses of it can.

14. For the duties we discuss in these books are what the Stoics call intermediate duties. They are common to people generally and have a wide reach; many attain them both through natural goodness of character and through progress in learning. But the duty they also call right action is perfect and complete, possessing, as they themselves say, every element of perfection, and it can belong to no one but the wise.

15. Yet when an action displays these intermediate duties, it seems to have been carried out to full perfection, because ordinary people generally do not understand how far it falls short of perfection; as far as they can see, nothing has been left out. The same thing happens with poems, paintings, and a great many other things: the untrained take pleasure in works and praise them when they do not deserve praise. The reason, I think, is that these works contain something sound that appeals to people without knowledge, who cannot at the same time judge what is defective in each case. And so, once experts have instructed them, they readily abandon their judgment. These duties, then, which we discuss in these books, are described as a kind of moral goodness of the second order, not the exclusive possession of the wise but shared with the whole human race.

16. They therefore appeal to everyone who has the seeds of virtue. Yet when the two Decii or the two Scipios are remembered as brave men, or when Fabricius or Aristides is called just, we do not seek in the former examples of courage, or in the latter examples of justice, of the kind we would seek in a wise man. None of them was wise in the sense in which we wish the word to be understood. Nor were Marcus Cato and Gaius Laelius wise, though they were regarded and called so; not even the Seven Sages were. But through their frequent performance of intermediate duties they bore a certain likeness and appearance of wise men.

17. Therefore it is wrong to weigh true moral goodness against a conflicting advantage. Nor should what we commonly call moral goodness, cultivated by those who wish to be regarded as good men, ever be weighed against material gains. We must guard and preserve the moral goodness within the reach of our understanding just as the wise must guard what is properly called, and truly is, moral goodness. Otherwise we cannot hold on to whatever progress we have made toward virtue. But these remarks concern those who are considered good because they observe their duties.

18. Those, however, who measure everything by gains and benefits, and refuse to let moral goodness outweigh them, habitually compare what is morally right with what they think advantageous when they deliberate. Good men do not. I therefore think that when Panaetius said people commonly hesitate over this comparison, he meant precisely what he said: that they commonly do so, not that they ought to. For it is deeply shameful not only to value what appears advantageous above what is morally right, but even to compare the two and hesitate between them. What, then, sometimes gives rise to uncertainty and seems to call for consideration? I believe that, whenever uncertainty arises, it concerns the nature of the action under consideration.

19. For circumstances often make an action that is usually considered wrong turn out not to be wrong. Let us take an example with broad implications. What crime can be greater than killing not merely a human being, but a close friend? Has someone, then, bound himself in guilt by killing a tyrant, even if that tyrant was his friend? The Roman people certainly do not think so: of all glorious deeds, they consider this the finest. Has advantage therefore defeated moral goodness? Rather, moral goodness has followed advantage. Thus, if we are to judge without error whenever what we call advantageous seems to conflict with what we understand to be morally right, we must establish a rule. If we follow it in weighing actions, we shall never depart from duty.

20. This rule will be most closely in accord with Stoic reasoning and teaching. We follow that teaching in these books for this reason: although both the Old Academics and your Peripatetics, who were once identical with the Academics, place what is morally right above what appears advantageous, these matters receive more illuminating treatment from those who hold that everything morally right is also advantageous, and nothing advantageous that is not morally right, than from those who admit either moral goodness without advantage or advantage without moral goodness. Our own Academy gives us great freedom: we are entitled to defend whatever position strikes us as most probable. But I return to the rule.

21. To take something from another person, then, and for one human being to increase his own well-being at another’s expense is more contrary to nature than death, poverty, pain, or anything else that can befall our bodies or our external circumstances. For, to begin with, it destroys human fellowship and society. If we are so disposed that each of us robs or injures another for his own gain, the fellowship of the human race, which accords most closely with nature, must inevitably be torn apart.

22. Suppose each limb had a mind of its own and thought it could flourish by drawing into itself the health of the limb next to it: the whole body would inevitably grow weak and die. In the same way, if each of us seizes the benefits of others for himself and takes whatever he can from anyone for his own gain, human society and fellowship must inevitably be overthrown. Nature allows each person to prefer acquiring the necessities of life for himself rather than for another. But nature does not permit us to increase our resources, our stores, and our wealth by plundering others.

23. Nor is it nature alone—that is, the law of nations—that has established this principle. The laws of peoples, by which the state is held together in each community, likewise forbid anyone to harm another for his own benefit. This is the aim and intention of the laws: to preserve the bond between citizens unharmed. Those who break it they restrain by death, exile, imprisonment, and financial penalties. The rational order of nature itself, which is both divine and human law, enforces this far more strongly. Anyone who wishes to obey it—and all who wish to live according to nature will obey it—will never reach for another’s property and appropriate what he has taken from someone else.

24. For loftiness and greatness of spirit, and likewise kindness, justice, and generosity, accord far more closely with nature than pleasure, life, or riches. To look down on these last and count them as nothing when comparing them with the common advantage is itself the mark of a great and lofty spirit. [To take something from another for one’s own benefit, however, is more contrary to nature than death, pain, or other things of that kind.]

25. Likewise, it accords more closely with nature to undertake the greatest labors and hardships to preserve or help all the nations of the earth, if possible, following the example of Hercules, whom human tradition, remembering his services, placed in the council of the heavenly gods, than to live in solitude, not only free of every hardship but surrounded by the greatest pleasures, abounding in every resource and even excelling in beauty and strength. Thus the finest and most brilliant spirits vastly prefer the former life to the latter. It follows that a human being who obeys nature cannot harm another human being.

26. Furthermore, a person who injures another to secure some benefit for himself either thinks he is doing nothing contrary to nature, or believes that death, poverty, pain, and even the loss of children, relatives, and friends are more to be avoided than doing anyone an injustice. If he thinks that injuring people does nothing contrary to nature, how can you reason with someone who strips human beings of their very humanity? But if he thinks injustice should indeed be avoided, yet death, poverty, and pain are far worse, his mistake is to regard any affliction of the body or of fortune as more serious than defects of character. Everyone, then, should have one aim: that the advantage of each should be the same as the advantage of all. If each person snatches it for himself, all human fellowship will dissolve.

27. Moreover, if nature prescribes that one human being should wish to look after another, whoever that person may be, for the very reason that he is human, then by that same nature everyone’s advantage must be shared. If that is so, we are all bound by one and the same law of nature; and if that in turn is so, the law of nature certainly forbids us to injure another. But the first proposition is true; therefore the last is true as well.

28. For it is plainly absurd to say, as some do, that they would take nothing from a parent or brother for their own benefit, but that other citizens are a different matter. They hold that no bond of law, no fellowship for the common advantage, unites them with their fellow citizens—a view that tears apart the whole society of the state. Those who say we must consider our fellow citizens but not foreigners break the common fellowship of the human race. Once that is removed, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice are uprooted. Those who uproot these must be judged impious even toward the immortal gods. For they overthrow the fellowship the gods established among human beings. Its closest bond is the conviction that for one human being to take something from another for his own benefit is more contrary to nature than to endure every hardship, whether in external circumstances, in the body, or even in the mind itself. For justice alone is the mistress and queen of all the virtues.

29. Someone may perhaps say, “Would not a wise man, then, if he were dying of hunger himself, take food from another man who was of no use for anything?” Certainly not. For my life is not more advantageous to me than a disposition of mind that keeps me from injuring anyone for my own benefit. What, then? If a good man could strip Phalaris, that cruel and savage tyrant, of his clothing to keep himself from dying of cold, should he not do it?

30. These cases are very easy to judge. If you take something for your own advantage from a person who is of no use in any respect, you act inhumanely and against the law of nature. But if you are someone who, by remaining alive, can bring great advantage to the state and to human society, you should not be blamed if you take something from another for that reason. If that is not the case, however, each person must bear his own hardship rather than diminish another’s well-being. Illness, then, or poverty, or anything of that kind, is not more contrary to nature than taking and coveting what belongs to another; but abandoning the common advantage is contrary to nature, for it is unjust.

31. And so the very law of nature, which safeguards and sustains human advantage, will surely decree that the necessities of life should pass from an idle, useless man to one who is wise, good, and brave, whose death would seriously diminish the common advantage. But he must not, out of self-esteem and self-love, make this an excuse for injustice. In this way he will always fulfill his duty, looking to the advantage of humanity and to that human fellowship I so often mention.

32. As for Phalaris, the judgment is quite simple. We have no fellowship with tyrants; rather, we are utterly opposed to them. Nor is it against nature to strip a man of his possessions, if you can, when it is right to kill him. This entire pestilent, godless breed must be expelled from the human community. Just as certain limbs are amputated when they have begun to lose their blood and, as it were, their breath of life, and are harming the rest of the body, so this savage brutality of a beast in human form must be severed from the common body of humanity. All questions in which duty must be determined by circumstances belong to this class.

33. These, I believe, are the kinds of matters Panaetius would have pursued, had some accident or other occupation not frustrated his plan. The preceding books contain quite enough precepts to let us discern, in these very inquiries, what must be avoided because it is wrong, and what need not be avoided because there is nothing wrong in it at all. But since we are now setting something like a roof upon a work begun and already nearly finished, I shall follow the geometers: they do not ordinarily demonstrate everything, but ask that certain things be granted them so they can more easily explain what they wish. So I ask you, my dear Cicero, to grant me, if you can, that nothing but what is right should be sought for its own sake. If Cratippus will not allow you that, you will at least grant that what is right should be sought for its own sake above all else. Either will satisfy me. At one time I find one view more persuasive, at another the other; beyond these, I find nothing persuasive at all.

34. First, Panaetius must be defended on this point: he did not say that what is advantageous can sometimes conflict with what is right—his principles would not have allowed it—but that what seems advantageous can. He repeatedly declares that nothing is advantageous unless it is also right, and nothing right unless it is also advantageous. He denies that any greater plague has invaded human life than the belief of those who have torn the two apart. Thus he introduced this apparent, not actual, conflict, not so that we might sometimes prefer advantage to what is right, but so that, when such cases arose, we could judge them without error. We shall therefore complete the part he left unfinished without outside support, fighting, as the saying goes, under our own Mars. For among the writings on this subject since Panaetius that have come into my hands, I have found nothing satisfactory.

35. When some prospect of advantage presents itself, we are bound to be moved by it. But if closer attention reveals something wrong bound up with the thing that offered this prospect, we must not think we are giving up an advantage: we must understand that where there is wrongdoing, there can be no genuine advantage. Now, if nothing is so contrary to nature as wrongdoing—for nature calls for rightness, harmony, and consistency, and rejects their opposites—and nothing is so much in accord with nature as genuine advantage, then advantage and wrongdoing certainly cannot exist in the same thing. Again, if we are born for moral goodness, and it alone should be sought, as Zeno held, or at least must be given far greater weight than everything else combined, as Aristotle maintained, then what is right must be either the sole good or the highest good. And what is good is certainly advantageous. Therefore whatever is right is advantageous.

36. Dishonest men make this mistake: once they seize upon something that seems advantageous, they immediately separate it from what is right. From this come daggers, poisons, forged wills; from this theft, embezzlement, the plundering and pillaging of allies and citizens; from this arise desires for excessive wealth, for intolerable power, and finally, even in free states, for kingship. Nothing more hideous or more shameful can be imagined than these desires. With their distorted judgment they see the profits to be made, but they do not see the penalty—I do not mean the penalty imposed by laws, which they often break through, but that of wrongdoing itself, the bitterest penalty of all.

37. Let us therefore exclude this whole class of deliberators, utterly criminal and godless as they are: those who deliberate whether to follow what they see is right or knowingly stain themselves with crime. There is guilt in the very hesitation, even if they never carry it into action. We must not deliberate at all over matters in which the deliberation itself is wrong.

38. We must also remove from every deliberation the hope or expectation of concealing and hiding what we do. If we have made any progress in philosophy, we should be firmly convinced that even if we could hide our actions from all gods and human beings, we must still do nothing greedy, nothing unjust, nothing lustful, nothing unrestrained. This is why Plato introduces his Gyges. When the earth split open after heavy rains, he descended into the chasm and, as the story goes, noticed a bronze horse with doors in its sides. Opening these, he saw the body of a dead man of extraordinary size, with a gold ring on his finger. He pulled it off and put it on himself. He was a royal shepherd, and then returned to a gathering of the shepherds. There, whenever he turned the ring’s setting toward his palm, no one could see him, although he could see everything; when he turned the ring back into place, he became visible again. Taking advantage of the ring’s power, he seduced the queen and, with her help, killed the king, his master, and disposed of those he thought stood in his way. No one could see him committing these crimes. Thus, thanks to the ring, he suddenly became king of Lydia. Now, if a wise man had this very ring, he would think himself no freer to do wrong than if he did not have it. Good men seek what is right, not what can be concealed.

39. At this point some philosophers, by no means bad men but not sufficiently acute, say that Plato has brought forward an invented, imaginary tale—as though he claimed that it really happened or could have happened. Here is the force of the ring and of the example: if no one would ever know, or even suspect, that you had done something for wealth, power, mastery, or lust, if it would remain forever unknown to gods and human beings, would you do it? They say this is impossible. It is possible, in fact; but I am asking what they would do if what they say is impossible were possible. They press their objection with quite obtuse insistence. They say it is impossible and stand by that, failing to see the force of the word “if.” When we ask what they would do if they could conceal it, we are not asking whether they can conceal it. Rather, we are putting them to a kind of torture: if they answer that, with impunity assured, they would do whatever paid, they confess themselves criminals; if they say they would not, they concede that everything wrong must be avoided for its own sake. But let us now return to our subject.

40. Many situations often arise that unsettle our minds with the appearance of advantage. The question is not whether moral goodness should be abandoned for the sake of some great advantage—that would certainly be wicked—but whether something that seems advantageous can be done without wrongdoing. When Brutus removed his colleague Collatinus from office, his action could have seemed unjust: Collatinus had shared in Brutus’s plans to expel the kings and had helped carry them out. But once the leading men had resolved that the relatives of Tarquin the Proud, the name of the Tarquins, and the memory of kingship must all be removed, what was advantageous—taking thought for the country—was so clearly right that Collatinus himself ought to have approved. Thus advantage prevailed because the action was right; without that, it could not even have been advantageous.

41. Not so, however, with the king who founded our city. The appearance of advantage drove him on: thinking it more advantageous to rule alone than with another, he killed his brother. He abandoned both family devotion and humanity to secure what seemed advantageous but was not. Yet he put forward the matter of the wall as his excuse, a pretense of righteousness neither plausible nor at all sufficient. He did wrong, then, if I may say so with the permission of Quirinus—or Romulus.

42. Still, we need not surrender our own advantages and hand them over to others when we need them ourselves. Each of us should pursue his own advantage, provided he can do so without injuring another. Chrysippus puts it well, as he does so many things: “A man running a race should exert himself and strive as hard as he can to win, but he must never trip his competitor or push him aside with his hand. So in life it is not unfair for each person to seek what serves his needs, but he has no right to snatch it from someone else.”

43. Duties become most entangled in friendships: it is contrary to duty both to withhold from friends what we can rightly grant and to grant what is not fair. But there is a brief and simple rule for this whole subject. The things that seem advantageous—public honors, wealth, pleasures, and the rest of that kind—must never be preferred to friendship. Yet a good man will not act against his country or against his oath and good faith for a friend’s sake, not even when he is sitting in judgment on that very friend. He puts aside the role of friend when he takes on that of judge. He will grant friendship this much: he would rather his friend’s case were just, and he will arrange the time for pleading the case to accommodate him, as far as the law allows.

44. But when he must pronounce judgment under oath, he should remember that he is calling God as his witness—that is, as I understand it, his own mind, the most divine thing God himself has given humanity. We have therefore inherited from our ancestors an admirable form of request to a judge, if only we held to it: “Whatever you can do without compromising your good faith.” This request concerns the concessions I mentioned a little earlier, which a judge may rightly make to a friend. For if everything friends want must be done, such relationships should be called conspiracies, not friendships.

45. I am speaking of ordinary friendships; among men of wisdom and perfect character, nothing of this sort can occur. They say the Pythagoreans Damon and Phintias were so devoted to one another that, when the tyrant Dionysius had fixed a day for the execution of one of them, and the condemned man had asked for a few days to make arrangements for his family, the other stood surety for his return, on condition that he himself would die if his friend did not come back. When the man returned on the appointed day, the tyrant, astonished at their faithfulness, asked them to admit him as a third member of their friendship.

