Book I

1 Although you, my son Marcus, have now been listening to Cratippus for a year, and that at Athens, you ought to be richly supplied with the precepts and principles of philosophy, given the supreme authority of both the teacher and the city—the one able to enlarge your knowledge, the other your experience through examples. Yet, since I myself have always joined Latin learning with Greek for my own benefit, and have done so not only in philosophy but also in the practice of speaking, I think you should do the same, so that you may be equal in command of both languages. Toward that end, we seem to have given our countrymen great help, so that not only those untrained in Greek letters, but even the learned, believe they have gained something both for speaking and for judging.

2 You will therefore study with the foremost philosopher of this age, and study as long as you wish; but you ought to keep wishing as long as you do not regret the progress you make. Yet as you read my books—which do not differ much from the Peripatetics’, since both of us wish to be Socratics and Platonists—use your own judgment on the subject matter itself; I place no obstacle in your way. The Latin language, however, you will certainly make richer by reading my works. Nor would I have this taken as arrogance. For while I concede the science of philosophy to many, the orator’s own gift—to speak aptly, clearly, and with grace—since I have spent my life in that pursuit, if I claim it for myself, I seem in some measure to assert a right of my own.

3 That is why I urge you strongly, my Cicero, to read with care not only my speeches but also these books on philosophy, which have now all but equaled them; there is greater force of eloquence in the speeches, but this style too—level and measured discourse—must be cultivated. And I see that no Greek has yet managed to labor in both kinds at once, to pursue both forensic oratory and this quiet manner of philosophical discussion—unless Demetrius of Phalerum can perhaps be counted in that number: a subtle reasoner, an orator not very forceful yet sweet, so that you may recognize in him the disciple of Theophrastus. How far we have advanced in both, let others judge; both we have certainly pursued.

4 For my part, I believe that Plato, had he chosen to handle forensic oratory, could have spoken with the greatest weight and fullness, and that Demosthenes, had he held to what he learned from Plato and chosen to deliver it, could have done so with polish and brilliance; and I judge the same of Aristotle and Isocrates, each of whom, delighting in his own pursuit, disdained the other. But since I had resolved at this time to write something to you—much more hereafter—I wished above all to begin with what was most fitting for your age and for my authority. For although there is much in philosophy, both weighty and useful, that philosophers have treated with precision and richness, nothing seems to extend wider than what they have handed down about duties and precepts. For no part of life can stand free of duty—in public or private matters, in the courts or at home, when you act on your own or transact with another—and in cultivating it lies all the moral goodness of life, in neglecting it all disgrace.

5 And this question is common to all philosophers. For who would dare call himself a philosopher while handing down no precepts of duty? Yet there are certain schools which, by the ends of good and evil they set up, subvert every duty. For the man who establishes the highest good so that it has nothing joined with virtue, and measures it by his own advantage rather than by moral goodness—he, if he is consistent with himself and is not at times overcome by the goodness of his nature, can cultivate neither friendship nor justice nor generosity. And one who judges pain the greatest evil can surely in no way be brave, nor one who declares pleasure the highest good be temperate.

6 Though these points are so plain that the matter needs no argument, I have discussed them elsewhere. If those schools wish to be consistent, they can say nothing about duty; nor can any precepts of duty that are firm, stable, and joined to nature be handed down except by those who hold that the honorable is to be sought for its own sake alone, or at least above all. That teaching, then, belongs properly to the Stoics, the Academics, and the Peripatetics; the doctrine of Aristo, Pyrrho, and Erillus was cast out long ago—though even they would have had the right of their own to dispute about duty, had they left some room for choosing among things, so that there would be a way of approach to finding duty. We shall therefore follow, for this time and this inquiry chiefly, the Stoics—not as interpreters, but, as is our habit, drawing from their springs with our own judgment and discretion, as much and in whatever manner seems good.

7 It seems right, then, since the whole discussion is to be about duty, to define first what duty is—which Panaetius, I am surprised, passed over. For every inquiry into any subject that reason undertakes ought to start from a definition, so that it is understood what the thing under discussion is. […] Every inquiry about duty is of two kinds. One concerns the final good; the other is set in precepts, by which the practice of life may be shaped in all its parts. Questions of the former kind are such as these: whether every duty is a perfect duty; whether one duty is greater than another; and the rest of that class. The precepts about duties, however, though they relate to the final good, show this less clearly, because they seem to look more to the shaping of common life; and it is about these that we must set things out in these books.

8 There is also another division of duty. For a duty is called both a kind of intermediate duty and a perfect duty. The perfect duty let us call the right, I think, since the Greeks call it katorthoma, and the common duty kathekon. And they define them thus: what is right, that they define as the perfect duty; the intermediate duty, they say, is that for which a plausible reason can be given why it was done.

9 There are, then, as Panaetius sees it, three parts to the deliberation of one who is taking counsel. First, one doubts whether what comes into deliberation is honorable or disgraceful to do; in weighing this, minds are often pulled apart by opposing judgments. Then people ask or deliberate whether the thing they are weighing will conduce to the comfort and pleasure of life, to resources and abundance, to wealth and power, by which they can help themselves and their own; that whole deliberation falls under the calculation of expediency. The third kind of doubt arises when what seems expedient seems to fight against the honorable. For when expediency seems to snatch us toward itself and moral goodness to call us back, the mind in deliberating is torn and takes on a twofold burden of thought.

10 In this division two things were passed over—and to omit something is the greatest fault in dividing. For it is not only whether a thing is honorable or disgraceful that is usually deliberated, but also, when two honorable courses are set out, which is the more honorable, and likewise, when two useful ones are set out, which is the more useful. So the scheme he thought threefold turns out to need dividing into five parts. The first, then, is about the honorable—but in two ways; then, on the same principle, about the useful; and after that, about the comparison between them.

11 To begin with, nature has given every species of living thing the means to protect itself, its life, and its body, to avoid whatever seems likely to harm it, and to seek out and provide all that is necessary for living—food, shelter, and the like of that kind. Common to all living things, too, is the urge toward union for the sake of procreation, and a certain care for their offspring. But the greatest difference between man and beast is this: the beast, moved only as far as sense impels it, adapts itself to what is present and at hand alone, with very little awareness of past or future. Man, however, because he shares in reason, by which he perceives consequences, sees the causes of things and is not blind to their precedents and their anticipations, as it were; he compares likenesses and joins and links the future to present things; he easily takes in the whole course of his life and prepares the things necessary for living it.

12 By the power of the same reason nature binds man to man for the fellowship of speech and of life; above all, it engenders in him a surpassing love for his children and drives him to want gatherings and assemblies of men both to exist and to be attended by him. For those reasons he strives to provide what supplies refinement and subsistence, not for himself alone, but for his wife, his children, and the others he holds dear and is bound to protect. This care also rouses men’s spirits and makes them greater for great undertakings.

13 Above all, the search for and investigation of truth is proper to man. And so, whenever we are free of necessary business and cares, we long to see, to hear, to learn something, and we hold the knowledge of things hidden or marvelous to be necessary for living a happy life. From this it is understood that what is true, simple, and sincere is what best fits man’s nature. Joined to this desire to see truth is a certain appetite for preeminence, so that a mind well formed by nature wills to obey no one except one who gives commands or teaches, or one who rules justly and lawfully for the general advantage; from this arise greatness of spirit and contempt for human affairs.

14 Nor is that a small power of nature and reason—that this animal alone perceives what order is, what fitness is, what measure there should be in deeds and words. No other animal feels the beauty, grace, and harmony of the parts of what it sees; and nature and reason, carrying this likeness from the eyes to the mind, think that beauty, constancy, and order must be guarded far more strictly in thought and deed, and it watches that we do nothing unseemly or effeminate, and that in all our opinions and actions we neither do nor think anything lustful. Out of these elements is fused and formed what we seek—the honorable, which, even if it never wins renown, is still honorable; and, as we truly say, praiseworthy by nature even if no one praises it.

15 You see, my son Marcus, the very shape, as it were the face, of the honorable, which, ‘if it could be seen with the eyes, would awaken wondrous loves of wisdom,’ as Plato says. But everything honorable arises from one of four parts. For it lies either in the perception of truth and quickness of mind, or in preserving human fellowship, giving each his due, and keeping faith in agreements, or in the greatness and strength of a lofty and unconquered spirit, or in the order and measure of all that is done and said, in which moderation and self-control reside. Though these four are bound and interwoven with one another, certain kinds of duty arise from each one separately; thus, from the first part described, in which we place wisdom and prudence, comes the search for and discovery of truth, and the proper task of that virtue is just this.

16 For whoever most clearly perceives what is truest in each matter, and who can see and set out the reasoning most keenly and most quickly, is rightly accounted the most prudent and the wisest. Truth, accordingly, is the material, so to speak, laid before that man to handle and to busy himself in.

17 To the other three virtues have been set the tasks of providing and preserving the things on which the active conduct of life depends, so that the fellowship and union of men may be kept, and so that the excellence and greatness of spirit may shine forth—both in increasing resources and securing benefits for oneself and one’s own, and far more in despising these very things. Order, constancy, and moderation, and the qualities like them, belong to that class of things to which some action must be applied, and not thought alone. For by applying a certain measure and order to the affairs that are handled in life, we shall preserve moral goodness and dignity.

18 Of the four headings into which we divided the nature and force of the honorable, the first—the one that consists in the knowledge of truth—touches human nature most closely. For we are all drawn and led by a desire for knowledge and understanding, in which to excel we think glorious, while to slip, to err, to be ignorant, to be deceived we count both an evil and a disgrace. In this pursuit, which is both natural and honorable, two faults must be avoided: one, that we not take unknown things for known and rashly assent to them. Whoever wants to escape that fault—and everyone ought to want it—will bring to the consideration of things both time and diligence.

19 The second fault belongs to those who devote too great an eagerness and too much labor to obscure and difficult matters—and useless ones besides. When these faults have been avoided, whatever effort and care is spent on worthy subjects worth knowing will be deservedly praised: we hear of Gaius Sulpicius in astronomy, we knew Sextus Pompeius ourselves in geometry, many in dialectic, more still in civil law—all arts occupied with the investigation of truth. But to be drawn away from action by devotion to that pursuit is against duty. For all the praise of virtue lies in action, though interruptions from it often occur, and many returns to study are given. Then too the mind’s activity, which never rests, can keep us in pursuits of knowledge even without our own effort. But every thought and movement of the mind will be occupied either in taking counsel on honorable matters that bear on living well and happily, or in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. And so much for the first source of duty.