46. When, therefore, what seems advantageous in friendship is weighed against what is right, let the appearance of advantage fall and moral goodness prevail. When friends ask for things that are not right, religious obligation and good faith must take precedence over friendship. In this way we shall achieve the discrimination in matters of duty that we are seeking. But in public affairs wrongdoing is very often prompted by the appearance of advantage, as when our people destroyed Corinth. The Athenians acted even more harshly when they decreed that the Aeginetans, who had a powerful fleet, should have their thumbs cut off. This seemed advantageous, since Aegina lay so near the Piraeus that it posed a serious threat. But nothing cruel is advantageous: cruelty is the greatest enemy of human nature, which we ought to follow.

47. Those who deny foreigners the use of their cities and expel them also act wrongly, as Pennus did in our fathers’ day and Papius has done recently. It is right that someone who is not a citizen should not be allowed to pass as one: that was the law enacted by those eminently wise consuls Crassus and Scaevola. But to deny foreigners the use of a city is certainly inhuman. Splendid, by contrast, are the deeds in which the appearance of public advantage is disregarded in favor of what is right. Our state is full of examples, at many times but especially in the Second Punic War. After the disaster at Cannae it showed greater spirit than ever in prosperity: no sign of fear, no mention of peace. Such is the power of moral goodness that it eclipses the appearance of advantage.

48. When the Athenians could no longer withstand the Persian assault, they decided to leave their city, entrust their wives and children to Troezen, embark on their ships, and defend the freedom of Greece with their fleet. A certain Cyrsilus urged them to remain in the city and admit Xerxes, and they stoned him to death. He seemed to be pursuing advantage; but there was none, since it conflicted with what was right.

49. After victory in the war with Persia, Themistocles told the assembly that he had a plan that would save the state, but that it ought not to be made known. He asked the people to appoint someone with whom he could share it; Aristides was appointed. Themistocles told him that the Spartan fleet, which had been hauled ashore at Gythium, could be secretly burned, and that this would inevitably break Spartan power. After hearing him, Aristides came before the assembly amid great anticipation and said that Themistocles’ proposal was extremely advantageous but utterly wrong. The Athenians therefore judged that, because it was not right, it was not advantageous either, and on Aristides’ authority rejected the entire proposal without even hearing it. They acted better than we do, who exempt pirates from tribute and make our allies pay it. Let it stand, then, that what is wrong can never be advantageous, not even when you obtain what you think an advantage. The very belief that something wrong is advantageous is disastrous.

50. But, as I said above, situations often arise in which advantage seems to conflict with moral goodness, and we must examine whether the conflict is real or whether the two can be reconciled. Here is a question of that kind. Suppose, for example, that a good man has brought a large cargo of grain from Alexandria to Rhodes, when the Rhodians are suffering from scarcity and famine and grain prices are extremely high. Suppose he also knows that several merchants have sailed from Alexandria, and has seen ships laden with grain on their way to Rhodes. Will he tell the Rhodians, or will he keep silent and sell his own grain at the highest possible price? We are imagining a wise and good man. We are asking about the deliberations and reflections of someone who will not keep the Rhodians in the dark if he thinks it wrong, but who is uncertain whether it is wrong.

51. In cases of this kind, Diogenes of Babylon, a great and distinguished Stoic, generally takes one view, and his pupil Antipater, a man of exceptional acuteness, another. Antipater holds that everything must be disclosed, so that the buyer remains ignorant of nothing at all that the seller knows. Diogenes holds that the seller must declare defects to the extent required by civil law, deal otherwise without trickery, and, since he is selling, wish to sell on the best possible terms. “I have brought my grain here and put it on display. I am selling my own property for no more than others do, perhaps even for less, now that the supply is greater. Whom am I wronging?”

52. On the other side, Antipater’s argument rises to meet him: “What are you saying? You ought to look after human beings and serve human fellowship. You were born under that law and have those principles of nature which you must obey and follow: your advantage must be the common advantage, and the common advantage yours in turn. Will you conceal from people the benefits and plentiful supplies that await them?” Diogenes will perhaps answer like this: “Concealing is one thing, keeping silent another. Nor am I concealing anything from you now if I do not tell you the nature of the gods or the ultimate good, though knowing these would benefit you more than cheap wheat. But not everything it would benefit you to hear is something I am obliged to say.”

53. “On the contrary,” the other will say, “you are obliged, if you remember that a fellowship unites human beings by nature.” “I remember,” Diogenes will say, “but is this fellowship such that no one can have anything of his own? If that is so, nothing should even be sold: everything should be given away.”
You see that throughout this dispute no one says, “Although this is wrong, I shall still do it because it pays.” Rather, one side argues that it is advantageous in a way that involves no wrong, while the other argues that it must not be done precisely because it is wrong.

54. Suppose a good man is selling a house because of certain defects that he knows about but others do not. It is unhealthy but thought to be healthy; no one knows that snakes appear in every bedroom; it is built of unsound timber and threatens to collapse, but no one except the owner knows this. My question is this: if the seller does not tell the buyers these things, and sells the house for much more than he had expected to get, has he acted unjustly or dishonestly? “Certainly he has,” says Antipater. “If allowing a buyer to rush headlong into a ruinous swindle through his mistake is not refusing to show a lost traveler the way—an offense condemned by public curses at Athens—what is? It is even worse than not showing the way: it is knowingly leading someone else astray.”

55. Diogenes replies: “Did the man force you to buy, when he did not even urge you to? He advertised what he did not like; you bought what you liked. If people who advertise a good, well-built country house are not thought to have deceived anyone, even if it is neither good nor soundly built, how much less have those who did not praise their house at all? Where the decision rests with the buyer, what fraud can there be on the seller’s part? And if he is not bound to make good every statement he has made, do you think he is bound to make good what he has not said? What could be more foolish than for a seller to list the defects of the thing he is selling? What could be more absurd than for an auctioneer, on the owner’s orders, to announce, ‘I am selling an unhealthy house’?”

56. Thus, in some doubtful cases, one side defends moral goodness, while the other argues for advantage in such a way that doing what seems advantageous is not merely right, but failing to do it is actually wrong. This is the conflict that so often seems to arise between what is advantageous and what is right. These questions must be decided: we have set them out not to leave them as questions, but to explain them.

57. It seems, then, that neither the grain merchant should have kept the Rhodians in the dark nor the seller of the house his buyers. Not everything you leave unsaid amounts to concealment. Concealment is wanting, for your own profit, to keep what you know from people whose interest it is to know it. Who cannot see what sort of concealment this is, and what sort of man practices it? Certainly not an open, straightforward, honorable, just, or good man, but rather one who is shifty, secretive, crafty, deceitful, malicious, cunning, practiced in trickery, wily. Is it not disadvantageous to be called by all these names for vice, and many more besides?

58. But if those who keep silent deserve blame, what are we to think of those who resort to outright falsehood? Gaius Canius, a Roman knight, a man not without wit and quite well read, had gone to Syracuse for leisure, as he used to say, not business. He often said he wanted to buy a small garden estate where he could invite friends and enjoy himself without interruptions. When this became widely known, a certain Pythius, who was a banker at Syracuse, told him that his gardens were not for sale, but that Canius was welcome to use them as his own if he wished. At the same time he invited him to dinner there the next day. Once Canius had accepted, Pythius, who as a banker had influence among all classes, summoned the fishermen and asked them to fish in front of his gardens the following day, giving them directions for what he wanted done. Canius arrived for dinner on time. Pythius had prepared a lavish banquet; a crowd of boats lay before their eyes; each fisherman brought in his own catch, and the fish were tossed down at Pythius’ feet.

59. Then Canius said, “Tell me, Pythius, what is all this? So many fish? So many boats?” “What is surprising about it?” he replied. “All the fish in Syracuse are here. This is where they get their water; these men cannot do without this estate.” Burning with desire, Canius pressed Pythius to sell. At first Pythius was reluctant. Why say more? Canius prevailed. Eager and wealthy, he bought at the price Pythius wanted, and bought the place fully furnished. He recorded the debt and completed the transaction. The next day Canius invited his close friends. He arrived early himself and saw not a single oarlock. He asked his nearest neighbor whether it was some holiday for fishermen, since he saw none of them. “None that I know of,” the man replied, “but no one ordinarily fishes here. That is why I wondered yesterday what had happened.”

60. Canius was furious, but what could he do? My colleague and close friend Gaius Aquilius had not yet introduced his forms of legal action for fraud. When asked, in connection with these very forms, what fraud was, he answered that it consisted in pretending one thing and doing another. A thoroughly clear definition, as one would expect from a man skilled at defining. Pythius, then, and everyone who does one thing while pretending another are faithless, dishonest, and malicious. No act of theirs can therefore be advantageous, stained as it is with so many vices.

61. But if Aquilius’s definition is true, pretense and concealment must be banished from every part of life. A good man, then, will neither pretend nor conceal anything to buy on better terms or to sell. Such fraud was already punishable under the laws: misconduct in guardianship under the Twelve Tables, the cheating of young people under the Plaetorian law, and, without a specific law, in proceedings whose formula includes the words “in good faith.” Among the other judicial formulas, these words stand out: in arbitration over a wife’s property, “what is better and fairer”; in a trust, “that dealings between good men be conducted well.” What, then? Can there be any element of fraud in “what is better and fairer”? Or when the formula says “dealings between good men be conducted well,” can anything be done deceitfully or maliciously? Fraud, as Aquilius says, consists in pretense. Every falsehood, then, must be removed from transactions. A seller will not plant a bidder to drive up the price, nor a buyer someone to bid against him. If either comes to naming a price, he will name it only once.

62. Quintus Scaevola, the son of Publius, asked the seller of an estate he was buying to name his price once and for all. When the seller did so, Scaevola said that he valued it more highly and added a hundred thousand sesterces. No one denies that this was the act of a good man; they deny that it was the act of a wise one, just as they would if he had sold for less than he could have obtained. Here, then, is the source of the damage: people suppose that goodness belongs to one class of men and wisdom to another. Hence Ennius’s line: “The wise man’s wisdom is in vain if he cannot benefit himself.” True enough—if Ennius and I agreed on what it means to benefit oneself.

63. I find that Hecato of Rhodes, a pupil of Panaetius, says in the books on duty he wrote for Quintus Tubero that a wise man should look after his property without doing anything contrary to custom, law, or established institutions. For we wish to be rich not for ourselves alone, but for our children, relatives, friends, and, above all, our country. The resources and wealth of individuals make up the riches of the state. Hecato cannot possibly approve of Scaevola’s conduct, which I mentioned a little earlier. For the only thing he says he will not do for his own profit is something unlawful.

64. For that he deserves neither much praise nor much gratitude. But if both pretense and concealment constitute fraud, very few dealings are free of it; and if a good man is one who helps everyone he can and harms no one, we certainly do not find such a man easily. Wrongdoing, then, is never advantageous, because it is always shameful; and since being a good man is always morally right, it is always advantageous.

65. As for the law governing real estate, our civil law requires sellers to disclose defects known to them. Under the Twelve Tables it was enough to make good whatever had been expressly declared, and anyone who denied his declaration incurred a penalty of twice the amount. But the jurists also established a penalty for silence. They ruled that a seller must answer for any defect in an estate that he knew about unless he had expressly disclosed it.

66. For example, when the augurs were about to take the auspices on the citadel, they ordered Tiberius Claudius Centumalus, who owned a house on the Caelian Hill, to demolish the parts whose height obstructed their observations. Claudius advertised the building for sale [sold it], and Publius Calpurnius Lanarius bought it. The augurs gave him the same notice. After Calpurnius had carried out the demolition and learned that Claudius had advertised the house only after receiving the augurs’ order to demolish it, he compelled him to submit to arbitration on “whatever he ought in good faith to give or do for him.” Marcus Cato gave judgment—the father of our Cato; for while others are identified by their fathers, the man who brought that shining light into the world should be identified by his son. As judge, then, he ruled that since the seller had known the facts and had not disclosed them at the sale, he must compensate the buyer for his loss.

67. He therefore held that good faith requires a defect known to the seller to be made known to the buyer. If his judgment was right, neither that grain merchant nor the seller of the unhealthy house was right to remain silent. But civil law cannot cover every instance of silence of this kind; those it can cover it deals with carefully. Our relative Marcus Marius Gratidianus had sold Gaius Sergius Orata a house he himself had bought from Orata a few years earlier. It was subject to an easement, but Marius had not mentioned this in the formal conveyance. The matter went to court. Crassus defended Orata, Antonius Gratidianus. Crassus pressed the law: “A seller must answer for a defect he knowingly failed to disclose.” Antonius pressed equity: “Since Sergius, who had sold the house himself, was not ignorant of the defect, there had been no need to mention it; nor had a man been deceived when he knew the legal condition of what he had bought.” Why do I tell you this? To make you understand that our ancestors had no liking for sharp practice.

68. But law and philosophy abolish sharp practice in different ways: law as far as it can lay its hands on it, philosophy as far as reason and understanding can reach. Reason, then, requires that nothing be done treacherously, nothing under false pretenses, nothing deceitfully. Is setting nets a form of entrapment even if you do not intend to rouse the game or drive it toward them? Wild animals often fall into nets with no one pursuing them. Are you, then, to advertise a house for sale, set up your notice like a net, [sell the house because of its defects,] and let someone stumble into it unwittingly?

69. I see that, because our customary conduct has become corrupt, this is not considered shameful by convention and is not forbidden by statute or civil law. It is, nevertheless, forbidden by the law of nature. For there is a fellowship—often as this has been said, it must be said still more often—whose widest reach embraces everyone in relation to everyone else; within it is the closer fellowship of those of the same people, and closer still that of citizens of the same state. Accordingly, our ancestors distinguished the law of nations from civil law. What belongs to civil law does not necessarily belong to the law of nations, but what belongs to the law of nations must also belong to civil law. Yet we possess no firm and distinct image of true law and genuine justice; we make do with shadows and likenesses. If only we followed even those! For they are drawn from the finest models of nature and truth.

70. How much those words are worth: “So that I may not be entrapped or defrauded through you or through my trust in you”! How golden these: “As dealings between good men ought to be conducted, well and without fraud”! But who are “good men,” and what does it mean for dealings to be “conducted well”? That is a great question. Quintus Scaevola, the chief pontiff, used to say that all arbitrations whose formula included “in good faith” carried the greatest force. He considered good faith a principle of the widest reach, applying to guardianships, partnerships, trusts, commissions, purchases, sales, hiring, and letting—the transactions that hold our common life together. In these cases, particularly since most allowed counterclaims, it took a great judge to determine what each party ought to make good to the other.

71. We must therefore abolish sharp practice, and the cunning that wishes to pass for practical wisdom but is far removed from it. Practical wisdom consists in distinguishing good from evil; cunning, if everything shameful is evil, prefers evil to good. Nor does civil law, drawing its authority from nature, punish malice and fraud only in real estate. In the sale of enslaved people, too, every fraud on the seller’s part is excluded. Under the aediles’ edict, he is answerable for what he ought to have known about their health, their running away, and their thefts. Heirs stand on a different footing.

72. From this we can understand that, since nature is the source of law, it accords with nature that no one should set out to profit by another’s ignorance. Nor can anything more destructive of human life be found than cunning disguised as sound judgment. From it spring those countless situations in which advantage seems to conflict with moral goodness. For how few people will be found who can refrain from wrongdoing when offered impunity and the certainty that no one will know!

73. Let us test the matter, if you like, with examples in which ordinary people might perhaps see no wrongdoing. We need not discuss assassins, poisoners, will-forgers, thieves, or embezzlers here; they must be dealt with by chains and prison, not by the words and arguments of philosophers. Let us instead consider the actions of those regarded as good men. Some people brought a forged will from Greece to Rome in the name of Lucius Minucius Basilus, a wealthy man. To make it easier to establish its validity, they named as their fellow heirs Marcus Crassus and Quintus Hortensius, the most influential men of their day. Although these men suspected the forgery, they knew of no guilt on their own part and did not reject this little gift from someone else’s crime. Well, then? Is that enough to make them appear innocent of wrongdoing? I do not think so, though I loved one while he lived and do not hate the other now that he is dead.

74. But Basilus had wanted Marcus Satrius, his sister’s son, to bear his name and had made him his heir—I mean the patron of the Picene and Sabine districts: what a disgraceful mark of our times [that title of theirs]! It was not fair that leading citizens should possess the property while Satrius received nothing but the name. For if a man acts unjustly when he fails, though able, to ward off a wrong and keep it from his own people, as I argued in the first book, what are we to think of someone who not only fails to prevent a wrong but actually helps it along? Even genuine inheritances seem dishonorable to me if they have been sought through malicious flattery, through a pretense of service rather than real service. Yet in such matters advantage and moral goodness sometimes seem to point in different directions. That is a mistake: the standard for advantage is the same as for moral goodness.

75. Anyone who fails to see this clearly will stop at no fraud, no crime. For if he thinks, “That is certainly right, but this pays,” he will dare, through this error, to tear apart what nature has joined together. That error is the source of every fraud, every evil deed, every crime. Suppose, then, a good man had the power to slip his name into the wills of the wealthy by snapping his fingers. He would not use it, even if he were certain that no one would ever suspect it at all. But give Marcus Crassus that power—to be named an heir with a snap of his fingers when he was not really an heir—and, believe me, he would dance in the Forum. A just man, however, the man we understand to be good, will take nothing from anyone to transfer it to himself. Anyone surprised by this should admit that he does not know what a good man is.

76. But anyone willing to unfold the conception lying wrapped within his own mind can teach himself that a good man is one who helps everyone he can and harms no one unless provoked by a wrong. What, then? Does a man do no harm when, by a sort of poison, he contrives to displace the true heirs and step into their place himself? “So he is not to do what is advantageous, what pays?” someone may ask. Rather, he must understand that nothing unjust either pays or brings advantage. Anyone who has not learned this cannot be a good man.

77. As a boy I used to hear from my father that Gaius Fimbria, a former consul, had been appointed judge in the case of Marcus Lutatius Pinthia, a thoroughly respectable Roman knight, who had entered into a wager on his being a good man. Fimbria told him that he would never judge that issue: if he ruled against him, he might strip a reputable man of his good name; if he ruled in his favor, he might seem to have pronounced someone a good man, though goodness embraces countless duties and praiseworthy qualities. To this good man, then, whom even Fimbria—not only Socrates—recognized, nothing that is not morally right can possibly seem advantageous. Such a man will not dare even to think, much less do, anything he would not dare proclaim in public. Is it not shameful that philosophers should doubt what even country people do not question? From them comes the proverb now worn smooth with age. When they praise someone’s trustworthiness and goodness, they say that he is a man you could play a finger-guessing game with in the dark. What can this mean except that nothing improper pays, even if you could gain it with no one able to challenge you?

78. Do you see that this proverb leaves no excuse either for Gyges or for the man I imagined a little earlier, who could sweep up everyone’s inheritance with a snap of his fingers? Just as something shameful, however well concealed, can never become morally right, so something that is not morally right cannot be made advantageous: nature resists and opposes it.

79. “But when the rewards are very great, there is a reason to do wrong.” Gaius Marius was far from any hope of the consulship. He had already languished for seven years after his praetorship and seemed unlikely ever to stand for consul. He was serving as lieutenant to Quintus Metellus, a distinguished man and citizen, when his commander sent him to Rome. There Marius accused Metellus before the Roman people of dragging out the war. If they made him consul, he said, he would soon bring Jugurtha, alive or dead, into the power of the Roman people. And so he did become consul, but he abandoned good faith and justice by bringing an excellent and most respected citizen into public disfavor through a false accusation—the very man whose lieutenant he was and who had sent him to Rome.

80. Nor did our Gratidianus fulfill the duty of a good man when he was praetor. The tribunes of the people had called in the board of praetors to settle the currency question by common agreement; at that time the value of money fluctuated so much that no one could know what he owned. Together they drew up an edict providing for a penalty and a judicial proceeding, and agreed that they would all mount the speakers’ platform together that afternoon. The others went off in different directions; Marius went straight from the benches to the platform and alone proclaimed what they had drafted together. And, if you want to know, it brought him great honor: statues in every neighborhood, incense and candles before them. Why say more? No one was ever dearer to the masses.

81. These are the things that sometimes unsettle our judgment: the violation of fairness seems comparatively small, while the gain it produces seems immense. Thus Marius thought that stealing popular favor from his colleagues and the tribunes of the people was not so very shameful, while becoming consul through it—the aim he then had in view—was highly advantageous. But there is one rule for everything, and I want you to know it thoroughly: either what seems advantageous must not be shameful, or, if it is shameful, it must not seem advantageous. What, then? Can we judge either the earlier Marius or this one a good man? Unfold and examine your understanding to see what [image], form, and conception of a good man it contains. Can a good man, then, lie, make accusations for his own profit, snatch another’s due, or deceive? Certainly not.

82. Is anything, then, worth so much, or any gain so desirable, that you should lose both the luster and the name of a good man? What can this so-called advantage bring you to equal what it takes away if it robs you of that name and strips you of good faith and justice? What difference does it make whether someone turns from a human being into a beast or keeps a human shape while harboring a beast’s savagery?
And what of those who neglect everything right and morally good, provided they gain power? Are they not doing the same as the man who even wanted as his father-in-law the man whose daring would give him power? It seemed advantageous to him to hold supreme power while another bore the hatred. He did not see how unjust this was to his country, or how shameful. The father-in-law himself, however, was forever quoting Greek verses from the Phoenician Women. I will render them as best I can—roughly, perhaps, but still so that their meaning can be understood:

“For if justice must be broken for the sake of kingship,
Break it; in all else, honor sacred duty.”

A deadly sentiment from Eteocles—or rather from Euripides, who made an exception for the one act that was the most criminal of all.

83. Why, then, gather petty examples: inheritances, trade, fraudulent sales? Here is a man who longed to be king of the Roman people and master of every nation, and achieved it. Anyone who calls that ambition morally right is mad: he approves the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their foul, detestable suppression glorious. But if someone admits that it is not morally right to reign as king in a state that has been free and ought to remain so, yet says that it is advantageous to the man who can achieve it, what rebuke—or rather what abuse—should I use to try to wrench him from so great an error? Immortal gods, can the foulest, most loathsome murder of one’s country be advantageous to anyone, even if the man who has bound himself to that crime is called “father” by the citizens he has crushed? Advantage, then, must be measured by moral goodness, and in such a way that the two seem different in name but identical in substance.

84. In popular opinion, I know of no advantage greater than kingship. Yet when I begin to bring the question back to the truth, I find nothing more disadvantageous to the man who has acquired it unjustly. Can anguish, anxiety, fear by day and night, a life crowded with plots and dangers, be advantageous to anyone? “Many are hostile and disloyal to the throne, few friendly,” says Accius. But what throne? One inherited lawfully from Tantalus and Pelops. How many more enemies, then, do you think that king had who used the army of the Roman people to crush the Roman people themselves, and forced a state not merely free but ruling over other nations to serve him?

85. What stains on his conscience do you think he carried in his heart, what wounds? And how can anyone’s life be advantageous to him when the terms of that life are such that whoever takes it will win the greatest gratitude and glory? If, then, the things that seem most advantageous are not so because they are filled with disgrace and shame, we should be thoroughly convinced that nothing can be advantageous unless it is morally right.

86. This judgment has been made often, but notably in the war with Pyrrhus by Gaius Fabricius, then consul for the second time, and by our senate. King Pyrrhus had taken the initiative in making war on the Roman people, and the struggle for supremacy was against a king of noble birth and great power. A deserter from his army came to Fabricius’s camp and promised that, if offered a reward, he would return to Pyrrhus’s camp as secretly as he had come and poison the king. Fabricius had him taken back to Pyrrhus, and the senate praised his action. Yet if we look for the appearance and reputation of advantage, that one deserter would have ended a great war and removed a formidable rival for supremacy. But it would have been a great disgrace and scandal to defeat by crime, rather than valor, a man with whom we were competing for glory.

87. Which course, then, was more advantageous, whether to Fabricius, who was to our city what Aristides was to Athens, or to our senate, which never separated advantage from dignity: to fight the enemy with weapons or with poison? If dominion is to be sought for glory, crime must have no part in it, for crime can contain no glory. But if power itself is sought by whatever means, it cannot bring advantage when joined with infamy. Nor, then, was the proposal of Lucius Philippus, son of Quintus, advantageous: that the states Lucius Sulla had freed from tribute by decree of the senate, in return for payment, should again pay tribute, and that we should not repay the money they had given for their freedom. The senate agreed with him. A disgrace to our rule! Pirates kept their word better than the senate. “But the revenue increased, so it was advantageous.” How long will people dare call anything advantageous that is not morally right?

88. Can hatred and infamy benefit any power whose support ought to be glory and the goodwill of its allies? I often disagreed even with my friend Cato. He seemed to me too unyielding in defending the treasury and its revenues, refusing every request from the tax contractors and many from our allies. We ought to have been generous to the allies and dealt with the contractors as we usually did with our own tenant farmers—all the more because that union of the orders was essential to the safety of the republic. Curio was also wrong when he called the cause of the people beyond the Po just, but always added, “Let advantage prevail.” He should instead have argued that their cause was not just because it did not benefit the republic, rather than concede its justice while declaring that it brought no advantage.

89. The sixth book of Hecato’s On Duties is full of questions like these: is it consistent with being a good man to stop feeding one’s enslaved household when food prices are extremely high? He argues both sides, but in the end measures duty by what he considers advantage rather than by humanity. He asks, if cargo must be thrown overboard at sea, whether one should sacrifice a valuable horse or a cheap enslaved person. Here financial interest pulls one way, humanity another. “If a fool has seized a plank from a wreck, will a wise man wrest it from him if he can?” He says no, because that would be unjust. What, then? Will the owner of the ship take back what is his? Certainly not—no more than he would wish to throw a passenger overboard on the open sea because the ship was his. For until the destination for which it was engaged has been reached, the ship belongs not to its owner but to those sailing in it.

90. What if there is one plank and two shipwrecked men, both wise? Should each snatch it for himself, or should one yield to the other? One should certainly yield, but to the man whose survival matters more, whether for his own sake or the state’s. What if they are equal in these respects? There will be no struggle; one will yield to the other as though he had lost a drawing of lots or a finger-guessing game. What if a father robs temples or digs tunnels into the treasury? Should his son report him to the magistrates? That would be a violation of sacred duty; indeed, he should even defend his father if he is accused. Does the country not take precedence over every other duty, then? Certainly, but it benefits the country itself to have citizens devoted to their parents. What if the father tries to seize a tyranny or betray his country? Will the son remain silent? No, he will plead with his father not to do it. If that achieves nothing, he will reproach him, even threaten him; in the end, if the matter threatens the destruction of the country, he will put its safety before his father’s.

91. He also asks whether a wise man who has unwittingly accepted counterfeit coins as good money, once he has discovered what they are, will pass them on as good money in paying a debt. Diogenes says yes; Antipater says no, and I am more inclined to agree with him. If someone knowingly sells wine that is going sour, must he disclose it? Diogenes thinks this unnecessary; Antipater thinks it the duty of a good man. These are, so to speak, disputed points of Stoic law. In selling a slave, must one disclose his faults—not those that, if undisclosed, entitle the buyer under civil law to return him, but such things as his being a liar, a gambler, a thief, or a drunkard? One thinks these must be disclosed; the other does not.

92. If someone selling gold thinks he is selling brass, should a good man tell him that it is gold, or buy for one denarius what is worth a thousand? It is already clear both what I think and where the philosophers I have named disagree. Must agreements and promises always be kept when they were made without force or deliberate fraud, to use the praetors’ customary language? Suppose someone gives another man a medicine for dropsy, on the agreement that, if it cures him, he will never use that medicine again. He is cured, but some years later contracts the same disease and cannot obtain permission from the man with whom he made the agreement to use it again. What should he do? Since the man who refuses permission is inhumane, and no wrong is being done to him, life and health must take priority.

93. Again, suppose a wise man is made heir to a hundred million sesterces, but the testator asks him to dance in public in the forum, in broad daylight, before accepting the inheritance. He promises to do so because otherwise the man will not name him as his heir. Should he keep his promise or not? I would rather he had not promised, and I think that would have shown dignity. But since he has promised, if he considers it disgraceful to dance in the forum, he will break his word more honorably by taking nothing from the inheritance than by taking it—unless perhaps he contributes the money to meet some great crisis of the republic. In that case, even dancing would not be disgraceful, since he would be acting for his country’s welfare.

94. Nor should promises be kept when they do not benefit the very people to whom they were made. To return to the myths, the Sun told his son Phaethon that he would do whatever he wished. Phaethon wished to be taken up into his father’s chariot. He was taken up, and before he could find his footing he was burned to death by a thunderbolt. How much better it would have been if his father’s promise had not been kept in this case! And what of the promise Theseus exacted from Neptune? Neptune had granted him three wishes, and he wished for the death of his son Hippolytus, whom he suspected of an affair with his stepmother. His wish was granted, and Theseus was plunged into the deepest grief.

95. Again, Agamemnon had vowed to Diana the most beautiful thing born in his kingdom that year, and sacrificed Iphigenia, since nothing more beautiful had been born that year. Better not to have fulfilled the promise than to have committed so appalling a crime. Promises, then, must sometimes go unfulfilled, and things entrusted to us must not always be returned. If someone deposits a sword with you while sane and demands it back when mad, returning it would be wrong; not returning it would be a duty. Again, if someone who has deposited money with you makes war on your country, should you return the deposit? I think not, for you would be acting against the republic, which ought to be dearest to you. Thus many things that seem morally right by nature become wrong through circumstances. Fulfilling promises, standing by agreements, returning deposits become wrong when their benefit has changed. But I think enough has been said about apparent advantages that oppose justice under the disguise of practical wisdom.

96. In the first book, however, we traced duties to four sources of moral goodness. Let us stay with these as we show how hostile to virtue are things that seem advantageous but are not. We have discussed practical wisdom, which cunning tries to imitate, and justice, which is always advantageous. Two divisions of moral goodness remain: one is seen in the greatness and distinction of an outstanding spirit; the other in the order and restraint imposed by self-control and moderation.

97. Ulysses thought it advantageous—or so the tragic poets tell us, for in Homer, the best authority, there is no hint of such a charge against him. The tragedies, however, accuse him of trying to evade military service by pretending to be mad. An unworthy plan, but an advantageous one, someone may perhaps say: to remain king and live at ease in Ithaca with his parents, his wife, and his son. Do you think any glory won through daily hardship can compare with such peace? I, on the contrary, think that peace should be scorned and cast aside, since I hold that what is not morally right cannot be genuinely advantageous either.

98. What do you suppose Ulysses would have heard said of him if he had persisted in that pretense? Even after his great achievements in the war, he still hears Ajax say:

“He first proposed the oath,
As all of you know, yet he alone broke faith.
He set about pretending madness to avoid joining us.
Had Palamedes’ penetrating wisdom not
Seen through this man’s brazen trickery,
He would have cheated forever on the oath he swore.”

99. It was surely better for him to struggle, as he did, not only with the enemy but with the waves than to desert Greece when it stood united to make war on the barbarians. But let us leave myths and foreign affairs and turn to an actual event in our own history. Marcus Atilius Regulus, during his second consulship, was ambushed and captured in Africa under the leadership of Xanthippus the Spartan, while Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, held the supreme command. He was sent to the senate under oath to return to Carthage unless certain Carthaginian prisoners of noble birth were released. When he reached Rome he saw what appeared to be his advantage, but, as his actions show, judged it false. It was this: to remain in his country, to be at home with his wife and children, to regard the disaster he had suffered in war as part of the common fortunes of war, and to retain the standing of a former consul. Who denies that these things are advantageous? Who do you think? Greatness of spirit and courage deny it.

100. Do you ask for more trustworthy authorities? It is the special province of these virtues to fear nothing, to look down on all human concerns, to consider nothing that can happen to a human being unbearable. What, then, did he do? He came into the senate and delivered his instructions, but declined to give his opinion: as long as he was bound by an oath to the enemy, he was not a senator. More than that—“What a fool,” someone may say, “to work against his own advantage!”—he declared that returning the prisoners was not advantageous. They were young men and good commanders, while he was already worn out with age. His authority prevailed; the prisoners were kept, and he himself returned to Carthage. Neither love of country nor love of his family held him back. Nor was he unaware then that he was going to a most cruel enemy and to ingeniously devised tortures; but he thought his oath must be kept. And so, even as he was being killed by enforced sleeplessness, his position was better than if he had remained at home, an aged captive, a former consul who had broken his oath.