20 Of the three remaining sources, the widest in reach is the principle by which human fellowship among men and, as it were, a community of life is held together; it has two parts: justice, in which the splendor of virtue is greatest and from which men are called good men, and beneficence joined to it, which may also be called kindness or generosity. But the first task of justice is that no one harm another unless provoked by wrong; the next, that one use common things for the common good and private things as one’s own.

21 Private things, moreover, are by nature none at all; they arise from ancient occupation—as with those who once came into empty lands—or from conquest, as with those who won possession in war, or from law, agreement, terms of settlement, or lot. From this it comes about that the fields of Arpinum are said to belong to the men of Arpinum, and those of Tusculum to the men of Tusculum; and the division of private possessions is like this. Since, then, each man’s own comes to him out of what was common by nature, each should hold what has fallen to his lot; and if anyone grasps at any part of it for himself, he will violate the law of human fellowship.

22 But since, as Plato has written so nobly, we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims one part of our birth and our friends another; and since, as the Stoics please to hold, everything that springs up on earth is created for the use of men, and men are generated for the sake of men, that they might benefit one another—in this we must follow nature as our leader: to bring the common good out into the open, to bind the fellowship of man with man by an exchange of duties, giving and receiving, and by our skills, our labor, and our resources.

23 The foundation of justice, moreover, is good faith—that is, constancy and truthfulness in what is said and agreed. From this we may dare, though it will perhaps seem too severe to someone, to imitate the Stoics, who diligently search out where words are drawn from, and to believe that ‘good faith’ (fides) took its name because what is said is done. There are two kinds of injustice: one in those who inflict wrong, the other in those who, when they can, do not fend off the wrong done to others. For the man who makes an unjust assault on anyone, stirred by anger or some passion, seems in a way to raise his hand against a comrade; but the man who does not defend another or stand against the wrong, when he can, is as much at fault as if he abandoned his parents, his friends, or his country.

24 Those wrongs, indeed, that are deliberately inflicted for the sake of harming often spring from fear: the man who means to hurt another fears that, unless he does it, he will himself suffer some loss. But for the most part people set about doing wrong so as to gain what they have coveted; in this fault greed extends widest of all.

25 Men seek riches both for the necessities of life and for the full enjoyment of pleasures. In those of greater spirit, however, the desire for money looks to power and to the means of winning favor—as Marcus Crassus said not long ago, that no sum of money was great enough for the man who wished to be first in the state, if the income from it could not maintain an army. Magnificent equipment and the cultured elegance and abundance of life also delight them; and from these things has come an endless craving for money. Nor is the enlargement of a household to be condemned, so long as it wrongs no one—but injustice must always be fled.

26 But most of all are men led into forgetting justice when they have fallen into the craving for command, public office, and glory. What stands in Ennius—‘No sacred fellowship, no good faith, exists in royal power’—has a far wider reach. For wherever there is something in which many cannot excel at once, the contest there usually grows so fierce that it is very hard to keep sacred fellowship unbroken. The recklessness of Gaius Caesar lately proved it: he overturned every right, divine and human, for the sake of the supremacy he had imagined for himself in the delusion of his own opinion. And it is a trouble in this class of men that the cravings for honor, command, power, and glory usually arise in the greatest spirits and the most brilliant minds. All the more, then, must we take care that no fault is committed in that kind.

27 But in every injustice it makes a great difference whether the wrong is done in some passion of the soul, which is for the most part brief and momentary, or deliberately and with thought. For wrongs that happen in some sudden impulse are lighter than those inflicted with planning and preparation. And on inflicting wrong enough has been said.

28 There are usually more causes for passing over a defense and deserting one’s duty. For people are unwilling to take on enmity, labor, or expense; or they are hindered by carelessness, laziness, or inactivity, or by their own pursuits and employments, so much that they let those they ought to protect stand deserted. And so we must see whether it is enough for them to say what is said in Plato against the philosophers: that they occupy themselves with the search for truth, and that they despise and count as nothing the things most men eagerly pursue and commonly fight over, and are therefore just. They attain one kind of justice—that in doing wrong they harm no one—but they fall into the other: absorbed in the love of learning, they desert those they ought to protect. And so people think they will not even enter public life unless compelled. But it would be fairer for that to happen of their own will; for what is done rightly is just only if it is voluntary.

29 There are also those who say that, out of devotion to maintaining their estates or from a kind of hatred of mankind, they mind their own business and seem to wrong no one. Free of one kind of injustice, they run into the other; for they desert the fellowship of life, contributing to it no eagerness, no effort, no resources.

30 Since, then, we have set out the two kinds of injustice, added the causes of each kind, and established beforehand the things in which justice is contained, we shall easily be able to judge what our duty is at any given moment—unless we love ourselves too dearly. For care for others’ affairs is hard. Though that Chremes of Terence ‘considers nothing human alien to himself,’ yet because we perceive and feel what happens to ourselves, prosperous or adverse, more than what happens to others—which we see, as it were, across a long interval—we judge differently about them than about ourselves. That is why those give good advice who forbid us to do anything we doubt is fair or unfair. Fairness shines of itself; doubt signals a thought of injustice.

31 But times often arise when the things that seem most worthy of a just man—and of the man we call a good man—are changed and become their opposites: returning what was deposited, even to a madman, keeping a promise, and everything that belongs to truth and good faith; it sometimes becomes just to let these shift and not to keep them. For they should be referred back to the foundations of justice I laid down at the start: first, that no one be harmed; second, that the common good be served. When these change with circumstances, duty changes too, and it is not always the same.

32 For it can happen that a promise or agreement, if carried out, becomes useless either to the one to whom it was promised or to the one who promised. For if Neptune, as the story goes, had not granted what he had promised to Theseus, Theseus would not have been robbed of his son Hippolytus. Of the three wishes, as it is written, this was the third, which he made in anger over Hippolytus’s death; and when it was granted, he fell into the deepest grief. Promises, then, need not be kept when they are useless to those to whom you made them; and if they harm you more than they benefit the person to whom you promised, it is not against duty to put the greater good before the lesser—as if you had arranged to act as someone’s advocate in a case that has come to trial, and meanwhile your son had fallen gravely ill: it is not against duty to fail to do what you said; rather the man to whom you promised would himself depart from duty if he complained of being let down. And who does not see that no standing is owed to promises a man has made under the compulsion of fear, or deceived by trickery? Most such promises are released by the praetor’s edict, some by statute.

33 Wrongs also often arise from a kind of sharp practice and from an interpretation of law too clever and at the same time malicious. From that has come the proverb, worn smooth by common speech, ‘the height of law, the height of injustice.’ In this class many faults are committed in public affairs too—like the man who, when a truce of thirty days had been made with the enemy, laid waste their fields by night, because the truce had been agreed for days, not for nights. Nor should even our own man be approved—if it is true, for I have only hearsay—that Quintus Fabius Labeo, or whoever it was, having been appointed arbiter by the senate between the Nolans and the Neapolitans over their boundaries, when he came to the place, spoke separately with each side, urging them not to grasp greedily or covetously, but to prefer retreating to advancing. When each had done so, a stretch of land was left between them. So he marked their boundaries exactly as each had said; and the land left in the middle he adjudged to the Roman people. That, to be sure, is to deceive, not to judge. Such cleverness, then, must be shunned in everything.

34 There are, moreover, certain duties to be kept even toward those from whom you have received wrong. For there is a limit to revenge and punishment; and I am not sure it is enough for the man who offered the provocation to repent of his wrong, so that he himself will attempt nothing of the kind afterward and others will be slower toward wrongdoing. And in the state the rights of war must above all be kept. For since there are two ways of contending—one by discussion, the other by force—and since the first is proper to man, the second to beasts, we must flee to the second only when we are not allowed to use the first.

35 Wars, then, must be undertaken for this reason: that one may live in peace without wrong; and once victory is won, those who were not cruel or savage in war must be spared—as our ancestors admitted the Tusculans, the Aequi, the Volsci, the Sabines, and the Hernici even into citizenship, but razed Carthage and Numantia to the ground. I could have wished they had spared Corinth; but I believe they followed some reason—chiefly the opportunity of the place, lest the site itself someday encourage the making of war. In my opinion at least, peace that would hold no treachery should always be considered. Had my counsel been followed here, we should have some commonwealth—if not the best, at least one—whereas now we have none. And though we must care for those whom you have conquered by force, those too who lay down their arms and flee to the good faith of the commanders must be received, even if the battering ram has struck their wall. So greatly was justice cultivated among our countrymen in this that those who had taken into their protection cities or nations conquered in war were, by the custom of the elders, their patrons.

36 And the fairness of war was set down most sacredly in the fetial law of the Roman people. From this it can be understood that no war is just unless it is waged after a demand for restitution, or unless it has been proclaimed and declared beforehand. Popilius was holding the province as commander, and in his army Cato’s son was serving as a raw recruit. When Popilius judged that one legion should be dismissed, he dismissed Cato’s son too, who served in that same legion. But the young man, out of love of fighting, stayed in the army; and Cato wrote to Popilius that, if he allowed him to remain, he should bind him a second time with the soldier’s oath, since, the first oath having lapsed, he could not lawfully fight the enemy.

37 Such was the utmost care observed in waging war. There is also a letter of Marcus Cato the Elder to his son Marcus, in which he writes that he has heard the young man had been discharged by the consul while serving as a soldier in Macedonia in the war with Perseus. He warns him, therefore, to take care not to enter battle; for he denies that it is lawful for one who is not a soldier to fight the enemy. I notice, too, this: that the man who in the strict term was a public enemy was called hostis (foreign foe), the gentleness of the word softening the grimness of the thing. For among our ancestors, hostis meant what we now call a foreigner. The Twelve Tables bear witness: ‘a day set for trial with a foreign foe,’ and likewise ‘against a foreign foe, authority everlasting.’ What can be added to such gentleness—to call the man with whom you wage war by a name so mild? Yet time has made that name harsher; it has moved away from ‘foreigner’ and now stays fixed on the man who bears arms against you.

38 But when the contest is for supremacy and glory is sought in war, the causes underneath must still be the same ones I said a little earlier are the just causes of wars. Yet wars in which the prize is imperial glory must be waged less harshly. As we contend with a citizen in one way if he is a personal enemy, in another if he is a rival candidate—with one the contest is for public office and standing, with the other for a man’s head and reputation—so the war with the Celtiberians and the Cimbrians was waged as against enemies: which of the two should stand, not which should rule; but with the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, and Pyrrhus the struggle was for supremacy. The Carthaginians were treaty-breakers, Hannibal cruel; the rest were more just. Pyrrhus’s words about returning his prisoners were especially noble: ‘I ask no gold, nor shall you give me a price; not as hucksters of war, but as warriors, let us decide life, both of us, with steel, not gold. Whether you wish to reign, lady, or I, or what Fortune may bring, let us test it by valor. And take this word as well: whose valor the fortune of war has spared, for their freedom it is my fixed resolve to care. A gift—take them, lead them away; I give them with the great gods’ favor.’