101. “But he acted foolishly, not merely in refusing to recommend the prisoners’ release, but in arguing against it.” How foolishly? Even if it served the republic? Can something that harms the republic be advantageous to any citizen? People overturn the very foundations of nature when they separate advantage from moral goodness. We all seek advantage and are drawn toward it; we cannot possibly do otherwise. For who shuns what is advantageous? Or rather, who does not pursue it with the greatest eagerness? But because we can find genuine advantage nowhere except in what is praiseworthy, fitting, and morally good, we rank these things first and highest, and regard the word “advantage” as expressing necessity rather than splendor.

102. “What, then,” someone may say, “is there in an oath? Do we fear an angry Jupiter? Yet all philosophers agree—not only those who say that a god has no troubles himself and causes none for others, but also those who hold that a god is always active and working at something—that a god never becomes angry or does harm. And what greater harm could an angry Jupiter have done than Regulus did to himself? Religion, then, had no power to outweigh so great an advantage. Or was he afraid of acting disgracefully? First, choose the lesser of evils. That disgrace did not, then, involve as much evil as those tortures. Then there are these lines in Accius:”

“Have you broken faith?
I have never pledged it, nor do I pledge it, to anyone faithless.”

Though an impious king speaks them, they are admirably put.

103. They add that, just as we say some things appear advantageous but are not, so they say some things appear morally right but are not. This very act of returning to torture to keep an oath seems morally right, but proves not to be, because an agreement imposed by the enemy’s force should not have been binding. They add that whatever is greatly advantageous becomes morally right, even if it did not seem so before. These, broadly, are the arguments against Regulus. But let us examine the first ones.

104. There was no need to fear that Jupiter would grow angry and harm him, since he does not become angry or do harm. Yet this argument counts no more against Regulus’ oath than against every oath. What we must understand in an oath is not the fear it inspires but the force it carries. An oath is a solemn affirmation before the divine; what you have firmly promised, calling a god, as it were, to witness, must be kept. For the issue now is not the anger of the gods, which does not exist, but justice and good faith. Ennius puts it beautifully:

“O nurturing Faith, winged, and the oath in Jupiter’s name.”

Whoever violates an oath, then, violates Faith, whom our ancestors wished to have as a neighbor of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol, as Cato says in his speech.

105. “But even an angry Jupiter would not have harmed Regulus more than Regulus harmed himself.” Certainly—if nothing were evil except pain. Yet philosophers of the highest authority declare that pain is not merely not the greatest evil, but not an evil at all. Please do not disparage Regulus, no ordinary witness to their view, but perhaps the most compelling of all. What more trustworthy witness could we seek than a leading man of the Roman people who voluntarily submitted to torture to preserve his duty? As for their advice to choose the lesser of evils—that is, disgrace rather than disaster—is there any greater evil than moral disgrace? If ugliness in the body has something offensive about it, how much worse must the distortion and foulness of a morally disfigured soul appear?

106. Accordingly, those who argue these matters more rigorously venture to call only what is morally wrong an evil; those who argue less strictly still do not hesitate to call it the greatest evil. As for “I have never pledged it, nor do I pledge it, to anyone faithless,” the poet was right to write that, because he was portraying Atreus and had to remain true to the character. But if they adopt the principle that no faith need be kept when pledged to a faithless person, let them beware of seeking a shelter for perjury.

107. There is a law of war as well, and the faith of an oath must often be kept even with an enemy. What has been sworn with the understanding that it ought to be done must be kept; where the understanding was otherwise, failure to perform is not perjury. For example, if you do not bring pirates an agreed ransom for your life, there is no deceit in that, even if you swore to pay and did not. A pirate is not included among lawful enemies in war, but is the common enemy of everyone. With him there ought to be no shared obligation of good faith or of an oath.

108. Swearing falsely is not in itself perjury. Perjury is failing to do what you have sworn “according to your own sincere conviction,” as our customary formula puts it. Euripides expresses it neatly: “My tongue has sworn; my mind I keep unsworn.” Regulus, however, ought not to have upset through perjury the terms and agreements of war made with an enemy. He was dealing with a lawful and legitimate enemy, with whom we share both the whole sacred code governing war and many other legal obligations. Were that not so, the senate would never have handed over distinguished men in chains to the enemy.

109. Yet Titus Veturius and Spurius Postumius, during their second consulships, were handed over to the Samnites because, after the defeat at Caudium and the passage of our legions under the yoke, they had made peace with them without the authorization of the people and senate. At the same time Tiberius Numicius and Quintus Maelius, then tribunes of the people, were handed over because the peace had been made with their approval. This was done so that the peace with the Samnites could be repudiated. Postumius himself, the man being surrendered, proposed and urged his own surrender. Many years later Gaius Mancinus did the same. He urged the passage of the bill that Lucius Furius and Sextus Atilius were introducing by decree of the senate, providing for his surrender to the Numantines, with whom he had made a treaty without the senate’s authority. The bill passed, and he was handed over to the enemy. He acted more honorably than Quintus Pompeius, whose pleas, in the same situation, prevented such a law from passing. In the latter case, what appeared advantageous outweighed moral goodness; with the earlier examples, the false appearance of advantage was overcome by the authority of what was right.

110. “But what was done under force should not have been binding.” As though force could be brought to bear upon a brave man! “Then why was he going to the senate, especially when he intended to argue against releasing the prisoners?” You are criticizing what is greatest in him. He did not insist on his own judgment, but undertook the mission so that the judgment might rest with the senate. Had he not himself guided its decision, the prisoners would certainly have been returned to the Carthaginians. Regulus would then have remained safe in his country. Because he thought this would not benefit his country, he believed it right for himself both to express those views and to endure those sufferings. As for their assertion that what is greatly advantageous becomes morally right: rather, it is morally right; it does not become so. Nothing is advantageous that is not also morally right; and it is not right because it is advantageous, but advantageous because it is right. Among so many wonderful examples, then, one could hardly name any more praiseworthy or more outstanding than this.

111. Yet in all that brings Regulus praise, one thing alone deserves our wonder: his recommendation that the prisoners be kept. His return seems wonderful to us now, but in those days he could not have acted otherwise. That praise belongs, then, not to the man but to the times. Our ancestors intended no bond to bind good faith more tightly than an oath. The laws of the Twelve Tables show this; so do the laws sanctioned by religious vows; so do the treaties that bind us to good faith even with an enemy; so do the inquiries and penalties of the censors, who judged nothing more scrupulously than the keeping of oaths.

112. Marcus Pomponius, tribune of the people, brought a charge against Lucius Manlius, son of Aulus, after he had been dictator, for extending his dictatorship by a few days. He also accused him of banishing his son Titus, later called Torquatus, from human company and ordering him to live in the country. When the young man heard that his father was in trouble, he is said to have hurried to Rome and arrived at Pomponius’ house at first light. On hearing of his arrival, Pomponius thought the son was angry and would bring him some evidence against his father. He rose from bed, dismissed the witnesses, and ordered the young man to be admitted. As soon as he entered, however, Titus drew his sword and swore that he would kill him on the spot unless he took an oath to drop the case against his father. Driven by this terror, Pomponius swore. He reported the matter to the people, explained why he had to abandon the prosecution, and let Manlius go. Such was the power of an oath in those days. This Titus Manlius was the man who won his surname by taking the neck ring from a Gaul by the Anio, after accepting his challenge and killing him. It was in his third consulship that the Latins were routed and put to flight at the Veseris. He was a truly great man, as lenient toward his father as he was harshly severe toward his son.

113. But just as Regulus deserves praise for keeping his oath, so the ten men whom Hannibal sent to the senate after the battle of Cannae deserve blame if they did not return. They had sworn to return to the camp the Carthaginians had captured unless they secured the ransom of the prisoners. Accounts of them differ. Polybius, an especially reliable authority, says that of the ten men of the highest rank sent on that occasion, nine returned when their request to the senate failed. One of the ten, however, had gone back to camp shortly after leaving it, pretending that he had forgotten something, and then remained in Rome. He interpreted his return to camp as releasing him from his oath, but wrongly. A trick tightens the bonds of perjury; it does not undo them. This was foolish cleverness, a perverse imitation of wisdom. The senate therefore decreed that this crafty trickster should be taken in chains to Hannibal.

114. But this is the most important point: Hannibal held eight thousand men, not men he had captured in battle or who had scattered in flight to escape death, but men whom the consuls Paulus and Varro had left in the camp. The senate decided not to ransom them, although it could have been done for a small sum, so that our soldiers would learn to hold fast to victory or death. The same author writes that, when Hannibal heard this, his spirit was broken: the senate and Roman people had shown such greatness of spirit in their stricken circumstances. Thus, in comparison with moral goodness, what seems advantageous is defeated.

115. Gaius Acilius, however, who wrote a history in Greek, says that more of the men returned to camp by the same trick to free themselves from their oath, and that the censors branded them with every mark of disgrace. Let this discussion end here. It is clear that actions prompted by a timid, low, abject, and broken spirit are not advantageous, because they are shameful, foul, and morally wrong. Such would have been Regulus’ action if, in giving his opinion about the prisoners, he had considered what he thought served his own needs rather than the republic’s, or if he had chosen to remain at home.

116. The fourth division remains: it comprises propriety, moderation, modesty, self-control, and temperance. Can anything opposed to this chorus of virtues be advantageous? Yet the philosophers known as Cyrenaics and Annicereans, whose school goes back to Aristippus, placed all good in pleasure and held that virtue should be praised because it produces pleasure. Their doctrines have faded, but Epicurus flourishes as the champion and advocate of much the same view. If we intend to defend and preserve moral goodness, we must fight these men with every man and horse, as the saying goes.

117. For if not only advantage but the whole happy life consists in a sound bodily condition and a confident hope that this condition will last, as Metrodorus has written, then this advantage—and indeed the highest advantage, as they judge it—will certainly clash with moral goodness. To begin with, what place will there be for practical wisdom? Is it to hunt out pleasures everywhere? What a wretched servitude for virtue, enslaved to pleasure! What, then, is wisdom’s task? To choose pleasures intelligently? Grant that nothing could be more pleasant: what could be imagined more shameful? Again, for someone who calls pain the greatest evil, what place is left for courage, which is disdain for pain and hardship? Epicurus may speak, as indeed he does in many passages, with considerable courage about pain; but we must consider not what he says, but what it is consistent for someone to say who has set pleasure as the limit of good and pain as the limit of evil. And if I listen to him on self-control and temperance, he does say a great deal in many places, but he gets stuck, as the saying goes. How can someone praise temperance when he places the highest good in pleasure? Temperance is the enemy of uncontrolled desires, while those desires pursue pleasure.

118. Still, with these three kinds of virtue they maneuver as best they can, and not without cleverness. They introduce practical wisdom as the knowledge that supplies pleasures and drives away pains. They find some way to account for courage too, by offering a method for disregarding death and enduring pain. They even bring in temperance—not very easily, to be sure, but as best they can. They say that pleasure reaches its full measure when pain is removed. Justice, however, totters—or rather lies prostrate—as do all the virtues seen in the common life and fellowship of the human race. There can be no goodness, generosity, or kindness, any more than friendship, if these are not sought for their own sake but measured by pleasure or advantage.

119. Let us, then, bring this into a few words. Just as we have shown that nothing contrary to moral goodness is genuinely advantageous, so we say that every pleasure is contrary to moral goodness. I therefore judge Callipho and Dinomachus all the more deserving of criticism: they thought they could settle the dispute by joining pleasure to moral goodness, as though coupling an animal with a human being. Moral goodness will not accept that union; it scorns and rejects it. Nor can the ultimate standard of good and evil, which must be single, be mixed and blended from things utterly unlike. But more on this elsewhere, for it is a great subject; now let us return to our purpose.

120. How, then, we should decide when apparent advantage conflicts with moral goodness has been discussed fully enough above. But if pleasure too is said to have the appearance of advantage, there can be no union between it and moral goodness. For, to grant pleasure something, it may perhaps add a little seasoning; it will certainly add no genuine advantage.

121. You have a gift from your father, my son Marcus—a great one, in my judgment, though its value will depend on how you receive it. These three books of mine will have to be welcomed as guests among your notes from Cratippus’ teaching. But just as you would sometimes have listened to me too if I had come to Athens—as I would indeed have done, had my country not called me back in a clear voice from the midst of my journey—so now, since my voice has reached you in these volumes, you will give them as much time as you can. And you can give as much as you wish. When I learn that you take pleasure in this kind of knowledge, I shall speak with you both in person, very soon, I hope, and from a distance for as long as you are away. Farewell, then, my dear Cicero, and be assured that, dear as you are to me, you will be far dearer if you delight in writings and teachings such as these.

## Translation — Mouseia

> Complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the Latin, not from the Musean edition or an English translation; source-language review recorded.

### Book III

1. Marcus, my son, Cato tells us something Publius Scipio used to say. This was the first Scipio called Africanus, and Cato was about his age. Scipio said he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do. And he was never less alone than when he was by himself. That’s a splendid saying, worthy of someone as great and wise as he was. It shows how he thought about business in his free time and talked to himself when alone. That way he never stopped working, and sometimes didn’t need anyone else to talk to. Free time and being alone make other people sluggish. They sharpened his mind. I wish I could honestly say the same about myself. I may not be able to match his remarkable mind by following his example. Still, my wish to do so certainly brings me very close. Armed force in a wicked cause has kept me out of politics and the courts. So I’m seeking a life away from work. That’s also why I’ve left Rome and travel around the countryside, often alone.

2. But my free time isn’t anything like Africanus’s, nor is my time alone. He sometimes took a break from serving his country in its finest offices. Sometimes he left the crowded gatherings of people and went off alone, as if entering a harbor. My free time, though, comes from having no work, not from wanting a rest. The senate has been wiped out, and the courts have been destroyed. What can I do in the senate house or the Forum that would be worthy of me?

3. I once lived among huge crowds, in the full view of my fellow citizens. Now I hide as much as I can and am often alone. I’m trying to stay out of sight of the criminals who are everywhere. But learned people have taught us something. We shouldn’t just choose the least of our troubles. We should also pick out whatever good those troubles may contain. That’s why I’m making use of my free time. It isn’t, of course, the sort of rest someone deserves who once won peace for his country. And I won’t let my time alone go to waste. It’s been forced on me; I didn’t choose it.

4. Even so, I think Africanus deserves more credit. No written record of his thinking survives. There’s no work he produced in his free time, nothing he made while alone. That tells us something about his active mind. He kept exploring the things his thoughts led him to, and so was never idle or alone. I don’t have enough mental strength to keep myself company just by thinking quietly. Instead, I’ve put all my effort and attention into this writing. Since the republic’s collapse, I’ve written more in a short time than during many years when it stood.

5. My dear Cicero, philosophy as a whole is fertile and bears fruit. No part of it lies neglected or abandoned. But no ground in it produces a richer or fuller crop than the study of duties. That’s where we get our rules for living steadily and doing what’s right. I’m sure you keep hearing and learning these things from our friend Cratippus. He’s the leading philosopher of our time. Still, I think it helps to have words like these sounding in your ears from every side. If possible, you shouldn’t hear anything else.

6. Everyone planning to live decently should do this. But perhaps no one has more reason to do it than you. People have considerable expectations that you’ll work as hard as I have. Their expectations for your public career are high, and perhaps they also expect you to live up to my name. You’ve also taken on a heavy responsibility toward both Athens and Cratippus. You’ve gone there as if on a trading trip to bring back worthwhile learning. Coming home empty-handed would be deeply shameful. It would discredit both that city’s standing and your teacher’s. So make every effort you can, in both determination and hard work. That is, if learning is work rather than pleasure. I’ve given you everything you need. Don’t let it look as though you’ve let yourself down. But that’s enough of that. I’ve often written you plenty to encourage you. Now let’s return to the remaining part of the plan we set out.