39 Truly a royal judgment, worthy of the stock of the Aeacids. And even when individuals, pressed by circumstances, have made some promise to an enemy, good faith must be kept in that very thing—as in the First Punic War, when Regulus, taken captive by the Carthaginians, was sent to Rome to negotiate an exchange of prisoners and swore that he would return: first, on arriving, he voted in the senate that the prisoners should not be sent back; then, when his kin and friends held him back, he chose to return to his punishment rather than betray the good faith he had given the enemy.

40 But in the Second Punic War, after the battle of Cannae, when Hannibal sent ten men to Rome, bound by oath that they would return unless they won the release of the captives by ransoming them, the censors, because they had sworn falsely, degraded every one of them to the lowest civic class, for as long as each of them lived—and no less the man who had found a way to cheat the oath. For he had left the camp with Hannibal’s leave and returned a little later, saying he had forgotten something; then, when he left the camp a second time, he considered himself released by his oath—and in words he was, in fact he was not. But in good faith, what you meant, not what you said, must always be considered. The greatest example of justice toward an enemy was set by our ancestors, when a deserter from Pyrrhus promised the senate that he would give the king poison and kill him; the senate gave him up to Pyrrhus, and Gaius Fabricius delivered him. Thus they refused to approve even the death of an enemy—a powerful one, and one making war upon them unprovoked—when it was to be bought with crime.

41 Enough has now been said about duties in war. Let us remember, too, that justice must be kept even toward the lowliest. Now the lowest condition and lot is that of slaves; and those give them no bad advice who direct that slaves be used as hired hands are used: work to be required of them, fair treatment to be given them. Since injustice is done in two ways—by force or by fraud—fraud seems the trick of the little fox, force the rush of the lion; both are utterly alien to a human being, but fraud deserves the deeper hatred. Yet of all injustice none is deadlier than that of men who, at the very moment they deceive, strive to seem good men. Enough has been said of justice.

42 Next, as we proposed, let us speak of beneficence and generosity, than which nothing is better suited to man’s nature, though it calls for many safeguards. We must see, first, that kindness injures no one—neither those to whom it seems to be shown nor the rest; second, that our kindness not exceed our means; and third, that it be given to each according to his worth, for that is the foundation of justice, to which all of this must be referred. For those who do a favor to someone that harms him, when they wish to seem to want to help him, must be judged not generous and open-handed but ruinous flatterers; and those who injure some so as to be generous to others fall into the very same injustice as if they turned another’s goods to their own gain.

43 Many men, however, greedy for splendor and glory, snatch from some what they lavish on others, and suppose they will be thought generous toward their friends if they enrich them by any means whatever. That is so far from a duty that nothing could be more opposed to duty. We must be sure, then, to use that generosity which helps our friends and injures no one. Hence the transfers of money made by Lucius Sulla and Gaius Caesar, from rightful owners to strangers, should not be thought generous; nothing is generous that is not also just.

44 The second point demanded caution: that kindness not outrun one’s means. Those who would be more generous than their circumstances allow first go wrong by wronging their own households, transferring to strangers resources that it would be fairer to supply to, and leave with, those nearest them. Such generosity, moreover, usually harbors a craving to seize and take by wrong, so that means for giving may be at hand. One can see, too, that most men are led to act less by a generous nature than by a kind of ambition to be seen as benefactors, and do many things that spring from show more than from genuine will; such pretense has more in common with empty display than with either generosity or moral goodness.

45 The third point was that in giving benefits we should choose by worth. Here we must weigh the character of the one on whom the kindness is to be conferred, his feeling toward us, the closeness of our common life and fellowship, and the services he has rendered our interests before now. It is best when all of these coincide; if not, the more numerous and weightier claims must carry more weight.

46 But since we live not with perfect and wholly wise men, but with those for whom it is a fine thing if they hold images of virtue, this too, I think, must be understood: no one at all should be neglected in whom any sign of virtue appears; yet each is to be honored in proportion as he is graced with those gentler virtues—modesty, self-control, and that very justice of which so much has now been said. For a brave and lofty spirit usually burns hotter in a man who is not yet perfect or wise; the gentler virtues, it seems, are what properly reach the good man. So much for character.

47 As for the goodwill each man bears toward us, the first duty is to give most to the one by whom we are most loved—though we should judge goodwill not as young men do, by a sudden ardor of affection, but rather by its steadiness and constancy. But where the service is such that gratitude must be repaid, not merely shown, a certain greater care is required; no duty is more essential than the repayment of gratitude.

48 And if Hesiod bids us return what we have taken on loan in fuller measure, so far as we can, what must we do when a kindness challenges us? Should we not imitate the fertile fields, which yield far more than they took in? If we do not hesitate to confer favors on those we hope will one day be of use to us, what should we be toward those who have already been of use? For since generosity has two forms—granting a benefit and repaying one—whether we give or not lies in our own power; not to repay is not permitted to a good man, provided he can do it without doing an injury.

49 Among benefits received, distinctions must be made, and there is no doubt that the most is owed to whoever gave the greatest. Even here, though, we must weigh above all with what spirit, zeal, and goodwill each man gave. Many do much out of a headlong impulse, without judgment—driven either by a disorder that runs to everyone or by a sudden rush of feeling like a gust of wind; such benefits are not to be counted as great as those bestowed with judgment, thoughtfully and steadfastly. And in bestowing a benefit, as in returning thanks, when other things are equal, the highest duty of all is this: to come to the aid of the one who most needs aid. Most people do the opposite; on the man from whom they hope for the most they wait most attentively, even when he has no need of them.

50 The fellowship and bond of human society will be best preserved if, to each man in proportion as he is most closely joined to us, the most kindness is given. But what the natural principles of human community and fellowship are seems to call for a deeper inquiry. The first is seen in the fellowship of the whole human race. Its bond is reason and speech, which reconcile men to one another by teaching, learning, sharing, arguing, judging, and join them in a kind of natural fellowship; and in nothing do we stand farther from the nature of wild beasts, in which we often say there is courage, as in horses and lions, but never justice, fairness, or goodness; for they lack reason and speech.

51 This fellowship is the widest of all, holding among all men with all. In it there must be a common right to all the things nature has produced for the common use of mankind, while what has been assigned by statutes and civil law is to be held as settled, and the rest so observed that, as the Greek proverb has it, friends hold all things in common. What seems common to all men is of the kind Ennius set forth in one instance, which can be carried over to countless others: “A man who kindly shows the way to one who wanders lights a torch, as it were, from his own torch; it shines no less for him after he has lit it for the other.” This one instance teaches plainly that whatever can be given without loss should be granted even to a stranger.

52 From this come those common things: not to bar anyone from flowing water, to let anyone who wishes take fire from fire, to give honest counsel to one who is deliberating—things useful to those who take them, no burden to the giver. These services, then, we should render, and we should always contribute something to the common good. But since each man’s means are small, while the multitude of those in need is beyond counting, open-handed giving must be measured by that line of Ennius, “it shines no less for him,” so that we keep means enough to be generous to our own.

53 There are, however, several degrees of human fellowship. To pass over that boundless one, closer is the fellowship of the same people, nation, and tongue, by which men are most closely joined. More intimate still is membership in the same city, for citizens share many things: the forum, temples, colonnades, streets, laws, rights, courts, votes; and beyond these, customs, intimacies, and the many dealings and contracts many have with many. But a still tighter bond is the fellowship of kinsmen, which is drawn in from that immense society of the human race into a small and narrow compass.

54 For since the desire to beget is common to all living things by nature, the first fellowship is marriage itself, the next children, then the one household where everything is shared; and this is the beginning of a city and, as it were, the seedbed of the state. Next follow the bonds of brothers, then of cousins; and when one house can no longer hold them, they go out into other houses like colonies. Then follow marriages and the ties they create, from which yet more kinsmen arise; and this propagation and stock is the origin of commonwealths. The bond of blood ties men together by goodwill and affection.

55 For it means much to have the same monuments of ancestors, to share the same sacred rites, to have tombs in common. But of all fellowships none is higher, none firmer, than when good men of like character are joined in intimacy; for the moral goodness of which we so often speak moves us even when we see it in another, and makes a friend of the man in whom it seems to dwell.

56 And though every virtue draws us toward itself and makes us love those in whom it seems to dwell, justice and generosity do this most of all. Nothing is more lovable, nothing binds more strongly, than likeness of character in good men; where the same pursuits and the same desires are found, each comes to delight in the other as much as in himself, and there is brought about what Pythagoras asks of friendship—that one be made out of many. Great, too, is that community which grows from benefits given and received on both sides; so long as they are mutual and welcome, they bind those who exchange them in a firm fellowship.

57 But when you look over everything with reason and spirit, of all fellowships none is weightier, none dearer, than the one each of us has with the state. Dear are our parents, dear our children, kinsmen, and friends; but the love of all these our country takes up in itself alone; for it, would any good man hesitate to meet death, if his death would serve it? Hence the detestable savagery of those who tore their country apart with every crime, and who are and have been bent upon destroying it root and branch.

58 But if a comparison must be made, and we weigh to whom the most duty is owed, country and parents come first, by whose surpassing benefits we are bound; next come children and the whole household, which looks to us alone and can find no other refuge; after them, well-matched kinsmen, with whom our lot is usually shared as well. The necessary supports of life, then, are owed chiefly to those I named before; but the sharing of life and table, counsel, conversation, encouragement, consolation, and at times even frank reproach flourish most in friendship; and the pleasantest friendship is that which likeness of character has joined.

59 But in assigning all these duties, we must consider what each man most needs, and what he could or could not attain without us. Thus the degrees of obligation will not always match the occasion; there are duties owed more to some than to others: you would sooner help a neighbor than a brother or close friend to gather in the harvest, yet if a lawsuit is at stake you would defend a kinsman or friend before a neighbor. These considerations, then, and others like them must be weighed in every duty, and habit and practice acquired, so that we may be good reckoners of duties and, by adding and subtracting, see what balance remains—by which you will understand how much is owed to each.

60 But just as physicians, generals, and orators, however thoroughly they have mastered the precepts of their arts, can achieve nothing worthy of great praise without use and practice, so the rules for holding to duty are indeed laid down—as we ourselves are doing—but the greatness of the subject demands use and exercise besides. And of how the honorable is drawn from those things that lie within the bond of human fellowship, the source from which the fitting duty arises, we have now said almost enough.

61 It must also be understood that, of the four kinds from which moral goodness and duty flow, that one seems most brilliant which is done with a spirit great and lofty and scorning the things of man. Hence, when insults are hurled, nothing comes more readily, if anything of the kind can be said: “For you, young men, carry a woman’s spirit; she, a maiden, carries a man’s”—and anything else of that sort; and again, “Salmacian spoils, won without sweat and blood.” In praise, on the other hand, we somehow celebrate with fuller voice deeds done with greatness and bravery and distinction. From this source come the rhetoricians’ stock themes of Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae, Leuctra; and our own Cocles, the Decii, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, Marcus Marcellus, and countless others; and above all the Roman people itself excels in greatness of spirit. Its passion for military glory is plain, for we see that even its statues wear almost always the soldier’s garb.

62 But that loftiness of spirit which shows itself in dangers and hardships, if it lacks justice and fights not for the common safety but for its own advantage, is a fault; far from being virtue, it is rather the savagery that repels all humanity. The Stoics, accordingly, define courage well when they call it the virtue that fights in defense of fairness. Hence no one who has chased the glory of courage by treachery and villainy has ever won true praise; nothing can be honorable that is without justice.

63 Hence that splendid saying of Plato: knowledge, he says, that stands apart from justice should be called cunning rather than wisdom; and a spirit ready for danger, if it is driven by its own appetite rather than the common good, deserves the name of recklessness rather than courage. And so we want men brave and great-souled to be at the same time good and straightforward, friends of truth and strangers to all deceit—qualities that fall within the very heart of justice’s praise.

64 But there is this trouble with such loftiness and greatness of spirit: obstinacy and an excessive hunger for supremacy spring up in it most easily. As Plato says the whole Lacedaemonian way of life was set aflame with the desire of winning, so the man who most excels in greatness of spirit most wants to be first of all—or rather, alone. Yet once you have coveted to stand above everyone, it is hard to keep the fairness that is justice’s own special mark. Hence such men will not suffer themselves to be beaten in argument or by any public and lawful process, and in the state there arise, for the most part, givers of bribes and makers of factions, seeking the greatest power, wanting to be superior by force rather than equal in justice. But the harder the task, the finer; no moment exists at which justice may be set aside.

65 The brave and great-souled, then, must be reckoned not those who inflict injury but those who drive it back. True and wise greatness of spirit judges that the honorable, which nature chiefly pursues, lies in deeds, not in fame, and would rather be first than seem first. Whoever hangs on the mistaken opinion of an ignorant crowd is not to be counted among great men. And it is the man of loftiest spirit whom the love of glory most easily pushes into unjust acts—a slippery ground indeed, for scarcely anyone is found who, once he has undertaken toils and braved dangers, does not demand glory as the wage of his exploits.

66 The brave and great spirit, in short, shows itself chiefly in two ways. The first lies in scorning outward things, when a man is convinced that he ought to admire, desire, or pursue nothing except what is honorable and right, and to yield to no man, no passion, no stroke of fortune. The second is that, when your spirit is so disposed as I said above, you carry out great deeds—of the greatest usefulness, yet very steep, and full of toils and dangers both to life itself and to the many things on which life depends.

67 Of these two, all the splendor and greatness—and I add usefulness as well—belongs to the second; but the cause and working principle of great men lies in the first. For there lies what makes spirits surpassing and scorning the things of man. That, in turn, shows itself in two things: if you judge that alone to be good which is honorable, and if you are free from every disturbance of soul. To count as small the things most people think outstanding and splendid, and to despise them on a stable and settled judgment, must be held the mark of a brave and great spirit; and to bear the things that seem bitter—the many and shifting turns of human life and fortune—in such a way that you depart in nothing from nature’s standing or from the dignity of the wise, is the part of a sturdy spirit and great constancy.

68 It is not consistent, however, that a man who cannot be broken by fear should be broken by appetite, or that one who has proved himself unbroken by toil should be conquered by pleasure. Both, then, must be avoided, and the love of money fled besides; nothing is so small-spirited and petty as to love riches, and nothing more honorable or more noble than to scorn money when you do not have it—or, when you do, to turn it to beneficence and generosity. The craving for glory, too, must be guarded against, as I said above; it robs us of freedom, for which great-souled men ought to struggle with all their strength. Nor are supreme commands to be sought; rather, they should sometimes be declined and at times laid down.

69 One must guard against every disturbance of the spirit—against desire and fear, then against distress, excessive pleasure, and anger—so that calm and freedom from care attend the soul, bringing with them both constancy and dignity. Many men, too, are and have been who, seeking that calm of which I speak, withdrew from public business and fled into leisure: among them the most celebrated philosophers and their acknowledged leaders, and certain men of stern and weighty character who could not endure the ways of peoples or of rulers; some of these lived in the country, delighting in their estates.

70 These men had the same aim as kings: to need nothing, obey no one, and enjoy liberty, whose special nature is to live as you please. Since, then, this is the common goal of those who crave power and of the men of leisure I have described, the former think to attain it by holding great resources, the latter by being content with their own and with little. Neither view is to be despised outright; yet the life of leisure is easier and safer, less burdensome and troublesome to others, while the life of those who have fitted themselves for public affairs and great deeds is more fruitful for the human race and better fitted for renown and greatness.

71 Perhaps, then, allowance should be made both for those who do not take up public life because they have devoted an outstanding mind to learning, and for those who, held back by poor health or some weightier cause, have withdrawn from it, leaving to others the power and the glory of governing. But for those with no such excuse, who say they look down on what most men admire—commands and magistracies—I think the matter must be set down not merely to their credit but to their fault. Their judgment in despising glory and counting it nothing is hard not to approve; but they seem to fear the labors and troubles, and then the rebuffs and defeats—a kind of disgrace—and notoriety. For there are men who are not consistent with themselves under opposite circumstances: they despise pleasure with the utmost severity but are weaker under pain; they disregard glory but are broken by disgrace—and that without much constancy.

72 But those whom nature has endowed for the conduct of affairs must cast aside all hesitation, seek magistracies, and govern the state; for otherwise neither can the city be ruled nor greatness of spirit be made plain. Those who take up public life need no less than philosophers—perhaps even more—that grandeur of soul and disregard of human things I so often mention, and that calm and freedom from care as well, since they will be free of anxious dread and will live with gravity and constancy.

73 These things are easier for philosophers: fewer places in their lives lie open to fortune’s blows, they need fewer things, and if any adversity befalls, they cannot fall so hard. Hence it is not without cause that greater agitations of spirit are stirred up and greater strivings required in those who govern the state than in those who live quietly, and that the more greatness of spirit and freedom from anguish must be brought to bear on them. Whoever comes to public business must beware of considering only how honorable the work is: he must also have the capacity to carry it out; and here he must take care neither to despair rashly out of indolence nor to be overconfident out of ambition. In every undertaking, before you advance, diligent preparation must be applied.

74 But since most people think warlike affairs greater than civil ones, this opinion must be brought down. Many men have often sought wars out of a craving for glory, and that is what usually happens with great spirits and talents—especially if they are fitted for soldiering and eager to wage wars. But if we would judge truly, many affairs of peace have proved greater and more illustrious than those of war.

75 For however justly Themistocles is praised, however much more illustrious his name than Solon’s, and however Salamis may be cited as the witness of a most glorious victory, which is set above Solon’s counsel—the one by which he first established the court of the Areopagus—this latter must be judged no less splendid than the former. That benefited the city once; this will benefit it forever; by this counsel the laws of the Athenians and the institutions of their forefathers are preserved. Themistocles, indeed, could say he had done nothing by which he himself helped the Areopagus; but Solon could truly claim that Themistocles was helped by him: for the war was waged by the counsel of that senate Solon had established.

76 The same may be said of Pausanias and Lysander: though the empire of the Lacedaemonians is thought to have been won by their exploits, they are not to be compared in even the smallest part with the laws and training of Lycurgus; indeed, it was by those very laws and that training that the Lacedaemonians had armies more obedient and braver. To me, at least, Marcus Scaurus, when we were boys, seemed in no way inferior to Gaius Marius; nor, when we were engaged in public life, did Quintus Catulus seem inferior to Gnaeus Pompey; for weapons abroad count for little unless there is counsel at home. Nor did Africanus, as singular a man and commander as he was in the destruction of Numantia, serve the state more than Publius Nasica served it at the same time as a private citizen when he killed Tiberius Gracchus—though that deed belongs not only to domestic reckoning, since it touches on war as well, being done by force and by hand; still, the act itself was accomplished by civic counsel, without an army.

77 And best of all is that saying which, I hear, the wicked and envious love to attack: “Let arms yield to the toga, the laurel to praise.” To pass over others, when we were steering the state, did not arms yield to the toga? Never was the danger in the state greater, never the peace more profound. Thus by our counsels and our diligence the weapons themselves, slipping quickly from the hands of the most reckless citizens, fell to the ground. What deed ever done in war was so great? What triumph is to be set beside it?

78 I may be allowed, Marcus my son, to boast before you, to whom the inheritance of that glory and the pattern of my deeds belong. That man so rich in military honors, Gnaeus Pompey, certainly paid me this tribute, with many listening: that he would have brought home his third triumph in vain, had he not, thanks to my service to the state, had a place in which to triumph. There are, then, fortitudes of the civil life no way inferior to the soldier’s; and on these even more than on those, labor and study must be spent.

79 In sum, that honorable quality we seek from a lofty and noble spirit is produced by the powers of the mind, not of the body. The body, all the same, must be exercised and so trained that it can obey counsel and reason in carrying out tasks and in enduring toil. The honorable we are seeking lies wholly in the mind’s care and thought; and in this, those who preside over the state in the toga bring no less usefulness than those who wage war. By their counsel wars have often been either not undertaken or brought to a close, and sometimes even begun—as the Third Punic War was by Marcus Cato, in which his authority prevailed even after his death.

80 The principle of deciding, then, is more to be desired than the hardihood of fighting; yet we must take care not to do this more out of a shrinking from war than out of a reasoned judgment of advantage. War should be undertaken in such a way that nothing else than peace may seem to be sought. It is the mark of a brave and steadfast spirit not to be thrown off balance in rough circumstances, nor, when all is in an uproar, to be cast from one’s footing, as the saying goes, but to keep a ready mind and sound judgment and not to depart from reason.