7. Panaetius studied duties with exceptional care; nobody disputes that. He’s been my main guide, though I’ve made some corrections. He divided our usual thinking about duty into three questions. We may be unsure whether a proposed action is decent or shameful. Or we may ask whether it will do us good or harm. Then there’s a third question: what if an apparently decent action clashes with something that looks useful? How do we tell which to choose? His three books explained the first two questions. He said in writing that he’d take up the third afterward. That was a promise he never fulfilled.

8. I find that all the more surprising because of something his pupil Posidonius wrote. Panaetius lived for thirty years after publishing those books. I’m also surprised that Posidonius only touched briefly on this subject in some notes. After all, he writes that no subject in all philosophy is more essential.

9. Some people say Panaetius didn’t overlook this subject. He deliberately left it out, they say, and shouldn’t have written about it at all. Their reason is that what’s useful can never clash with what’s right. I don’t agree with them at all. One question is open to debate. Should this third kind of question in Panaetius’s plan have been included or left out altogether? But there’s no doubt about the other point. Panaetius undertook to discuss it, then left it unfinished. If someone finishes two parts of a three-part plan, the third must still remain. Besides, at the very end of his third book, he promises to discuss this part next.

10. There’s also strong evidence from Posidonius. In one of his letters he reports a saying of Publius Rutilius Rufus, who’d studied with Panaetius. No painter could be found to finish the part of the Venus of Cos that Apelles had left incomplete. The face was so beautiful that nobody hoped to match it in the rest of the body. In the same way, nobody followed up what Panaetius had left out [and hadn’t finished]. What he’d completed was simply too good.

11. There’s therefore no uncertainty about Panaetius’s intention. What we might debate is whether adding this third question was the right way to investigate duty. Consider the two views. For the Stoics, moral rightness alone counts as good. For your Peripatetics, it counts for so much that everything else on the opposite side barely weighs anything. Whichever view we take, usefulness can’t compete with doing right. We’ve heard that Socrates cursed the first people to split apart in their thinking what nature holds together. The Stoics agreed completely with him. They judged every right action useful, and refused to call anything useful if it was wrong.

12. Suppose Panaetius had said that we should practice virtue because it produces benefits. That’s the position of people who judge what we should seek by pleasure or freedom from pain. Then he could have said that what’s useful sometimes clashes with what’s right. But that isn’t his view. He thinks that only what’s right is good. Other things may seem useful and so pull us in the opposite direction. Yet gaining them doesn’t make life better, and losing them doesn’t make it worse. Given that, he apparently shouldn’t have introduced this sort of choice. It sets what seems useful against what’s right.

13. The Stoics call “living in agreement with nature” the greatest good. As I understand it, they mean this: always act in line with virtue. Choose other things that fit our nature only if they don’t conflict with virtue. Since that’s so, some people think this comparison shouldn’t have been introduced. They think there shouldn’t have been any guidance about this kind of question at all. Now, only wise people have what’s right in the strict, true sense. It can never be separated from virtue. People whose wisdom isn’t complete can’t have that fully developed moral goodness at all. What they can have are things resembling it.

14. The Stoics put the duties we’re discussing in these books in an “intermediate” class. They’re shared by everyone and apply widely. Many people fulfill them through their natural goodness and through progress in learning. But there’s another kind of duty, which the Stoics also call a “right action.” It’s perfect and complete. As they put it, it has every part in place. No one but a wise person can perform it.

15. When someone does something that shows these intermediate duties, people think it’s completely perfect. That’s because most people don’t really understand what’s missing from perfection. As far as they can tell, nothing has been left out. The same thing happens with poems, paintings, and plenty of other things. People who don’t know the subject enjoy and praise things that don’t deserve praise. I think that’s because these things contain something worthwhile that appeals to an untrained audience. But those same people can’t judge what’s wrong with each work. Once experts explain it to them, they readily change their minds. So the duties we’re discussing in these books are said to be a second level of moral goodness. They aren’t restricted to the wise. They’re shared by the whole human race.

16. That’s why these duties stir everyone who has the beginnings of virtue. We talk about the bravery of the two Decii or the two Scipios. We speak of Fabricius or Aristides as just. But we don’t take the former as models of courage, or the latter as models of justice, as if they were wise. None of them was wise in the sense we’re giving that word. Neither were Marcus Cato and Gaius Laelius, who were thought wise and called wise. Not even the seven sages were. Still, they regularly carried out these intermediate duties. That gave them something of the likeness and appearance of wise people.

17. So we mustn’t weigh what’s truly right against some advantage that conflicts with it. Nor should we ever weigh what we usually call right against personal gain. That’s the sort of right conduct practiced by people who want to be thought decent. We have to protect and preserve this rightness that we can understand. Wise people have the same responsibility toward what’s strictly and truly right. Otherwise, we can’t hold on to whatever progress we’ve made toward virtue. But so far I’ve been talking about people thought decent because they keep to their duties.

18. Some people judge everything by their gains and personal convenience. They won’t accept that doing right should carry more weight. When making decisions, these are the people who set rightness against supposed usefulness. Decent people don’t think that way. So I take Panaetius’s words quite literally. He said people often hesitate over this comparison. He didn’t say they ought to. It’s thoroughly shameful to rank apparent usefulness above doing right. Even treating them as competing choices, even hesitating between them, is shameful. What is it, then, that sometimes leaves us uncertain and calls for thought? When uncertainty arises, I believe we’re unsure what kind of action we’re actually considering.

19. Circumstances often show that something isn’t wrong, although people usually think it is. Let’s take an example with wider implications. What crime could be worse than killing someone—not just anyone, but a close friend? Then has someone committed a crime by killing a tyrant, even a tyrant who’s a close friend? The Roman people don’t think so. Of all outstanding deeds, they consider that the finest. Has usefulness won out over doing right, then? No. What was right followed from what helped. So we need to lay down a rule. Sometimes what we call useful will seem to conflict with what we understand as right. This rule will let us judge without making a mistake. If we follow it when weighing actions, we’ll never stray from our duty.

20. This rule will fit most closely with the Stoics’ thinking and teaching. In these books I’m following that teaching for this reason. The older Academics and your Peripatetics put what’s right ahead of what seems useful too. The Peripatetics, in fact, once belonged to the same school as the Academics. But some thinkers hold that anything right is useful, and nothing useful can be wrong. They’ll make this case more brilliantly than people who allow something right to be useless, or something useful to be wrong. My own Academic school gives me plenty of freedom. I’m entitled to defend whichever view strikes me as most convincing. But let’s get back to the rule.

21. Taking something from someone else goes against nature. So does improving your own lot at their expense. Both go against it more than death, poverty, pain, or any other harm to your body or circumstances. For a start, it destroys our shared life and human society. Suppose our attitude is that everyone may rob or hurt someone else for personal gain. Human society is bound to fall apart. Yet that society is what best fits our nature.

22. Imagine each body part thinking it could be healthy by taking a neighboring part’s health for itself. The whole body would inevitably weaken and die. It’s the same if each of us grabs other people’s advantages for ourselves. If we take whatever we can from anyone for our own gain, human society and shared life must collapse. We’re allowed to prefer getting life’s necessities for ourselves rather than for someone else. That doesn’t conflict with nature. But nature won’t let us increase our means, supplies, and wealth by robbing others.

23. Nature lays down this rule—that is, the law common to all peoples does. So do the laws that hold each people’s state together. We aren’t allowed to harm someone else for our own advantage. The laws aim at this; this is what they want: to keep the bond between citizens intact. They punish people who break it with death, exile, imprisonment, or fines. Nature’s own rule enforces this much more strongly. It’s the law for gods and humans. Anyone willing to obey it will never seek what’s someone else’s or keep for themselves what they’ve taken from another person. Everyone who wants to live according to nature will obey it.

24. A great spirit that aims high fits our nature far better than pleasure, life, or wealth. So do kindness, justice, and generosity. When the common good is at stake, it takes a great spirit with high aims to look down on those other things and count them as nothing. [Taking something from someone else for your own benefit goes against nature more than death, pain, and other things of that kind.]

25. Taking on the hardest work and trouble to protect or help every nation, if possible, better fits our nature. It means following Hercules’s example. People remembered his good deeds and placed him in the council of the heavenly gods. That’s more natural than living alone, free of every trouble and enjoying the greatest pleasures. Even if you had every resource in abundance, and outstanding beauty and strength too. So people with the finest and most outstanding natural gifts far prefer the first life to the second. It follows that someone who obeys nature can’t harm another person.

26. Someone who hurts another person for personal gain must believe one of two things. Either they’re doing nothing against nature, or other things are more important to avoid than wronging anyone. Those things include death, poverty, pain, and even losing children, relatives, and friends. Suppose they think hurting people doesn’t go against nature at all. What’s there to discuss with someone who takes the humanity out of being human? Or suppose they think hurting others should be avoided, but death, poverty, and pain are much worse. Their mistake is thinking any harm to the body or to their circumstances outweighs faults in character. So everyone must have one goal: each person’s benefit and everyone’s benefit must be the same. If we each grab it for ourselves, all human fellowship will fall apart.

27. Nature also tells us to care for another person’s welfare simply because they’re human, whoever they are. Then that same nature must require everyone’s interests to be shared. If that’s so, we’re all bound by one and the same law of nature. And if that’s so, nature’s law certainly forbids us to harm another person. The starting point is true. So the conclusion is true too.

28. Some people say they wouldn’t take anything from a parent or brother for their own benefit. But other citizens are a different matter, they say. That’s absurd. They’re saying that no bond of law or shared interest links them to their fellow citizens. That view tears apart the whole community of a state. Other people say we must care about fellow citizens, but not foreigners. They break up the shared society of the human race. Once it’s gone, helpfulness, generosity, kindness, and justice are destroyed at their roots. People who destroy these things must also be judged guilty of wrongdoing against the immortal gods. They’re tearing down the society those gods established among human beings. The tightest bond in that society is this belief: taking from someone else for your own gain goes against nature more than enduring every kind of hardship. That includes hardships in your circumstances, your body, or even your mind itself. For justice alone is the ruler and queen of all the virtues.

29. Someone might object: “Surely a wise person facing death from hunger would take food from a completely useless person?” No, not at all. Keeping myself alive isn’t worth more to me than keeping this attitude: I won’t hurt anyone for my own gain. “Then suppose a decent person could avoid freezing to death by taking the clothes off Phalaris, that vicious, monstrous tyrant. Surely he should do that?”

30. These cases are very easy to judge. Suppose you take something for your own benefit from a person who’s no use in any way. You’ve acted inhumanely and broken nature’s law. But suppose staying alive would let you do a great deal for the republic and human society. If you took something from another person for that reason, you wouldn’t deserve blame. When that isn’t the case, everyone must bear their own hardships rather than take away someone else’s advantages. So illness, poverty, and similar troubles don’t go against nature more than taking from others or seeking what’s theirs. But abandoning the common interest does go against nature. It’s unjust.

31. So nature’s law, which protects and supports human welfare, will certainly rule as follows. Life’s necessities may be transferred from an idle, useless person to someone wise, good, and brave. That person’s death would mean a great loss to everyone’s welfare. But he mustn’t let his high opinion of himself or self-love make this an excuse for wrongdoing. In this way, he’ll always do his duty, looking after people’s welfare and the human community I so often mention.

32. As for Phalaris, the judgment is very easy. We have no bond with tyrants. Instead, we’re completely cut off from them. If it’s right to kill someone, taking his possessions when you can isn’t against nature. This whole destructive, godless breed must be wiped out of human society. Sometimes we cut off limbs when they’ve lost their blood and, so to speak, their life, and harm the body’s other parts. In the same way, this savage, monstrous beast in human shape must be separated from humanity’s shared body. All questions about how circumstances affect our duty belong to this kind of inquiry.

33. I believe Panaetius would have pursued questions like these if some accident or other demands hadn’t upset his plan. The earlier books offer plenty of guidance for considering these very questions. They help us see what we must avoid because it’s wrong, and what we needn’t avoid because there’s nothing wrong with it. But now we’re putting something like a roof on a work already started and nearly finished. Mathematicians don’t usually prove everything. They ask us to accept certain things so they can explain their points more easily. In the same way, my dear Cicero, I ask you to grant me this, if you can: nothing except what’s right should be wanted for its own sake. If Cratippus won’t let you accept that, you’ll surely grant me this instead: what’s right should be wanted for its own sake more than anything else. Either view is enough for me. Sometimes one seems more convincing to me, sometimes the other. No other view seems convincing at all.

34. First, we must defend Panaetius on one point. He didn’t say that what benefits us can sometimes conflict with what’s right. His principles wouldn’t allow that. He spoke instead of things that seem beneficial. He often states that nothing is beneficial unless it’s also right, and nothing is right unless it’s also beneficial. He says no greater disaster has entered human life than the belief that separates these things. So he introduced an apparent conflict, not an actual one. He didn’t mean that we should sometimes put advantage ahead of doing right. He meant to help us judge such situations correctly whenever they arose. We’ll therefore finish this part he left unfinished without outside help, fighting under our own Mars, as the saying goes. Of the discussions of this subject since Panaetius that have reached me, none has satisfied me.

35. When something apparently beneficial presents itself, it naturally attracts us. But suppose you examine it closely and see something wrong attached to that apparent benefit. Then you’re not giving up a benefit. You’re recognizing that where there’s wrongdoing, there can be no benefit. Nothing is more against nature than wrongdoing. Nature calls for things that are right, harmonious, and consistent, and rejects their opposites. And nothing agrees with nature more than what benefits us. So benefit and wrongdoing certainly can’t exist in the same thing. Also, suppose we’re born to do what’s right. Perhaps that alone is worth seeking, as Zeno thought. Or perhaps it must outweigh absolutely everything else, as Aristotle believed. Either way, what’s right must be either the only good or the highest good. And whatever is good is certainly beneficial. So everything that’s right is beneficial.

36. The faulty thinking of dishonest people therefore seizes on something that seems beneficial and immediately separates it from what’s right. This gives rise to daggers, poisons, and forged wills; to theft, embezzlement, plunder, and the pillaging of allies and fellow citizens. It produces desires for excessive wealth, unbearable power, and even kingship in free states. Nothing more disgusting or shameful than these desires can be imagined. Their mistaken judgments show them the gains to be made. But they don’t see the punishment—not the legal penalties, which they often break through, but the punishment of wrongdoing itself. That’s the harshest punishment of all.

37. So let’s remove this whole class of people from our discussion. Their thinking is thoroughly criminal and godless. They ask whether to follow what they recognize as right or knowingly stain themselves with a crime. The crime is already there in their hesitation, even if they never carry it out. We shouldn’t even consider questions when considering them is itself wrong.

38. We must also remove from every decision any hope or expectation of hiding what we do. If we’ve made any progress in philosophy, we should be thoroughly convinced of this: even if we could hide everything from all gods and humans, we still mustn’t act greedily, unjustly, lustfully, or without self-control. That’s why Plato introduces Gyges. After heavy rains split open the ground, Gyges climbed down into the opening. There, as the story goes, he noticed a bronze horse with doors in its sides. Opening them, he saw a dead man’s body of extraordinary size, with a gold ring on its finger. He pulled off the ring and put it on himself. He was a royal shepherd, and he then returned to a gathering of the shepherds. There, whenever he turned the ring’s setting toward his palm, nobody could see him, though he could see everything. When he turned the ring back into place, he became visible again. Taking advantage of the ring’s power, he seduced the queen. With her help, he killed the king, his master, and removed those he thought stood in his way. Nobody could see him committing these crimes. Thanks to the ring, he suddenly became king of Lydia. Now, if a wise person had that very ring, he wouldn’t think himself any more entitled to do wrong than without it. Good people look for ways to do right, not ways to hide.

39. At this point, some philosophers, decent enough but not very sharp, say Plato has presented an invented, made-up story. As though he were claiming it really happened, or even could have happened! Here’s the point of the ring and the example. Suppose you did something for wealth, power, control over others, or sexual pleasure. Nobody would know or even suspect it. It would remain forever unknown to gods and humans. Would you do it? They say that can’t happen. Actually, it can. But I’m asking what they would do if the thing they say is impossible were possible. They keep hammering away rather clumsily. They insist it’s impossible and stick to that, missing the point of the question. When we ask what they’d do if they could hide their actions, we’re not asking whether they could hide them. Instead, we’re putting them through a kind of torture. If they answer that, with punishment ruled out, they’d do whatever helped them, they admit they’re criminals. If they say they wouldn’t, they admit that everything wrong must be avoided for its own sake. But let’s return to our subject.