81 Yet to foresee in thought the things to come, and to settle long in advance what may happen on either side and what must be done when it does happen, and never to allow matters to reach the point of having to say, “I did not foresee that”—this is the mark of a great spirit, and of great intelligence as well. These are the works of a spirit at once great and lofty, confident in its judgment and its planning; but to range recklessly in the battle line and to cross weapons with the enemy is something savage, more like a wild beast; yet when the moment and the necessity demand, the fight must be fought out hand to hand, and death must be preferred to slavery and disgrace.

82 In the overthrowing and plundering of cities, however, the greatest care must be taken to do nothing rash, nothing cruel; it is the mark of a great man, in the midst of upheaval, to punish the guilty, to spare the multitude, and to hold to what is right and honorable through every turn of fortune. For just as there are men who prefer war to the pursuits of peace, as I said above, so you will find many to whom hazardous, heated enterprises seem more brilliant and grander than quiet, well-considered ones.

83 Yet we must never shun danger so entirely that we seem unwarlike and timid; but we must also guard against throwing ourselves into danger without cause, for nothing can be more foolish. In meeting dangers, therefore, we should imitate the practice of physicians, who treat mild illnesses with gentle remedies but are compelled to employ hazardous and uncertain treatments for graver diseases. It is the act of a madman, then, to pray for a storm in a calm, and the part of a wise man to come safely through a storm by whatever means he can—and wiser still if the good he gains by seeing the matter through outweighs the harm he risked in its uncertainty. Enterprises attended with danger threaten partly those who undertake them and partly the state.

84 Again, in such ventures some put their lives in jeopardy, others their glory and the goodwill of their fellow citizens. We ought, then, to be readier to face dangers that concern ourselves than dangers that concern all, and to fight more readily for honor and glory than for our other advantages. Many men have been found ready to pour out not only their money but their lives for their country, yet would not suffer the smallest loss of glory, not even if the state demanded it—as Callicratidas, who, after commanding the Lacedaemonians in the Peloponnesian War and doing many things with distinction, ruined everything at the last by refusing to follow the counsel of those who thought the fleet should be withdrawn from Arginusae and battle not be joined with the Athenians. To them he answered that the Lacedaemonians, if that fleet were lost, could build another, but that he could not flee without disgrace. The first blow was a moderate one for the Lacedaemonians; the second was ruinous—when Cleombrotus, fearing unpopularity, rashly joined battle with Epaminondas, the power of the Lacedaemonians collapsed. How much better Quintus Maximus! Of him Ennius said: “One man, by delaying, restored the state to us. He set no rumor above the common safety. Therefore more and more the man’s glory shines today.” This kind of fault must be guarded against in civil affairs as well. For there are men who dare not say what they think, even when it is the best course, for fear of unpopularity.

85 In general, those who are to preside over the state should hold fast to two precepts of Plato: first, so to guard the citizens’ interest that whatever they do is referred to it, their own advantage forgotten; second, to care for the whole body of the state, so that, while they protect one part, they do not abandon the rest. As guardianship, so too the administration of the state must be conducted for the benefit of those committed to one’s charge, not of those to whom the charge is committed. But men who provide for one part of the citizens and neglect another bring into the state a most deadly thing—faction and discord; and from this it comes about that some appear champions of the people, others partisans of the best citizens, while only a few have the whole community at heart.

86 Hence the great discords among the Athenians, and in our own commonwealth not only faction but destructive civil wars; and these a citizen who is serious and brave, and worthy to lead in the state, will shun and hate. He will give himself wholly to the state and will chase after neither wealth nor power, and he will protect the whole of it in such a way as to provide for all. Nor will he ever summon anyone to hatred or unpopularity by false accusations, and he will cleave to justice and honor so entirely that, so long as he keeps them, he will suffer death, however grievous, rather than abandon the things I have spoken of.

87 Of all things the most wretched is the ambition and contest for honors, of which Plato, in the same work, speaks admirably: he likens men contending with one another as to which of them shall govern the state to sailors competing which of them shall be the one at the helm. And he counsels us to “count as our adversaries those who bear arms against us, not those who wish, by their own judgment, to defend the state”—as was the disagreement between Publius Africanus and Quintus Metellus, which was carried on without bitterness.

88 Nor should we listen to those who think a man must nurse deep anger against his enemies and count this the part of a great and courageous spirit; nothing is more praiseworthy, nothing more worthy of a great and illustrious man, than a mild and forgiving temper. In free peoples, too, where the laws are equal for all, affability and that loftiness of soul men speak of must also be cultivated, so that we do not fall, through anger at those who approach us at the wrong moment or ask shamelessly, into a useless and hateful peevishness. Yet gentleness and mercy are to be approved only so far as severity is applied for the sake of the state, without which no state can be governed. And every punishment and censure must be free of insult, and must aim not at the man who inflicts punishment or rebuke in words, but at the good of the state.

89 We must also take care that the penalty is not greater than the offense, and that for the same acts some are punished while others are not so much as charged. Above all, anger must be shut out of punishment; for one who comes to inflict a penalty in anger will never hold to that mean between too much and too little—the mean the Peripatetics approve, and approve rightly, provided only they did not go on to praise irascibility and call it a gift nature gave us for our use. But anger must be rejected in everything, and we must wish that those who preside over the state be like the laws, which are led to punish not by passion but by fairness.

90 And even in prosperity, when things run according to our wishes, we must above all shun haughtiness, disdain, and arrogance. To bear adversity without restraint is lightness of character—and so is to bear success without it; and beautiful is that evenness throughout the whole of life, the same face always and the same brow, as we have heard of Socrates and of Gaius Laelius alike. Philip, king of the Macedonians, was surpassed by his son in deeds and glory; yet I see he was the better in easy manner and kindness of heart. Hence the one was great at all times, the other often most base; and those who counsel that the higher we rise, the more humbly we should carry ourselves seem to give sound advice. Panaetius says that Africanus, his pupil and close friend, used to remark that as horses that have grown wanton with fierceness through their many battles are handed over to trainers, so that they may be easier to manage, so men unbridled in success and overconfident in themselves ought to be led, as it were, around the training ring of reason and instruction, that they may perceive the frailty of human affairs and the fickleness of fortune.

91 And in the very height of prosperity one should most of all make use of the counsel of friends, and grant their word even greater weight than before. At such times one must guard against opening one’s ears to flatterers or letting oneself be courted with praise, for in this it is easy to be deceived: we imagine that we are such as to deserve the praise we get. From this spring countless faults, when men puffed up with conceit are made shamefully ridiculous and stumble into the gravest errors.

92 But let this much be said of such matters here. The judgment to be made is this: the greatest deeds and the deeds of the greatest spirit are done by those who govern states, because their administration reaches widest and touches the greatest number; yet many men of great spirit have lived, and do live, even in a life of leisure—men who either investigated or attempted certain great things and kept themselves within the bounds of their own means, or who, taking their place between philosophers and the men who govern states, delighted in their own property: not increasing it by every method they could, nor shutting their own people off from the use of it, but rather sharing it with friends and with the state, should the need ever arise. That property should first be well acquired, by no base or odious gain; next, it should make itself useful to as many as possible, provided they are worthy; then it should be enlarged by method, care, and thrift; and it should obey not passion and luxury, but generosity and beneficence. The man who keeps these rules may live with magnificence, gravity, and courage, and also with simplicity, fidelity, truth, and goodwill toward his fellow men.

93 There remains one more division of the honorable to be discussed—that in which we see a sense of shame, and a kind of grace, as it were, of life; temperance and modesty; the complete calming of the soul’s passions; and measure in all things. Contained in this place is what in Latin may be called propriety; in Greek it is named prepon.

94 The force of propriety is such that it cannot be separated from the honorable; for what is fitting is honorable, and what is honorable is fitting. What the difference is between the honorable and the fitting can be grasped more easily than it can be explained. For whatever is fitting becomes visible only when the honorable has gone before. And so what is fitting appears not only in this division of the honorable, of which we are here to speak, but in the three before it as well. For it is fitting to use both reason and speech with judgment, and to do what one does with care, and in every matter to see the truth and hold it fast; while to be deceived, to mistake, to slip, to be misled is as unbecoming as to rave and to be out of one’s mind. And all things just are fitting, and all things unjust the opposite—as they are shameful, so are they unbecoming. The same account holds for courage; for what is done with manliness and greatness of spirit seems worthy of a man and fitting, and what is done against these is as unbecoming as it is shameful.

95 This propriety, then, of which I speak belongs to the whole of the honorable—and belongs so plainly that it is seen not in some hidden way but lies open to view. For there is a certain something that befits, and it is perceived in every virtue; and this can be separated from virtue more easily in thought than in fact. As the charm and beauty of the body cannot be parted from health, so this propriety of which we speak is indeed entirely blended with virtue, but is distinguished in thought and conception.

96 Its division, moreover, is twofold; for we understand a certain general propriety, which runs through the whole of the honorable, and another subordinate to it, which belongs to the several parts of the honorable. That former one is commonly defined in some such way as this: propriety is that which accords with man’s superiority in that respect in which his nature differs from the other living creatures. The part subordinate to the general they define in this way: propriety is what is so in accord with nature that moderation and temperance show in it, together with a certain gentlemanly refinement.

97 We may suppose these things understood from that propriety which the poets follow, of which more is usually said in another place. We say the poets keep what is fitting when whatever befits each character is both done and said: if Aeacus or Minos were to say “let them hate, if only they fear,” or “the father is a tomb to his own children,” it would seem unbecoming, for we are told they were just men; but when Atreus speaks such lines, the applause breaks out, for the words befit the character. The poets, then, will judge from the character what befits each man; but nature herself has laid our character upon us, with great superiority and preeminence over the other living creatures.

98 That is why the poets, with the great variety of their characters, will consider what suits even the vicious and what befits them; but since nature has given us our parts of constancy, moderation, temperance, and a sense of shame, and since the same nature teaches us not to neglect how we conduct ourselves toward our fellow men, it follows that propriety is seen to extend as widely as it does—both that which belongs to the whole of the honorable and that which is looked for in each several kind of virtue. For as the beauty of the body moves and delights the eyes by the apt arrangement of its limbs, by this very thing, that all its parts agree together with a certain grace, so this propriety that shines out in life wins the approval of those we live with, by order and constancy and moderation in every word and act.

99 A certain deference, therefore, is to be shown toward men—toward the best and toward the rest alike. For to disregard what each man thinks of one is the mark not only of arrogance but of utter recklessness. There is, moreover, a difference between justice and a sense of shame in the regard one pays to men: it is the part of justice not to wrong them; of a sense of shame, not to give them offense—and in this the force of propriety is seen most plainly. These points being set down, I think it is understood what that is which we call “the fitting.”

100 The duty drawn from it takes, first, this path, which leads to conformity with nature and to its preservation; if we follow nature as our guide, we shall never go astray, and we shall follow both what is keen and clear-sighted in our nature, and what is fitted for the fellowship of men, and what is vehement and strong. But the greatest force of propriety lies in the part we are now discussing; for not only the movements of the body that accord with nature are to be approved, but far more those of the soul, which likewise are adapted to nature.

101 For the power and nature of the soul is twofold: one part lies in appetite—horme, as the Greeks call it—which sweeps a man this way and that; the other in reason, which teaches and sets forth what should be done and what avoided. And so it comes about that reason takes the lead and appetite obeys. All action, moreover, should be free from rashness and carelessness; one should do nothing for which one cannot give a reasonable account—for this is, roughly, the definition of duty.

102 Care must be taken, then, that the appetites obey reason, neither running ahead of it nor deserting it out of indolence or listlessness, and that they are tranquil and free from every disturbance of soul; from this will shine out all constancy and all moderation. For appetites that wander too far and leap, as it were, exulting—whether in desire or in avoidance—and are not held well enough by reason, pass beyond all doubt their bound and measure. They throw off and cast aside obedience and do not obey the reason to which they are subject by nature’s law; and from them not only are souls disordered, but bodies as well. One may see it in the very faces of the angry, or of those stirred by some desire or fear, or wild with excessive pleasure: the looks, voices, gestures, and bearing of them all are changed.

103 From these things—to return to the form of duty—it is understood that all appetites must be gathered in and calmed, and that watchfulness and care must be roused, so that we do nothing rashly and at random, without thought and without care. We were not so generated by nature that we seem made for play and jest; rather for seriousness, and for pursuits graver and greater. Yet play and jest may be used, but only as sleep and the other kinds of rest are used—when we have given their due to grave and serious things. And the very manner of jesting should be neither extravagant nor immodest, but refined and witty. For as we do not grant boys every license in play, but only such as is not alien to honorable conduct, so in jest itself some light of a sound nature should shine forth.

104 There are, in all, two kinds of jesting: one coarse, insolent, disgraceful, obscene; the other elegant, urbane, clever, witty—the kind with which not only our own Plautus and the old comedy of the Athenians, but even the books of the Socratic philosophers are filled, and the many witty sayings of many men, like those collected by Cato in his old age, which are called apophthegms. The distinction, then, between refined and coarse jesting is easy: the one kind is fine if it comes at the right time and in relaxed spirits, worthy of a most serious man; the other is not fine even in a free man, if filth of subject and obscenity of language enter in. A certain measure must also be kept in play, so that we do not squander everything and, lifted up by pleasure, slide into some disgrace. Our Campus Martius, moreover, and the pursuits of hunting supply honorable examples of play.

105 But it belongs to every inquiry into duty always to keep before us how far the nature of man outranks cattle and the other beasts: these feel nothing but pleasure, and toward it they are borne with all their force; but the mind of man is fed by learning and thought, is always inquiring into something or doing something, and is carried along by the delight of seeing and hearing. Indeed, even if someone is somewhat more inclined toward pleasures—so long as he is not of the herd (for there are men who are such in name, not in fact)—but is somewhat more raised up, however much he is taken by pleasure, he hides and conceals his appetite for it out of a sense of shame.

106 From this it is understood that bodily pleasure is hardly worthy of man’s excellence, and ought to be despised and rejected; but if anyone does grant some weight to pleasure, he must carefully hold to the measure in enjoying it. And so diet and the care of the body should have reference to health and strength, not to pleasure. And if we would consider what excellence and dignity there is in our nature, we shall understand how shameful it is to dissolve in luxury and to live delicately and softly, and how honorable to live frugally, with self-restraint, sternly, soberly.

107 It must also be understood that nature has, as it were, clothed us in two characters. One is common, arising from this: that we all share in reason and in that superiority by which we surpass the beasts—from which is drawn everything honorable and fitting, and from which the method of discovering duty is sought. The other is that assigned in particular to individuals. For as in bodies there are great differences—we see some strong in speed for running, others in strength for wrestling—and as some figures have dignity in them and others charm, so in souls there exist even greater varieties.

108 There was much charm in Lucius Crassus and in Lucius Philippus, and more, and more deliberately, in Gaius Caesar, son of Lucius; but in those same days there was a singular gravity in Marcus Scaurus and in young Marcus Drusus, much cheerfulness in Gaius Laelius, and in his close friend Scipio a higher ambition and a sterner manner of life. Of the Greeks, we are told that Socrates was sweet and witty, delightful in talk, and in every form of speech a dissembler—whom the Greeks named the eiron—while Pythagoras and Pericles, on the contrary, won the greatest authority without any merriment. From the Carthaginians we have heard of the cunning Hannibal, and among our own commanders of Quintus Maximus, quick to conceal, to keep silent, to dissemble, to lay ambushes, to forestall the enemy’s plans. In this class the Greeks rank Themistocles and Jason of Pherae above others, and above all they admire the subtle and cunning act of Solon, who, that his life might be safer and that he might aid his country considerably more, feigned madness.

109 Others are greatly unlike these: simple and open men, who think nothing should be done from hiding, nothing by ambush—worshipers of truth, enemies of deceit. And still others would endure anything, serve anyone, so long as they gained what they wanted—as we saw with Sulla and Marcus Crassus. In this class we have heard of the Lacedaemonian Lysander, most wily and most enduring, and, on the other side, of Callicratidas, the fleet commander who came immediately after Lysander. So too in conversation we have seen certain men, however great their power, contrive to appear one of the crowd—as in Catulus, father and son alike, and in Quintus Mucius, the man they called Mancia. I have heard from my elders that the same was true of Publius Scipio Nasica, while his father—he who punished the ruinous designs of Tiberius Gracchus—had no charm of conversation, not even so much as Xenocrates, the sternest of the philosophers, and precisely for that reason was great and renowned. Countless other differences of nature and character there are, and these differences are by no means to be criticized.

110 But each man must hold fast to what is his own—not faulty, yet peculiar to him—so that the propriety we are seeking may be kept the more easily. This is the way to act: to contend against universal nature in nothing, yet, preserving that, to follow our own particular nature, so that even if there are pursuits more weighty and better, we should still measure our pursuits by the rule of our own nature; for it avails nothing to fight against nature, or to pursue anything you cannot attain. From this the character of that propriety emerges more clearly, since nothing is becoming that is done, as the saying goes, against Minerva’s will—that is, when nature opposes and resists.

111 In a word, if there is anything that is proper, surely nothing is more so than consistency—in the whole course of life, and again in each individual action; and you cannot keep that consistency if, imitating another man’s nature, you abandon your own. For as in speech we should use the tongue born with us, so that we are not, like certain men who force Greek words into their talk, rightly laughed at, so in our actions and our whole life we should admit no discordance.

112 And this difference of natures has such force that at times one man ought to take his own life, and another, in the same circumstances, ought not. For was Marcus Cato’s situation other than that of the rest, who surrendered themselves to Caesar in Africa? Yet for the others it might perhaps have been counted a fault to kill themselves, because their lives had been gentler and their characters easier; but to Cato, to whom nature had granted an incredible gravity, and who had himself strengthened it with unbroken constancy and had always stood by his purpose and the resolution he had taken, the choice was to die rather than look upon the face of a tyrant.

113 How much Ulysses endured in that long wandering, as he served women—if Circe and Calypso may be called women—and wished to be obliging and pleasant to everyone in every conversation! And at home he even bore the insults of slaves and maidservants, that he might one day reach what he desired. But Ajax, with the spirit tradition gives him, would have met death a thousand times over rather than endure those things. Considering such examples, each of us must weigh what he has of his own and govern it, and must not wish to test how well what belongs to another would become him; for what is most a man’s own is what best becomes him.

114 Let each man, then, know his own natural gift, and show himself a keen judge both of his own virtues and of his own faults, so that actors do not seem to have better sense than we do. For they do not choose the best plays but those best suited to themselves: those who trust their voices choose the Epigonus and the Medus; those who trust their gesture, the Melanippa and the Clytemnestra—Rupilius, whom I remember, always the Antiope; Aesopus seldom the Ajax. Shall the actor see this on the stage, then, and the wise man not see it in life? To those things, therefore, in which we are most gifted we shall devote our chief effort. But if ever necessity thrusts us into things that are not of our talent, every care, rehearsal, and diligence must be employed, that we may do them—if not with grace—at least with the least possible awkwardness; and we should strive not so much to pursue good qualities not given to us as to flee our faults.

115 And to those two characters I spoke of above a third is added, which some chance or the times impose, and a fourth also, which we take up for ourselves by our own judgment. For kingships, commands, noble birth, honors, wealth, power, and the things contrary to these rest on chance and are governed by the times; but which character we ourselves wish to play proceeds from our own will. And so some devote themselves to philosophy, some to civil law, some to eloquence, and of the virtues themselves one man chooses to excel in one, another in another.

116 Those whose fathers or ancestors won glory in some field generally strive to excel in the same kind of fame—as Quintus Mucius, son of Publius, in civil law, and Africanus, son of Paulus, in war. But some add somewhat of their own to the fame they received from their fathers, as this same Africanus heaped eloquence upon his military glory—as Timotheus, son of Conon, also did, who, inferior to his father in no part of his fame in war, added to that fame the glory of learning and talent. It happens at times, too, that some, giving up the imitation of their ancestors, follow a course of their own; and in this most usually labor those who, sprung from obscure ancestors, set great aims before themselves.

117 All these things, then, we must embrace in mind and thought when we ask what is fitting; but above all we must settle what we wish to be and what sort of men, and in what kind of life—a deliberation the hardest of all. For in early youth, when judgment is at its weakest, each man fixes upon that manner of spending his years which he has loved the most. And so he is entangled in some settled kind and course of living before he could judge what was best.

118 When Prodicus tells of Hercules—as the story is told in Xenophon—that at the first coming of manhood, the age nature appointed for choosing which road of life one shall enter, he went out into solitude, and, sitting there, debated long and much with himself, seeing two roads, one of Pleasure, the other of Virtue, and pondering which was the better to take—such an experience might perhaps have befallen Hercules, “begotten of the seed of Jove,” but it is not so with us: we imitate whomever each of us admires, and are driven toward their pursuits and their ways. For the most part, steeped in our parents’ teaching, we are led into their habits and customs; some are carried by the crowd’s judgment and desire most those things that seem finest to the majority; yet a few, whether by some good fortune or by excellence of nature, have followed the straight road of life without their parents’ training.