40. Many situations arise that confuse us by offering an apparent benefit. The question isn’t whether to abandon what’s right because the benefit is so great. That would be dishonest. Instead, it’s whether we can do what seems beneficial without doing wrong. When Brutus stripped his colleague Collatinus of his authority, his action could have seemed unjust. Collatinus had shared Brutus’s plans and helped him drive out the kings. But the leading men had decided to eliminate the family connection to Tarquin the Proud, the Tarquin name, and the memory of kingship. Protecting the country was beneficial, and it was so clearly right that even Collatinus himself should have approved. So the benefit prevailed because the action was right. Without that, it couldn’t even have been beneficial.

41. Things were different with the king who founded Rome. The appearance of an advantage swayed him. He thought ruling alone would benefit him more than sharing power, so he killed his brother. He abandoned both family duty and basic humanity to get something that seemed beneficial but wasn’t. Yet he offered the wall as his excuse. This gave his action an appearance of being right, but wasn’t convincing or adequate. So he did wrong, if I may say so with all respect to Quirinus—or Romulus.

42. Still, we don’t have to give up our own advantages and hand them to others when we need them ourselves. Everyone should look after their own interests, provided they don’t harm anyone else. Chrysippus put this well, as he did many things: “Someone running a race should make every possible effort to win. But they must never trip a competitor or push them aside. In the same way, there’s nothing unfair about seeking what you need in life. But you have no right to snatch it from someone else.”

43. Friendship makes questions of duty especially confusing. It’s wrong both to withhold what you could rightly give a friend and to give something unfair. But there’s a short, simple rule covering this whole subject. Things that seem beneficial—public office, wealth, pleasures, and everything of that kind—must never come before friendship. Yet a decent person won’t act against their country, their oath, or their word for a friend’s sake. That holds even when they’re judging their own friend’s case. When they take on the judge’s role, they set aside the friend’s role. They can favor the friendship this much: they can hope their friend’s case is sound. They can also allow their friend time to argue the case, as far as the law permits.

44. But when a judge must give a decision under oath, they should remember they’re calling on a god as witness. By this I mean, as I see it, their own mind. God himself has given us nothing more godlike than that. Our ancestors therefore passed down an excellent custom, if only we followed it. When asking a judge for help, we ask only for what they can do without breaking their word. This request covers the things I just mentioned that a judge can rightly grant a friend. If we had to do everything our friends wanted, these relationships wouldn’t be friendships. They would be conspiracies.

45. I’m talking about ordinary friendships. Nothing like this can arise between people who are wise and completely good. The Pythagoreans Damon and Phintias reportedly felt such loyalty to each other. The tyrant Dionysius had fixed a day for one of them to be executed. The condemned man asked for a few days to arrange care for his family. His friend guaranteed his return, agreeing to die himself if the other didn’t come back. When the condemned man returned on the appointed day, the tyrant admired their loyalty. He asked them to accept him as a third member of their friendship.

46. So when an apparent advantage in friendship is weighed against what’s right, dismiss the apparent advantage. Let what’s right prevail. When friends ask for things that aren’t right, duty to the gods and keeping your word must come first. This will give us the way of choosing our duty that we’re looking for. But apparent advantage very often leads to wrongdoing in public affairs. Our own people did wrong in destroying Corinth. The Athenians acted even more harshly. They voted to cut off the thumbs of the people of Aegina, whose naval strength was great. This seemed beneficial, since Aegina was so close to Piraeus that it posed a serious threat. But nothing cruel is beneficial. Nothing is more hostile to our human nature than cruelty. And we ought to follow that nature.

47. Those who bar foreigners from cities and expel them also act wrongly. Pennus did this in our fathers’ time, and Papius did it recently. It’s right to forbid someone who isn’t a citizen from passing as one. The very wise consuls Crassus and Scaevola introduced a law to that effect. But preventing foreigners from using the city is plainly inhumane. Actions that reject an apparent public advantage for the sake of what’s right deserve admiration. Our country’s history is full of examples, especially during the Second Punic War. After the disaster at Cannae, it showed greater courage than ever before in good times. There was no sign of fear and no mention of peace. What’s right has such power that it overshadows apparent advantage.

48. Athens had no way to hold back the Persian assault. Its people decided to leave the city, put their wives and children in safety at Troezen, and take to their ships. They’d use the fleet to protect Greek freedom. Cyrsilus urged them instead to stay in Athens and let Xerxes in. They killed him with stones. His advice looked useful. But because it conflicted with doing right, it offered no real use at all.

49. After victory in the war against Persia, Themistocles addressed the public assembly. He said he had a plan that would keep the country safe, but it needed to remain secret. He asked the people to appoint someone he could share it with. They chose Aristides. Themistocles told him that the Spartan fleet, hauled ashore at Gythium, could be burned secretly. Doing this would inevitably break Spartan power. After hearing him, Aristides returned to the assembly, where everyone eagerly awaited his report. He said Themistocles’ plan would be extremely beneficial, but was completely wrong. The Athenians decided that because it was wrong, it couldn’t benefit them either. On Aristides’ advice, they rejected the whole proposal without even hearing what it was. They acted better than we do: we exempt pirates from taxes while making our allies pay. So let this principle stand: what’s wrong can never be beneficial. This holds even when you get what you believe is an advantage. Merely thinking that something wrong is beneficial is itself disastrous.

50. But, as I said earlier, situations often arise where an advantage seems to conflict with what’s right. We must examine whether it really conflicts or whether the two can fit together. Here is one question of that kind. Suppose a decent man brings a large shipment of grain from Alexandria to Rhodes. The people of Rhodes face shortages and famine, and grain prices are extremely high. Suppose he also knows that several merchants have sailed from Alexandria. He has seen their ships loaded with grain heading for Rhodes. Will he tell the people of Rhodes, or keep quiet and sell his grain for the highest possible price? We’re imagining a wise, decent man. We’re asking how he would think this through and reach a decision. He wouldn’t hide the facts from the people of Rhodes if he thought doing so was wrong. But he isn’t sure whether it might be acceptable.

51. In cases like this, Diogenes of Babylon and his student Antipater usually disagree. Diogenes was a leading, respected Stoic, and Antipater was an extremely sharp thinker. Antipater thinks everything must be disclosed. The buyer shouldn’t be left unaware of anything the seller knows. Diogenes thinks the seller must disclose defects as far as civil law requires. Otherwise, he must avoid trickery, but he’s entitled to seek the best price for his goods. “I’ve brought my grain here, put it out, and offered it for sale. I’m asking no more than the others, perhaps even less, since there’s a larger supply. Who’s being wronged?”

52. Antipater argues the other side: “What are you saying? You ought to look after other people and serve the human community. That’s the rule you were born under. Nature gives you principles you’re bound to obey and follow. Your benefit should be everyone’s benefit, and everyone’s benefit should, in turn, be yours. Will you hide from people the supplies and relief coming their way?” Diogenes might answer like this: “Hiding something is different from keeping quiet. I’m not hiding anything from you now by not explaining what the gods are like or what’s best in life. Knowing those things would help you more than cheap wheat. But I don’t have to tell you everything it would help you to hear.”

53. “Yes, you do,” the other will say, “if you remember that nature has joined people together in a community.” “I remember,” Diogenes will reply. “But does that community mean nobody owns anything individually? If so, we shouldn’t sell anything at all. We should give it away.”
Notice what’s being argued throughout this debate. Nobody says, “Although this is wrong, I’ll do it anyway because it benefits me.” One side says the action brings a benefit without being wrong. The other says it mustn’t be done precisely because it’s wrong.

54. Suppose a decent person is selling a house with defects he knows about but nobody else does. It’s unhealthy, though people think it’s healthy. Snakes appear in every bedroom, but people don’t know that. It’s built with poor timber and is close to collapse, but only the owner knows. Suppose the seller doesn’t tell prospective buyers these things. He sells the house for far more than he expected. Has he acted unfairly or dishonestly? “Of course he has,” says Antipater. “Athens publicly curses anyone who fails to show a lost traveler the way. What else is this, if not that? He lets a buyer rush ahead blindly and suffer a terrible loss through a mistake. It’s worse than failing to show someone the way. He’s knowingly leading another person into error.”

55. Diogenes replies: “Did the seller force you to buy? He didn’t even urge you to. He advertised something he didn’t like, and you bought something you did like. People advertise ‘a fine, well-built country house.’ We don’t consider them cheats even if the house is neither fine nor properly built. Still less should we blame people who haven’t praised their house at all. Where the buyer makes his own judgment, how can the seller be guilty of fraud? If a seller doesn’t have to guarantee everything he says, must he guarantee what he hasn’t said? What’s sillier than a seller listing the faults of what he’s selling? And what could be more absurd than an auctioneer announcing, on the owner’s orders, ‘I’m selling an unhealthy house’?”

56. So in certain doubtful cases, one side defends what’s right. The other argues for what benefits us, but on these terms: doing what seems beneficial isn’t merely right; failing to do it is wrong. This is the apparent conflict that often arises between what’s beneficial and what’s right. We need to settle these questions. I haven’t presented them just to raise problems, but to resolve them.

57. So I don’t think the grain merchant should have kept the Rhodians in the dark. Nor should the house seller have kept his buyers in the dark. Keeping quiet about something isn’t always concealment. It becomes concealment when you want people to remain ignorant for your own gain, though knowing matters to them. Who can’t see what this kind of concealment amounts to, or what sort of person practices it? Certainly not someone open, straightforward, upright, fair, or decent. Rather, someone devious, secretive, cunning, deceitful, malicious, crafty—a seasoned, slippery trickster. Isn’t it against your interests to earn all these bad names, and many more?

58. If people who keep quiet deserve criticism, what should we think of those who actually lie? Gaius Canius, a Roman of the knightly class, was witty and fairly well read. He went to Syracuse, as he himself used to say, for leisure, not business. He kept saying he wanted to buy a small garden property. He could entertain friends there and enjoy himself without interruptions. Word of this spread. A man named Pythius, who ran a banking business in Syracuse, told him his garden property wasn’t for sale. But Canius could use it as his own if he wished. At the same time, he invited Canius to dinner there the next day. Canius accepted. As a banker, Pythius had influence with people of every class. He called the fishermen together and asked them to fish in front of his garden the following day. He told them what he wanted them to do. Canius arrived for dinner on time. Pythius had prepared a lavish meal, and a crowd of boats was in full view. Each fisherman brought in his catch, and the fish were tossed down at Pythius’s feet.

59. “Please tell me, Pythius,” Canius said, “what’s all this? So many fish! So many boats!” “What’s surprising about that?” Pythius replied. “All the fish in Syracuse are here. This is where they draw their water. Those men can’t do without this property.” Burning with desire, Canius pressed Pythius to sell it. At first Pythius acted reluctant. Why drag out the story? Canius got his way. Eager and rich, he paid whatever Pythius wanted, buying the property fully furnished. He recorded the debt and closed the deal. The next day Canius invited his friends over. He arrived early himself and didn’t see so much as an oarlock. He asked the nearest neighbor whether the fishermen were having some holiday, since none were in sight. “Not that I know of,” the neighbor replied. “But nobody normally fishes here. That’s why I was wondering yesterday what had happened.”

60. Canius grew angry—but what was he to do? At that point my colleague and close friend Gaius Aquilius hadn’t issued his legal formulas for bringing fraud cases. Asked what fraud meant in those formulas, he answered: making one thing appear to happen while actually doing another. A very clear answer, as you’d expect from someone who knew how to define things. Pythius, then, was faithless, dishonest, and malicious. So is everyone who acts one way while putting on a different appearance. Their actions are stained with all these faults. That means none of those actions can bring a real benefit.

61. If Aquilius’s definition is right, we must stop pretending and hiding things in every part of life. An honest person won’t put on an act or keep something back to get a better price, whether buying or selling. Laws already punished this kind of fraud. The Twelve Tables dealt with guardians who cheated their wards. The Plaetorian law covered cheating young people. Even without a specific law, courts dealt with fraud in cases that included the words “in good faith.” Other legal proceedings have some particularly important wording, too. In settling a wife’s claim to her property, it’s “what’s better and fairer.” In a trust, it’s “dealing fairly, as honest people do.” Now, can there be any room for cheating in “what’s better and fairer”? Can anyone act deceitfully or maliciously when the rule is “dealing fairly, as honest people do”? As Aquilius says, fraud includes putting on a false appearance. So we must get rid of every kind of lying in making agreements. Sellers mustn’t plant someone to push up the bidding. Buyers mustn’t plant someone to bid against them either. If either party comes to name a price, they should name it just once.

62. Take Quintus Scaevola, Publius’s son. He was buying a farm and asked the seller to name his price once. The seller did. Scaevola said he thought it was worth more, and added a hundred thousand. Everyone agrees that he acted like an honest person. But they deny that he acted wisely. They’d say the same if he’d sold something for less than he could have gotten. That’s the disastrous idea here: people think being honest and being wise are two different things. Hence Ennius’s line: “A wise person’s wisdom is useless if he can’t help himself.” That’s true enough—if Ennius and I agree on what helping myself means.

63. I’ve read what Hecato of Rhodes says about this. He studied with Panaetius and wrote books on duty for Quintus Tubero. He says a wise person should look after his own finances, without breaking any customs, laws, or established rules. After all, we don’t want wealth just for ourselves. We want it for our children, relatives, and friends, and especially for our country. Individuals’ resources and supplies make up a country’s wealth. There’s no way he can approve of what Scaevola did, as I described just now. He says outright that, in pursuing his own profit, he’ll draw the line only at what’s forbidden.

64. He doesn’t deserve much praise or thanks for that. But if both pretending and hiding the truth count as fraud, very few dealings are free of it. And if an honest person helps everyone he can and harms no one, such people are certainly hard to find. So doing wrong never helps us, because it’s always shameful. Being an honest person is always right, so it always benefits us.

65. When it comes to real estate, our civil law requires sellers to say what defects they know about. The Twelve Tables had demanded only that sellers stand by their explicit spoken declarations. Denying those declarations brought a double penalty. The lawyers added a penalty for silence as well. Their decision was this: when a seller knows there’s a defect in a property, he must specifically disclose it. Otherwise, he’s responsible for that defect.

66. Here’s an example. The omen-readers were going to take the omens on the citadel. Tiberius Claudius Centumalus owned a building on the Caelian Hill. They told him to pull down the parts whose height blocked their view of the signs. Claudius put his apartment building up for sale [and sold it]. Publius Calpurnius Lanarius bought it. The omen-readers gave him the same order. Calpurnius pulled those parts down, then learned something. Claudius had put the building up for sale after being ordered to pull them down. So he brought Claudius before an arbitrator to decide “whatever he should give me or do for me in good faith.” Marcus Cato gave the ruling. He was our Cato’s father. Other people are identified by their fathers, but this man should be identified by his son: he fathered that shining light. As judge, then, he ruled that the seller had known about the problem and hadn’t disclosed it. He therefore had to cover the buyer’s loss.

67. His ruling made this part of good faith: buyers must be told about defects the seller knows about. If he was right, that grain dealer was wrong to keep quiet. So was the seller of the unhealthy house. But civil law can’t cover every case of keeping things back. Where it can, the rules are carefully enforced. My relative Marcus Marius Gratidianus sold Gaius Sergius Orata a house he’d bought from Orata himself a few years earlier. Other people had rights over the property. Marius hadn’t mentioned them when formally transferring ownership. The case went to court. Crassus represented Orata, and Antonius defended Gratidianus. Crassus pressed the legal rule: “A seller must answer for defects he knew about but didn’t disclose.” Antonius argued for fairness: “Sergius knew about the defect, since he’d sold the house himself. So there was no need to mention it. He hadn’t been deceived: he knew the legal position of the property he was buying.” Why tell you this? To show you that our ancestors didn’t approve of sharp dealing.

68. But laws and philosophers tackle sharp dealing differently. Laws go as far as they can get a firm grip. Philosophers go as far as reason and understanding can reach. Reason therefore demands that we avoid traps, false appearances, and deception of any kind. Now, isn’t setting out nets an act of trapping, even if you don’t plan to flush animals out or drive them in? Wild animals often fall into them with no one chasing them. Will you do the same with a house? Will you put it up for sale and set out your notice like a net, [selling the house because of its defects,] so someone walks into it without knowing?