119 But most rare of all is that class of men who, endowed either with surpassing greatness of mind or with splendid learning and culture, or with both, have had the space even to deliberate which course of life above all they wished to follow; and in that deliberation every judgment must be brought back to each man’s own nature. For since in everything we do we seek, from the way each of us is born, as was said above, what is fitting, then in the ordering of a whole life far greater care must be given to that end: that we may be consistent with ourselves through the whole length of life and falter in no duty.

120 In this reckoning, since nature has the greatest force and fortune the next, both are indeed to be weighed in choosing one’s kind of life—but nature’s more; for it is far firmer and more constant, so that fortune sometimes seems, as if mortal itself, to make war upon immortal nature. Whoever, then, has conformed his whole plan of living to a nature of his own that is not at fault, let him hold to his constancy (for that is what best becomes him)—unless perhaps he comes to see that he has erred in choosing his way of life. But if that should happen (and it can happen), a change of habits and pursuits must be made. If the times favor the change, we shall make it more easily and more fittingly; if not, it must be made slowly, step by step—as the wise hold that friendships that please us less and win our approval less are more becomingly thinned out by degrees than cut off all at once.

121 If a man does change his course of life, he must take every care to be seen to have done so on good counsel. And since I said a little earlier that we should imitate our ancestors, let two exceptions be made. First, their faults are not to be imitated. Second, a man should not imitate what his own nature will not bear: the son of the elder Africanus, for example, who adopted this Africanus, the son of Paulus, could not, because of his poor health, be as like his father as his father had been like his own. If, then, a man cannot plead cases, or hold the people with speeches, or conduct wars, he ought still to show the qualities that lie within his own power—justice, good faith, generosity, modesty, self-restraint—so that less is demanded of him in the things he lacks. The best inheritance that fathers hand down to their children, finer than any estate, is the glory of virtue and of great deeds; and to disgrace it must be judged both a sin and a vice.

122 Since duties are not the same for different ages, some belonging to the young and others to the old, something must also be said about this distinction. It is the duty of a young man to respect his elders and to choose from among them the best and most approved, on whose counsel and authority he may rely; for the inexperience of youth needs the practical wisdom of age to steady and guide it. Above all, this age must be kept away from sensual pleasures and trained in the labor and endurance of both mind and body, so that its energy may be strong for the duties of war and of civil life. And even when the young wish to relax and give themselves to enjoyment, let them beware of excess and remember modesty; this will be easier if they are willing to have their elders present even at such times.

123 For the old, bodily labors should be lessened and the exercises of the mind even increased; they should work to help their friends, the young, and above all the republic as much as possible with their counsel and wisdom. Nothing should old age guard against more than giving itself up to idleness and sloth. Luxury, disgraceful at every age, is most shameful in the old; and if unrestrained indulgence is added to it, the harm is double: old age brings disgrace on itself, and it makes the excesses of the young more shameless.

124 Nor is it out of place to speak of the duties of magistrates, of private citizens, and of foreigners. It is the particular task of a magistrate to understand that he represents the state, and that he must uphold its dignity and honor, preserve its laws, dispense its justice, and remember that these things have been entrusted to his good faith. A private citizen ought to live with his fellow citizens on fair and equal terms, neither servile and abject nor overbearing, and in public affairs to want what makes for peace and honor; for this is the man we usually regard and describe as a good citizen.

125 The duty of a foreigner or resident alien is to mind his own business, to pry into nothing that concerns others, and least of all to meddle in the politics of a state not his own. So, in general, our duties will be found when we ask what is fitting and suited to persons, times, and ages. And nothing is so fitting as to keep consistency in every action we undertake and every decision we make.

126 Propriety is seen in all our deeds and words, and even in the movement and bearing of the body. It depends on three things—beauty, order, and an adornment suited to action—which are hard to put into words, but it will be enough if they are understood; and within these three lies also our care to win the approval of those with whom, and among whom, we live. So a few words must be said on these matters too. To begin with, nature herself seems to have had a wonderful plan for our bodies. Our face and the rest of our figure, which have a comely appearance, she placed in plain view; but the parts of the body given for nature’s needs, which would have been unsightly and ugly to look upon, she covered and concealed.

127 Human modesty has imitated this careful workmanship of nature. What nature has hidden, all people of sound mind keep out of sight, and they take care to attend to nature’s needs as privately as possible. The parts of the body whose functions are necessary they call neither the parts nor their functions by their own names; and what is not shameful to do, so long as it is done in private, is obscene to speak of. So neither the open performance of those acts is free from indecency, nor is obscene talk.

128 Nor should we listen to the Cynics, or to those Stoics who were very nearly Cynics, who criticize and mock us for thinking it disgraceful to name things that are not shameful in themselves, while we call things that really are shameful by their proper names. To rob, to cheat, to commit adultery are shameful in fact, yet they are spoken of without obscenity; to beget children is honorable in fact, yet obscene in name. And these same philosophers argue much more to the same effect against modesty. We, however, should follow nature and shun everything that offends the eyes and ears. In standing, walking, sitting, and reclining, in our expression, our eyes, and the movement of our hands, let us keep to what is fitting.

129 In these matters two things above all are to be avoided: anything effeminate or soft, and anything coarse or boorish. Nor should we allow that such things suit actors and orators while in us they may be careless. The custom of the stage, indeed, has kept such modesty from its old discipline that no actor comes on without a loincloth, for fear that, if some parts of the body were accidentally exposed, they might be seen in an unseemly way. And by our own custom, grown sons do not bathe with their fathers, nor sons-in-law with their fathers-in-law. Modesty of this kind, then, must be kept, especially since nature herself is our teacher and guide.

130 There are two kinds of beauty: in one lies loveliness, in the other dignity. We ought to regard loveliness as the beauty of women and dignity as the beauty of men. So let a man remove from his appearance every adornment unworthy of a man, and let him guard against a similar fault in his gestures and movements. For the movements of the wrestling school are often rather offensive, and some of the gestures of actors are not free from affectation; in both, what is straightforward and simple wins praise. Dignity of appearance is best kept up by a good complexion, and a good complexion by bodily exercise. We should add a cleanliness that is neither offensive nor too studied, one that merely avoids a boorish and uncivilized neglect. The same principle holds for dress, in which, as in most things, the middle course is best.

131 We must take care, too, not to adopt a gait so slow and languid that we look like the floats in a procession, nor to rush about in such a hurry that we pant, our faces change color, and our features are distorted; all this is strong evidence of a lack of steadiness. But we must work much harder still to keep the movements of the mind in accord with nature. We shall achieve this if we guard against falling into agitation and alarm, and keep our minds intent on preserving what is fitting.

132 The movements of the mind are of two kinds: those of thought and those of impulse. Thought is chiefly occupied in searching for the truth; impulse drives us to action. We must take care, then, to use thought on the best possible subjects, and to keep impulse obedient to reason. And since speech has great power, and is of two kinds—the one of formal debate, the other of conversation—let debate be given to the courts, the assemblies, and the senate, and let conversation have its place in social gatherings, in philosophical discussions, in meetings of friends, and at dinners as well. There are rules for debate laid down by the rhetoricians, but none for conversation, though I am not sure there could not be such rules too. Teachers appear wherever there are students eager to learn; but no one studies conversation, while the crowd of rhetoricians is everywhere. Still, the rules about words and sentences will apply to conversation as well.

133 Since the voice is the vehicle of speech, and we look for two things in the voice—that it be clear and that it be pleasant—we must, of course, ask both of nature; yet practice will improve the one, and imitating those who speak precisely and gently will improve the other. There was nothing about the Catuli to make you think they had an exquisite literary taste, though they were cultivated men—but so were others; the Catuli, however, were thought to speak the best Latin. Their tone was sweet, their letters neither overpronounced nor swallowed, so that their speech was neither obscure nor affected; their voices were easy, neither faint nor singsong. Lucius Crassus had a fuller style and no less wit, but the Catuli had no smaller reputation for speaking well. In wit and humor, Caesar, the brother of the elder Catulus, surpassed everyone, so that even in the courtroom style he defeated others’ formal speeches with his conversational manner. In all these things, then, we must take pains, if we are seeking in everything what is fitting.

134 Let conversation, then—the art in which the followers of Socrates excel—be easy and not in the least dogmatic, and let there be charm in it. Nor should anyone shut others out, as if he had taken possession of his own property; in conversation, as in other things, he should think it fair that each should have his turn. He should consider, above all, what subjects he is speaking of: if they are serious, he should bring gravity; if light, wit. Above all, he should take care that his talk does not reveal some flaw in his character; and this is most likely to happen when people speak maliciously and insultingly of the absent, whether in jest or in earnest, for the sake of running them down.

135 Conversation usually turns on family affairs, on politics, or on the study of the arts and learning. We should take care, then, even if the talk begins to wander to other topics, to bring it back to these—but as the company allows; for we do not all enjoy the same subjects, or at every time, or in the same way. We should also notice how long the conversation keeps its pleasure, and, as there was a reason for beginning it, so there should be a measure in ending it.

136 In all of life we are rightly taught to avoid passions—that is, excessive movements of the mind that do not obey reason; so our conversation should be free of such movements, lest anger arise, or some craving, or sluggishness, or cowardice, or anything of the kind appear. And we must take the greatest care to show respect and affection for those with whom we are conversing. Sometimes rebukes become necessary, in which we may perhaps need to raise the voice and use sharper and heavier words, and even to appear to act in anger. But just as with cautery and surgery, we shall come to this kind of correction rarely and reluctantly, never unless we must, when no other remedy can be found; and even then anger must be kept far away, for nothing can be done rightly or with deliberation in anger.

137 For the most part we may use a mild reproof, joined with seriousness, so that we show severity but avoid insult; and we should make it plain that even the harshness of the rebuke has been undertaken for the good of the one rebuked. It is right, too, even in disputes with our bitterest enemies, and even when we hear things said of us that we do not deserve, to keep our dignity and banish anger; for what is done in agitation can neither be done with consistency nor win the approval of those present. It is also unseemly to boast about oneself, especially falsely, and, to the ridicule of one’s hearers, to play the braggart soldier.

138 And since I am covering everything—or at least that is my aim—I must also say what sort of house a man of rank and a leading citizen should have. Its end is use, and the plan of the building must be fitted to that; but attention must also be paid to comfort and dignity. We are told that Gnaeus Octavius, the first of his family to be elected consul, won honor by building a splendid and dignified house on the Palatine. Crowds came to see it, and it was thought to have won votes for its owner, a new man, for the consulship. Scaurus pulled it down and added its site to his own house. So Octavius was the first to bring a consulship into his house, while Scaurus, the son of a very great and distinguished man, brought into his enlarged house not only defeat at the polls but disgrace and ruin as well.