69. I realize our habits have become so corrupt that people don’t regard this as shameful. Neither legislation nor civil law forbids it. Still, nature’s law does. People are bound together—I’ve said this often, but it needs saying still more often. The widest bond joins every person to every other person. There’s a closer one between people of the same nation, and a closer one still between fellow citizens. So our ancestors distinguished the law of all peoples from our own civil law. Something in our civil law doesn’t necessarily belong to the law of all peoples. But something in the law of all peoples ought to belong to our civil law too. We don’t have a clear, solid picture of true law and real justice. We work with shadows and images. If only we’d follow even those! They’re drawn from the finest examples that nature and truth provide.

70. Think how much these words mean: “So that I won’t be caught out or cheated by you or by trusting your word!” And this wording is worth its weight in gold: “As honest people should deal with each other, fairly and without cheating!” But it’s a big question who counts as “honest” and what “dealing fairly” means. Quintus Scaevola, the chief priest, said the words “in good faith” carried enormous weight wherever they were included in arbitration. He thought good faith had an extremely wide reach. It applied to guardianships, partnerships, trusts, work done on someone’s behalf, buying, selling, hiring, and renting. These dealings hold our shared life together. It takes an outstanding judge, he said, to decide what each party owes the other in such cases. That’s especially true because in most of them either side can bring a claim against the other.

71. So we must get rid of cunning and that kind of dishonesty that tries to pass for good judgment. They’re actually worlds apart. Good judgment means choosing between what’s good and what’s bad. Dishonesty prefers the bad to the good, if everything shameful counts as bad. Our civil law takes its lead from nature in punishing dishonesty and fraud. This doesn’t apply just to property. When people sell slaves, too, the law rules out every kind of cheating by the seller. Under the city magistrates’ order, sellers must answer for what they should have known about a slave’s health, running away, or thefts. People selling as heirs are in a different position.

72. Nature is the source of law. That makes this clear: it’s in keeping with nature that no one should try to prey on someone else’s ignorance. Nothing could do more damage to human life than dishonesty dressed up as intelligence. It produces countless situations where what helps us seems to clash with what’s right. How many people could resist doing wrong if they were promised that no one would ever know and they’d never be punished?

73. Let’s test this, if you like. We’ll use cases where ordinary people might think nothing wrong was done. This isn’t the place to discuss murderers, poisoners, will-forgers, thieves, or people who steal public money. They need the hardship of chains and prison, not philosophers’ words and arguments. Instead, let’s consider what supposedly honest people do. Some people brought a forged will from Greece to Rome. It was in the name of Lucius Minucius Basilus, a wealthy man. To make it easier to get the will accepted, they named Marcus Crassus and Quintus Hortensius as heirs alongside themselves. These were the two most powerful men of their time. Both suspected the will was forged. But since they hadn’t taken part in any wrongdoing themselves, they didn’t turn down this little present from someone else’s crime. Well, does that let us say they’d done nothing wrong? I don’t think so. Yet I loved one of them while he was alive, and I don’t hate the other now he’s dead.

74. Basilus had wanted his sister’s son, Marcus Satrius, to take his name, and had made him his heir. I mean the patron of the Picene and Sabine territories—what a shameful mark of the times [their name]! It wasn’t fair for leading citizens to get the property and Satrius to get nothing but the name. As I argued in the first book, someone acts unjustly if he can protect his own people against a wrong but doesn’t stop it or drive it back. What should we think of someone who not only fails to stop a wrong, but helps it along? To my mind, even genuine inheritances are morally wrong if they’re won through calculated flattery. The same goes when they’re won by pretending to help, rather than really helping. In cases like these, people sometimes think one course is right and another pays. That’s a mistake. The rule for what benefits us is the very same rule as for what’s right.

75. Anyone who doesn’t see this clearly is capable of any fraud or crime. He’ll think, “Yes, that’s right, but this works to my advantage.” That mistake will make him dare to pull apart things nature has joined together. It’s the source of every fraud, every harmful act, every crime. Suppose an honest person could snap his fingers and get his name slipped into rich people’s wills. He wouldn’t use that power. Not even if he knew for certain that no one would ever suspect it. But give Marcus Crassus the power to get himself named as heir with a snap of his fingers, when he wasn’t really an heir. Believe me, he’d dance in the Forum. A just person—the kind we mean by an honest person—won’t take anything away from anyone to get it for himself. If that surprises someone, he should admit he doesn’t know what an honest person is.

76. But anyone willing to unfold the idea wrapped up in his own mind can teach himself this. An honest person helps everyone he can and harms no one, unless they’ve wronged him first. Now, isn’t someone doing harm if he uses a kind of poison to push out the real heirs and take their place? Someone may ask, “So he shouldn’t do what helps him, what works to his advantage?” No. He should understand that nothing unjust helps him or works to his advantage. Until he’s learned that, he can’t be an honest person.

77. When I was a boy, my father told me about Gaius Fimbria, a former consul. He’d been appointed judge in the case of Marcus Lutatius Pinthia, a Roman knight with a very good reputation. Pinthia had made a legal wager on whether he was an honest person. Fimbria told him he’d never decide that case. Ruling against him would strip a respected person of his good name. Ruling for him would seem to declare someone an honest person, when that description involves countless duties and praiseworthy qualities. Now take this honest person, whom even Fimbria understood, not just Socrates. He simply can’t think anything benefits him unless it’s right. Someone like that won’t dare do anything he wouldn’t dare announce openly. He won’t even dare think it. Isn’t it shameful for philosophers to question what even country people don’t doubt? They gave us the saying that’s now worn smooth with age. When praising someone’s trustworthiness and honesty, they say, “You could play a finger-counting game with him in the dark.” What can that mean except this? Nothing that’s wrong works to your advantage, even if you can get away with it and nobody can challenge you.

78. Do you see how this saying leaves no excuse for Gyges? It leaves none for that person I imagined just now, either, who could sweep up everyone’s inheritances by snapping his fingers. Something shameful can never become right just because it’s hidden. In the same way, something that isn’t right can’t be made beneficial. Nature stands firmly against it.

79. “But when the rewards are huge, there’s a reason to do wrong.” Gaius Marius had little hope of becoming consul. He was already in his seventh year of going nowhere after serving as praetor. It looked as though he’d never even run for consul. He was serving as deputy to Quintus Metellus, an outstanding man and citizen. Metellus, his commander, sent him to Rome. There Marius accused him before the Roman people of dragging out the war. He said that if they made him consul, he’d soon put Jugurtha into their hands, dead or alive. He did become consul. But he abandoned honesty and justice. He’d stirred up hatred against a thoroughly decent, responsible citizen with a false charge—against the very man whose deputy he was and who’d sent him there.

80. My relative Gratidianus didn’t live up to an honest person’s duty either. He was praetor at the time. The people’s tribunes had brought the board of praetors into their discussions, to settle currency matters by a joint decision. Money’s value was fluctuating so wildly then that nobody could tell what they owned. Together they drew up an edict, with a penalty and a process for trying cases. They agreed to go up to the speakers’ platform together that afternoon. The others went off in different directions. Marius went straight from their meeting benches to the platform. Alone, he announced what they’d worked out together. And, I can tell you, it brought him enormous prestige. There were statues in every neighborhood, with incense and candles in front of them. Why say more? Nobody had ever been more loved by the public.

81. Cases like these can sometimes confuse us when we’re deciding what to do. The unfairness seems fairly small, while the gain it brings seems enormous. Marius thought there wasn’t much shame in stealing his colleagues’ and the people’s tribunes’ popularity. Becoming consul through it seemed a huge advantage—that was his aim at the time. But there’s one rule for every case, and I want you to know it thoroughly. Either what seems helpful mustn’t be shameful, or, if it’s shameful, it mustn’t seem helpful. Well, can we call either that Marius or this one an honest person? Unpack your understanding and examine it closely. Look at the [image,] shape, and idea of an honest person that you find there. Does that person lie, make accusations for personal gain, grab what’s owed to others, or deceive? Absolutely not.

82. Is anything worth so much, is any gain so desirable, that you’d give up both the standing and the name of an honest person? How could that so-called advantage bring you as much as it takes away, if it robs you of your good name, trustworthiness, and justice? What’s the difference between turning from a human into a beast and keeping a human shape with a beast’s cruelty inside?
And what about people who ignore everything right and decent, provided they get power? Aren’t they doing what that man did who wanted a particular father-in-law so he could gain power through the other’s recklessness? He thought he’d gain by holding enormous power while someone else took the heat. He didn’t see how shameful this was, or how unjust to his country. That father-in-law himself was always quoting Greek lines from The Phoenician Women. I’ll give them as best I can. They may sound rough, but at least their meaning will be clear:

“If the law must be broken, for the sake of ruling,
Break it; in everything else, respect what’s sacred.”

What a menace Eteocles is—or rather, Euripides, who made an exception for the single most criminal act of all.

83. Why collect petty cases of inheritances, trading, and fraudulent sales? Here’s someone who wanted to become king of the Roman people and master of every nation—and did it. Anyone who calls that ambition right is out of his mind. He’s approving the destruction of laws and freedom. He thinks crushing them, in all its ugliness and horror, is glorious. Another person admits that ruling as king is wrong in a country that’s been free and ought to stay free. Yet he says it benefits someone who can do it. What scolding—or rather, what abuse—could I use to shake him out of such a terrible mistake? Immortal gods! Can anyone benefit from the foulest, most horrible murder of his country? Even if the citizens he’s crushed call the man responsible their father? So we must use what’s right as our guide to what benefits us. The two may seem different in wording, but their actual meaning must be one and the same.

84. By ordinary people’s standards, I can’t think of a greater advantage than ruling as king. But once I start testing the idea against reality, I find nothing worse for someone who’s gained that power unjustly. Can anyone benefit from anguish, worry, fears day and night, and a life packed with plots and dangers? Accius says, “A king has many hostile, faithless people, and few who wish him well.” But which kingship does he mean? One passed down from Tantalus and Pelops and held by right. How many more enemies do you think a king has who used the Roman people’s army to crush the Roman people themselves? He forced a country to serve him that wasn’t just free, but ruled other nations.

85. Think of the stains on that man’s conscience, the wounds in his mind! And how can someone’s own life benefit him when its terms are these: whoever takes it will win the greatest thanks and glory? These things look more beneficial than anything else. Yet they aren’t, because they’re full of disgrace and shame. That should convince us firmly enough that nothing benefits us unless it’s right.

86. Our people have made that judgment often. One example came in the war with Pyrrhus, from Gaius Fabricius, then consul for the second time, and our Senate. King Pyrrhus had started a war against the Roman people. They were fighting for supremacy against a powerful king of noble birth. A deserter from his army came to Fabricius’s camp and made him an offer. If Fabricius promised him a reward, he’d slip back into Pyrrhus’s camp as secretly as he’d left it and poison the king. Fabricius had him taken back to Pyrrhus, and the Senate praised his action. Now, if we’re looking only for what appears or is thought to help, that one deserter could have ended a major war and removed a dangerous rival for supremacy. But what disgrace, what an outrage, to defeat a rival in a contest for glory through crime instead of courage!

87. So which would have benefited Fabricius more: fighting his enemy with weapons or with poison? He was the same kind of person here as Aristides was at Athens. And which would have benefited our Senate, which never separated advantage from dignity? If we should seek power for glory’s sake, crime has no place in it: crime can’t bring glory. But if we want power itself, however we get it, it can’t benefit us when it brings disgrace. So Lucius Philippus, Quintus’s son, proposed something that wasn’t beneficial either. Lucius Sulla had taken money from certain cities and granted them freedom under a Senate decree. Philippus wanted those cities to pay tribute again, without our returning the money they’d paid for freedom. The Senate agreed with him. What a disgrace to our rule! Pirates keep their word better than the Senate. “But it increased revenue, so it was beneficial.” How long will people dare to call anything beneficial when it isn’t right?

88. Our rule should rest on glory and our allies’ goodwill. Can hatred and disgrace possibly help it? I often disagreed even with my friend Cato. I thought he defended the treasury and its revenue too stubbornly, refusing everything to the tax collectors and many things to our allies. We ought to have treated our allies generously. And we ought to have dealt with the tax collectors as we normally deal with our own tenant farmers. All the more so because keeping those social orders united was vital to our country’s safety. Curio was wrong too. He said the people beyond the Po had a fair case, but always added, “Let advantage win.” He should instead have argued that their case wasn’t fair because it didn’t benefit the country. He shouldn’t have admitted it was fair while saying it wasn’t beneficial.

89. The sixth book of Hecato’s work on duties is full of questions like these. Is it right for an honest person to stop feeding his slaves when food prices are extremely high? He argues both sides. In the end, though, he bases duty on what he thinks is advantageous rather than on human kindness. He asks this: if something must be thrown overboard at sea, should it be an expensive horse or a low-priced slave? Here financial interest pulls one way, human kindness the other. “If a foolish person gets hold of a plank after a shipwreck, will a wise person wrench it away if he can?” He says no, because that would be unjust. Well, will the ship’s owner take back what’s his? Certainly not. He shouldn’t want to do that any more than throw a passenger off his ship at sea because the ship is his. Until it reaches the destination it was hired for, the ship belongs to the passengers, not its owner.

90. But suppose there’s one plank and two shipwrecked people, both wise. Should each try to grab it, or should one give way to the other? Yes, one should give way—to whoever has more reason to stay alive, for his own sake or his country’s. What if they’re equal on those points? They won’t fight over it. One will step aside for the other, as though he’d lost a drawing of lots or a finger-counting game. What if a father robs temples or tunnels into the treasury? Should his son report him to the authorities? That would be a terrible wrong. He should even defend his father if he’s charged. Doesn’t your country come before every other duty, then? Of course. But the country itself benefits from citizens who show devotion to their parents. What if the father tries to seize absolute power or betray his country? Will the son keep quiet? No, he’ll beg his father not to do it. If that gets nowhere, he’ll accuse him, even threaten him. In the end, if the country’s destruction is at stake, he’ll put its safety ahead of his father’s.

91. He also asks about a wise person who unknowingly accepts counterfeit coins as genuine. Once he discovers this, should he use them as genuine coins to pay a debt? Diogenes says yes; Antipater says no. I’m more inclined to agree with Antipater. If someone knowingly sells wine that’s going sour, must he disclose that? Diogenes thinks he needn’t. Antipater thinks an honest person should. These are something like disputed points of law among the Stoics. When selling a slave, must you disclose his faults? I don’t mean faults that legally entitle the buyer to return him unless they’re disclosed. I mean that he’s a liar, a gambler, a thief, or a drunk. One philosopher thinks these must be disclosed; the other doesn’t.

92. Suppose someone is selling gold but thinks he’s selling brass. Should an honest person tell him it’s gold? Or should he pay one denarius for something worth a thousand denarii? By now, my own view is clear, as is the disagreement between those philosophers I named. Must we always keep agreements and promises made without force or deliberate fraud, as the court magistrates usually put it? Suppose someone gives another person medicine for fluid buildup under the skin. They agree that, if it cures him, he’ll never use that medicine again. He recovers, but some years later the same illness returns. The person he made the agreement with won’t give him permission to use it again. What should he do? Anyone who refuses permission is being inhumane, and using it does him no wrong. The sick person should protect his life and health.

93. Now suppose someone makes a wise person his heir, leaving him 100 million sesterces. He asks him to dance publicly in the forum, in broad daylight, before claiming the inheritance. The wise person promises, since otherwise the man wouldn’t name him as heir. Should he keep that promise? I wish he hadn’t made it. Refusing would have shown dignity. But once he’s promised, suppose he thinks dancing in the forum is shameful. Breaking his word is more honorable if he takes none of the inheritance than if he takes it. There’s one possible exception: he might devote the money to some great national emergency. If he’s going to help his country, even dancing needn’t be shameful.

94. We shouldn’t even keep a promise when it won’t help the person we’ve promised. Let’s return to the myths. The Sun promised his son Phaethon anything he wished for. The boy asked to be lifted into his father’s chariot. Up he went, but before he could stand securely, lightning struck and burned him to death. Wouldn’t it have been far better for the father to break that promise? Then there’s Theseus, who insisted on collecting a promise from Neptune. Neptune had granted him three wishes. He suspected his son Hippolytus of a relationship with his stepmother and wished the boy dead. He got his wish—and was left in the deepest mourning.

95. And what about Agamemnon? He vowed to sacrifice to Diana the most beautiful thing born in his kingdom that year. So he sacrificed Iphigenia, since nothing more beautiful had been born that year. He should have broken his promise rather than committed such a horrible crime. So sometimes we shouldn’t keep promises, and we shouldn’t always return things left in our care. Suppose someone leaves a sword with you while he’s sane, then demands it back when he’s insane. Returning it would be wrong. Your duty would be to refuse. Or suppose someone leaves money with you and then wages war on your country. Should you return it? I don’t think so. You’d be acting against your country, which should be dearest to you. Thus, circumstances make many things wrong that seem right in themselves. Keeping promises, honoring agreements, and returning things entrusted to us become wrong when their effects are no longer beneficial. I think I’ve said enough about supposed benefits that violate justice under the cover of good judgment.

96. In the first book, we traced duties to four sources of what is right. Let’s stay with those same sources as we show something else: how things that seem beneficial, but aren’t, conflict with good character. We’ve discussed good judgment, which cunning tries to imitate. We’ve also discussed justice, which always benefits us. Two parts of what is right remain. One appears in the greatness and excellence of a strong spirit. The other appears in the discipline and restraint of self-control and moderation.

97. Ulysses thought something would benefit him—at least according to the tragic poets. Homer, our best authority, never suggests anything like this about him. But the tragedies accuse him of trying to avoid military service by pretending to be insane. Someone might say his plan wasn’t right, but it was useful. He could rule Ithaca and live there peacefully with his parents, wife, and son. Do you think any glory earned through daily hardships can compare with that peaceful life? I think such peace should be scorned and thrown away. Since it wouldn’t be right, I don’t think it would benefit him either.

98. What do you think Ulysses would have heard if he’d kept up that pretense? Even after his great achievements in the war, Ajax still says this about him:

“He himself took the lead in swearing that oath,
But he alone, as you all know, broke his word.
He kept pretending madness to avoid joining us.
If Palamedes, with his sharp judgment,
Hadn’t seen through that man’s shameless trick,
He’d have kept evading his sacred oath forever.”

99. It was better for him to fight not only the enemy but the waves, as he did, than to desert the Greeks united for war against foreigners. But let’s leave myths and foreign examples behind. Let’s turn to something that really happened, here among our own people. During his second term as consul, Marcus Atilius Regulus was captured in an ambush in Africa. Xanthippus the Spartan led the troops, with Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, in overall command. Regulus was sent to the Senate after swearing an oath. Unless certain high-ranking prisoners were handed back to the Carthaginians, he would return to Carthage himself. When he reached Rome, he saw an apparent benefit. But his actions show that he judged it false. It was this: he could stay in his country, at home with his wife and children. He could treat his wartime disaster as an ordinary turn in the fortunes of war. He could keep his standing as a former consul. Who denies that these things are beneficial? Who do you think? Greatness of spirit and courage deny it.

100. Do you want more trustworthy authorities? These virtues have their own defining qualities: fearing nothing, looking down on everything merely human, and considering nothing that can happen to a person unbearable. So what did Regulus do? He entered the Senate and explained his mission. He refused to give an opinion, saying he wasn’t a senator while bound by his oath to the enemy. He also said that returning the prisoners wouldn’t benefit Rome. “What a fool,” someone may say, “to act against his own interests!” The prisoners, he explained, were young men and good commanders; he was already worn out with age. His influence prevailed, so the prisoners were kept, and he himself returned to Carthage. Neither love for his country nor love for his family held him back. He certainly knew he was going to an exceptionally cruel enemy and carefully devised tortures. But he thought he must keep his oath. So even as they killed him by keeping him awake, his position was better than the alternative. He could have stayed home, an old prisoner, a former consul who had broken his oath.

101. “But he was foolish. He didn’t just oppose returning the prisoners; he argued against it.” How was that foolish? Even if it benefited the country? Can something that harms the country benefit any citizen? People overturn nature’s foundations when they separate what’s beneficial from what’s right. We all want what benefits us and feel drawn toward it. We simply can’t do otherwise. Who avoids what’s beneficial? Or rather, who doesn’t pursue it with all possible eagerness? But real benefits come only from praiseworthy, fitting, morally right conduct. That’s why we give such conduct the highest priority. We think of benefit as something necessary, rather than something glorious.

102. “What’s so important about an oath, then?” someone may ask. “Are we afraid of an angry Jupiter? All philosophers agree that a god never gets angry or harms anyone. That includes both those who say a god has no troubles and causes none for others, and those who believe a god is always active and working on something. Besides, how could an angry Jupiter have hurt Regulus more than Regulus hurt himself? Religious obligation, then, had no force that could outweigh such a great benefit. Was it about avoiding shameful conduct? First, choose the lesser evil. The shame wasn’t as great an evil as that torture. Then there’s that passage in Accius:”

“Did you break your promise?
I never gave, and never give, my word to anyone untrustworthy.”

An unholy king says it, but it’s still very well said.

103. They add another argument. We say some things seem beneficial but aren’t. In the same way, they say, some things seem right but aren’t. Returning to torture to keep an oath seems right, for example. But it becomes wrong because an agreement forced on someone by an enemy shouldn’t have been binding. They also say that anything highly beneficial becomes right, even if it didn’t seem right before. Those are roughly the arguments against Regulus. But let’s look at the first ones.

104. There was no reason to fear that Jupiter would get angry and hurt him. Jupiter doesn’t get angry or harm anyone. But this argument works against every oath, not just Regulus’s. With an oath, we need to understand its binding force, not the fear it causes. An oath is a solemn statement made before a god. When you’ve firmly promised something with a god as your witness, you must keep that promise. It’s not about the gods’ anger, since they have none. It’s about justice and keeping your word. Ennius puts it beautifully:

“O Faith, who nurture us and have wings, and oath in Jupiter’s name!”

Anyone who breaks an oath, then, breaks faith. As Cato says in his speech, our ancestors wanted Faith to have her home on the Capitol, next to Jupiter, Best and Greatest.

105. “But even an angry Jupiter couldn’t have hurt Regulus more than Regulus hurt himself.” Certainly—if pain were the only evil. But philosophers of the highest standing say pain isn’t the greatest evil, or even an evil at all. Please don’t criticize Regulus as a witness for their position. He’s no ordinary witness; perhaps he’s the strongest one of all. What stronger witness could we want than a leader of the Roman people who willingly faced torture to fulfill his duty? As for their advice to choose the lesser evil, they mean choosing disgrace over suffering. But is there any greater evil than disgrace? Even physical ugliness can offend us. How much worse must we consider the distortion and ugliness of a mind made shameful?

106. Those who argue this position more firmly dare to say that only what’s shameful is evil. Those who take a less strict approach still have no hesitation in calling it the greatest evil. As for “I never gave, and never give, my word to anyone untrustworthy,” the poet was right to write it. He was portraying Atreus and had to stay true to that character. But if people claim that a promise made to someone untrustworthy never binds them, they should beware. They may be looking for a hiding place for oath-breaking.

107. War, too, has its laws, and we must often keep an oath even to an enemy. If you swore with the intention that something ought to be done, you must do it. If your intention was otherwise, failing to do it isn’t breaking your oath. Suppose you don’t bring pirates the ransom you agreed to pay for your life. There’s no dishonesty in that, even if you swore to pay it. A pirate isn’t classified as a lawful enemy in war. He’s everyone’s common enemy. No bond of good faith or oath should exist between us and him.

108. Swearing something false isn’t in itself breaking an oath. What breaks an oath is failing to do what you swore with sincere intent. That’s the meaning of “according to your sincere intention” in our customary wording. Euripides puts it neatly: “My tongue swore, but my mind remains unsworn.” Regulus, however, shouldn’t have broken his oath and disrupted the terms and agreements made with an enemy in war. He was dealing with a lawful, recognized enemy. Our entire body of religious law governing war applied to that enemy, along with many shared legal obligations. Otherwise, the senate would never have handed distinguished men over to enemies in chains.

109. Yet Titus Veturius and Spurius Postumius were handed over to the Samnites during their second terms as consuls. After a defeat at Caudium, our legions had been forced to pass under the yoke. The consuls then made peace with the Samnites, but without authorization from the people and senate. At the same time, Tiberius Numicius and Quintus Maelius, then tribunes of the people, were also handed over. They had authorized the peace agreement. Handing these men over allowed Rome to reject the peace with the Samnites. Postumius himself proposed and urged this surrender, although he was one of those being surrendered. Many years later, Gaius Mancinus did the same. He had made a treaty with the Numantines without the senate’s authorization. He therefore supported the bill to hand him over to them. Lucius Furius and Sextus Atilius introduced it under a senate decree. The bill passed, and Mancinus was handed over to the enemy. He acted more honorably than Quintus Pompeius. Pompeius was in the same position, but begged against the measure, and it didn’t pass. In his case, apparent benefit counted for more than doing right. For the earlier men, the authority of what was right overcame the false appearance of benefit.

110. “But something done under force shouldn’t have been binding.” As though a brave man could really be forced! “Why, then, did he go to the senate, especially when he intended to oppose returning the prisoners?” You’re criticizing the greatest part of his conduct. He didn’t simply stand by his own judgment. He took on the mission so the senate could decide. Without his own advice, the prisoners would certainly have been returned to the Carthaginians. Regulus would then have stayed safely in his country. But he thought that wouldn’t benefit his country. So he believed he was right both to take that position and to suffer for it. As for their claim that something highly beneficial becomes right: no, it is right, rather than becoming right. Nothing is beneficial unless it’s also right. And it isn’t right because it’s beneficial; it’s beneficial because it’s right. Among so many remarkable examples, it would be hard to name one more praiseworthy or outstanding than this.

111. But of everything Regulus deserves praise for, one thing especially deserves admiration: his advice to keep the prisoners. His return seems amazing to us now. In those days, however, he couldn’t have done otherwise. The credit there belongs to the times, not the man. Our ancestors wanted no bond to hold people to their word more tightly than an oath. The laws of the Twelve Tables show this, as do laws made sacred by oaths. Treaties show it too, since they bind us to keep our word even to enemies. So do the censors’ investigations and punishments. They judged nothing more carefully than the keeping of oaths.

112. Marcus Pomponius, a tribune of the people, brought charges against Lucius Manlius, son of Aulus. Manlius had served as dictator and added a few days to his term. Pomponius also accused him of sending his son Titus away from everyone and ordering him to live in the country. This was the Titus later called Torquatus. The young man heard that his father was facing trouble. The story goes that he hurried to Rome and reached Pomponius’s house at daybreak. When his arrival was announced, Pomponius thought he was angry and bringing evidence against his father. He got out of bed, sent everyone else away, and ordered the young man admitted. As soon as Titus entered, he drew his sword. He swore he’d kill Pomponius immediately unless he promised under oath to drop the case against his father. Terrified, Pomponius took the oath. He reported the matter to the people and explained why he had to abandon the prosecution. Then he let Manlius go. That was how much an oath mattered in those days. This Titus Manlius got his surname by removing a Gaul’s neck ring near the Anio River. The Gaul had challenged him, and Titus had killed him. During his third term as consul, the Latins were crushed and routed at the Veseris. He was an exceptionally great man, as indulgent toward his father as he was harshly strict with his son.

113. Regulus deserves praise for keeping his oath. By the same reasoning, ten men Hannibal sent to the Senate after the battle of Cannae deserve blame if they didn’t return. They’d sworn to return to the camp held by the Carthaginians unless they won agreement to ransom the prisoners. The accounts of these men don’t all agree. Polybius, an especially reliable historian, says nine returned after the Senate refused their request. They were ten men of the highest rank. The tenth stayed in Rome. Shortly after leaving the camp, he’d gone back as though he’d forgotten something. He argued that this return to camp had released him from his oath. That was wrong. Deceit tightens the bonds of perjury; it doesn’t loosen them. His cunning was stupid, a twisted imitation of good judgment. So the Senate ordered this scheming trickster to be bound and taken to Hannibal.

114. But this was the most important point. Hannibal held eight thousand men who hadn’t been captured in battle or scattered while fleeing the danger of death. They were men the consuls Paulus and Varro had left behind in camp. The Senate decided not to ransom them, although it would have cost very little. It wanted to instill in our soldiers the determination to win or die. The same historian writes that Hannibal’s spirit broke when he heard this. Despite their desperate situation, the Senate and Roman people had shown such greatness of spirit. That’s how things that seem beneficial lose out when compared with what’s right.

115. Gaius Acilius, who wrote a history in Greek, gives another account. He says several men returned to camp using the same trick to free themselves from their oath. The censors branded them with every mark of disgrace. Let’s end this discussion here. Actions driven by a timid, low, defeated, broken spirit clearly bring no benefit. Regulus would have acted that way if he’d recommended what he thought he needed concerning the prisoners, rather than what the country needed. The same goes if he’d wanted to remain at home. Such actions bring no benefit because they’re disgraceful, foul, and shameful.

116. The fourth part remains: proper behavior, moderation, modesty, self-control, and restraint. Can anything benefit us if it conflicts with this whole chorus of virtues? Yet the philosophers who followed Aristippus, called Cyrenaics and Annicereans, put all good in pleasure. They thought virtue deserved praise because it produced pleasure. Those schools have faded away, but Epicurus is thriving. He supports and promotes much the same view. If we mean to defend and hold on to what’s right, we must fight them with “men and horses,” as the saying goes.

117. Metrodorus writes that not just our advantage, but our whole happiness, rests on a healthy body and the sure expectation of staying healthy. If that’s true, this advantage—the greatest one, in their view—will certainly clash with what’s right. To begin with, where will good judgment fit? Is its job to hunt down enjoyable sensations everywhere? What miserable service for virtue, working as pleasure’s slave! And what task will good judgment have? To select pleasures intelligently? Suppose nothing could be more enjoyable. Could anything be more shameful? Then consider someone who calls pain the greatest evil. What place can courage have for him, when courage means disregarding pain and hardship? Epicurus does speak quite bravely about pain in many passages. But we shouldn’t look at what he says. We should ask what someone can consistently say if he defines good by pleasure and evil by pain. And if I listen to him on self-control and restraint, he certainly has plenty to say in many places. But he gets stuck, like water that won’t flow, as the saying goes. How can someone praise restraint when he places the greatest good in pleasure? Restraint opposes uncontrolled desires, while those desires chase pleasure.

118. Still, they find ways around these difficulties with the three virtues, and not without some cleverness. They introduce good judgment as knowledge that supplies pleasures and drives away pains. They also find some room for courage by explaining why we should disregard death and endure pain. They even bring in restraint—not easily, admittedly, but however they can. They say pleasure reaches its greatest extent when pain has been removed. Justice, though, totters—or rather lies flat. So do all the virtues expressed in our shared life and the bonds between human beings. Kindness, generosity, and friendliness can’t exist, any more than friendship can, unless we seek them for themselves. They can’t exist if we measure them by pleasure or advantage.

119. Let’s put this briefly. We’ve shown that nothing conflicting with what’s right can benefit us. In the same way, we say that every kind of pleasure conflicts with what’s right. That’s why I find Callipho and Dinomachus especially blameworthy. They thought they’d settle the dispute by joining pleasure to what’s right, like yoking a farm animal to a person. What’s right won’t accept that pairing. It rejects it and pushes it away. Nor can our ultimate standard of good and bad be mixed and blended from completely unlike ingredients. It must be one consistent thing. But this is an important subject, and there’s more to say about it elsewhere. Now let’s return to our topic.

120. We’ve already discussed sufficiently how to decide when an apparent advantage conflicts with what’s right. But suppose someone says pleasure also has the appearance of an advantage. Even then, it can’t be joined with what’s right. To give pleasure some credit, it may add a little seasoning. It certainly adds no benefit.

121. Marcus, my son, you have a gift from your father. I think it’s a great one, but its value will depend on how you receive it. You’ll have to welcome these three books as guests among your notes from Cratippus. If I’d come to Athens myself, you’d have listened to me too from time to time. I would have come if my country’s loud call hadn’t brought me back in midjourney. Now my voice has reached you through these books instead. Give them as much time as you can—and you can give as much as you want. Once I know you enjoy this kind of learning, I’ll talk with you in person soon, I hope. And while you’re away, I’ll speak to you from a distance. Goodbye, then, my dear Cicero. Be sure that you’re very dear to me already. But you’ll be far dearer if you take pleasure in writings and teachings like these.