139 Dignity should be enhanced by a house, not sought entirely from it; the owner should bring honor to the house, not the house to the owner. And as in other things a man must think not only of himself but of others, so in the house of a distinguished man, where many guests must be entertained and a crowd of every kind of people admitted, care must be taken to provide room. Otherwise a spacious house often brings discredit on its owner if there is emptiness in it, and above all if under another owner it used to be crowded. For it is painful when passersby remark, “O ancient house, alas, how different the master who now rules you!”—a thing that can indeed be said of many houses in these times.

140 You must be careful, especially if you are building yourself, not to go beyond moderation in expense and magnificence; and in this matter a great deal of harm lies in the example. For most people eagerly imitate the doings of leading men, especially in this respect. Who imitates the virtue of Lucius Lucullus, that excellent man? But how many have imitated the magnificence of his villas! To these, certainly, a limit must be set, and they must be brought back to the mean; and the same moderation should be carried into every use and comfort of life. But enough of this.

141 In undertaking any action we must hold to three rules. First, impulse must obey reason; nothing is better suited than this to preserving our duties. Second, we must consider how important the thing is that we wish to accomplish, so that we give it neither more nor less care and effort than the case demands. The third is to see that everything that concerns a gentleman’s appearance and dignity is kept within bounds. And the best bound is to keep to propriety itself, of which I spoke before, and not go beyond it. Of these three, however, the most important is that impulse obey reason.

142 Next I must speak of the order of things and the right timing of actions. Both are covered by the science the Greeks call eutaxia—not the moderation we mean by modestia, a word in which “measure” is contained, but eutaxia, in which the keeping of order is understood. So, if we may call it modestia too, the Stoics define it this way: modestia is the knowledge of putting everything that is done or said in its proper place. The meaning of order and of arrangement, then, seems to be the same; for they define order, too, as the arrangement of things in their fitting and suitable places. And by the place of an action they mean its right timing; the right time for an action is called in Greek eukairia, in Latin occasio. So it comes about that modestia, understood as I have explained, is the knowledge of the right occasions for action.

143 But the same definition might serve for practical wisdom, of which I spoke at the beginning; here, however, we are inquiring into moderation and self-restraint and the virtues related to them. So what belonged to practical wisdom has been treated in its place; what belongs to these virtues, of which I have been speaking for some time—those that concern modesty and the approval of those with whom we live—must now be discussed.

144 We must, then, observe such an order in our actions that, as in a well-composed speech, everything in life is fitting and consistent. It is disgraceful and a serious fault to bring talk suited to a dinner party, or some frivolous chatter, into a serious matter. Pericles put it well. He had the poet Sophocles as his colleague in command, and they had met on business of their joint office, when a handsome boy happened to pass by, and Sophocles said, “What a beautiful boy, Pericles!” “But a general, Sophocles,” Pericles replied, “should keep not only his hands but his eyes under control.” Yet if Sophocles had said the same thing at a trial of athletes, he would have escaped any just reproach. So great is the importance of place and time. Likewise, if a man who is about to plead a case rehearses it to himself on a journey or on a walk, or thinks hard about something else, he is not blamed; but if he did the same at a dinner party, he would seem ill-bred for not knowing the time.

145 Gross breaches of good manners—singing in the Forum, say, or any other great absurdity—are easily seen and hardly need warnings and rules. But faults that seem small and that many people cannot detect are the ones we must avoid more carefully. Just as a trained ear notices when a lyre or a flute is even slightly out of tune, so we must see that nothing in our lives is out of tune—and all the more so, since the harmony of actions is far greater and finer than the harmony of sounds.

146 So, just as a musician’s ear detects even the smallest faults in a lyre, we too, if we wish to be keen and careful judges and observers of faults, will often learn great things from small ones. From a glance of the eyes, from the relaxing or knitting of the brows, from sadness, cheerfulness, laughter, speech, silence, from raising or lowering the voice, and from other signs like these, we shall easily judge which of them is fitting and which is at odds with duty and nature. In this matter it is useful to judge the character of each of these things from others, so that we ourselves may avoid whatever is unbecoming in them; for somehow we notice faults more readily in others than in ourselves. That is why pupils are most easily corrected when their teachers mimic their faults in order to cure them.

147 Nor is it out of place, when we must choose in doubtful cases, to call in learned men, or men of practical experience, and to ask what they think about each kind of duty. For most of them usually go where nature herself leads. In such cases we must consider not only what each person says but also what he thinks, and even why he thinks it. Painters, sculptors, and poets too each want the public to examine their work, so that whatever many people criticize may be corrected, and they ask themselves and others what is wrong with it; in the same way, there are a great many things we must do or not do, change or correct, on the judgment of others.

148 About actions governed by custom and the conventions of civic life, no rules need be given; these are rules in themselves. And no one should fall into the error of thinking that, if Socrates or Aristippus did or said something against the customs and conventions of the city, he may do the same. Those men earned this license by great and godlike gifts. The whole doctrine of the Cynics, however, must be rejected; for it is hostile to modesty, without which nothing can be right, nothing honorable.

149 Those whose lives have been proven in honorable and great affairs, who are loyal to the republic and have served it well or are serving it now, we should respect and honor as if they held some office or command. We should also show great deference to old age, give way to those who hold office, and distinguish between citizen and foreigner, and, in the case of a foreigner, whether he has come in a private or a public capacity. In short, not to go into details, we ought to cherish, defend, and preserve the fellowship and union of the whole human race.

150 Now, as to which crafts and ways of earning a living are to be thought fit for a gentleman and which vulgar, this, roughly, is what we have been taught. First, those occupations are condemned that incur people’s hatred, such as those of customs collectors and moneylenders. Unworthy of a gentleman and vulgar, too, are the earnings of all hired workmen whose labor, not whose skill, is bought; for in their case the very wage is a pledge of servitude. Those also must be counted vulgar who buy from merchants to sell again at once; for they would make no profit without a good deal of lying, and nothing is more disgraceful than falsehood. All craftsmen, too, are engaged in vulgar trades, for no workshop can have anything liberal about it. Least respectable of all are the trades that cater to pleasure: “fishmongers, butchers, cooks, poulterers, and fishermen,” as Terence says. Add to these, if you like, the perfumers, the dancers, and the whole troupe of the variety stage.

151 But the professions that require greater practical wisdom or bring no small benefit—medicine, architecture, the teaching of honorable subjects—are honorable for those whose rank they suit. Trade, if it is on a small scale, is to be thought vulgar; but if it is large and wealthy, importing much from everywhere and distributing it to many without misrepresentation, it is not greatly to be blamed. Indeed, if a merchant, satisfied with his profits—or rather, content with them—moves, as he has often moved from the high seas into harbor, from the harbor itself to an estate in the country, he seems to deserve the highest praise. But of all the ways of acquiring wealth, none is better than farming, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more worthy of a free man. Since I have said enough about it in my Cato the Elder, you will find there what bears on this subject.

152 How duties are derived from the parts of moral goodness has, it seems, been sufficiently explained. But among the very things that are honorable there may often arise a conflict and a comparison: which of two honorable courses is the more honorable. This topic Panaetius passed over. For since all moral goodness springs from four sources—knowledge, community, greatness of spirit, and moderation—these must often be weighed against one another when we choose a duty.

153 I hold, then, that the duties derived from community are more in keeping with nature than those derived from knowledge; and this can be proved by the following argument. Suppose a wise man’s life were such that, with an abundance of every good thing, he could consider and contemplate in perfect leisure everything worth knowing; yet if his solitude were so complete that he could never see another human being, he would leave life. And the foremost of all the virtues is the wisdom the Greeks call sophia—for by prudence, which the Greeks call phronesis, we understand something else, the knowledge of what to seek and what to avoid; but the wisdom I have called foremost is the knowledge of things divine and human, which includes the fellowship of gods and men and their society with one another. If that wisdom is the greatest, as it is, then the duty derived from community must certainly be the greatest. For knowledge and the contemplation of nature would be in some sense maimed and incomplete if no action followed from them. And that action is seen above all in protecting human interests; it belongs, therefore, to the society of the human race. So it is to be ranked above knowledge.

154 The best people show and judge this by their very conduct. For who is so eager to study and understand the nature of things that, if, while he was examining and contemplating the things most worth knowing, word were suddenly brought to him of a peril and crisis for his country, which he could help and relieve, he would not drop and cast aside all those studies, even if he thought he could count the stars or measure the size of the universe? And he would do the same if a parent or a friend were in trouble or danger.

155 From this we understand that the duties of justice, which concern human welfare—and nothing should be more sacred to a human being than that—must be ranked above the pursuits and duties of knowledge. Indeed, even those whose studies and whole lives were devoted to the pursuit of knowledge have not held back from increasing the welfare and advantage of mankind. For they have trained many to be better citizens and more useful to their states: so Lysis the Pythagorean trained Epaminondas of Thebes, Plato trained Dion of Syracuse, and many men have trained many others. And I myself, whatever I have contributed to the republic—if indeed I have contributed anything—came to public life trained and equipped by teachers and by learning.

156 And not only while they are alive and present do such men teach and educate those eager to learn; they achieve the same even after death through the monuments of their writings. For they have passed over no question that concerns laws, customs, or the conduct of the state, so that they seem to have devoted their leisure to our business. So those very men who are given to the pursuit of learning and wisdom bring their intelligence and practical wisdom above all to the service of mankind. For this reason, too, to speak fully, provided one speaks wisely, is better than to think with the greatest acuteness but without eloquence; for thought is turned in upon itself, while eloquence embraces those to whom we are joined in community.

157 Swarms of bees do not gather in order to make honeycombs; because they are by nature creatures that gather, they make honeycombs. In the same way, and much more so, human beings, gathered together by nature, apply their skill in action and thought. And so, unless the virtue that consists in protecting people—that is, in the society of the human race—takes hold of knowledge, knowledge would seem solitary and barren; and greatness of spirit, cut off from human fellowship and union, would be a kind of savagery and brutality. So it comes about that the fellowship and community of human beings outweigh the pursuit of knowledge.

158 Nor is it true, as some say, that human community and society were formed out of the necessities of life, because we could not obtain or produce without others what nature requires; and that if everything needed for food and comfort were provided for us, as they say, by a magic wand, then every man of the best talents would drop all business and devote himself entirely to learning and knowledge. It is not so. For he would flee solitude and look for a companion in his studies; he would want now to teach, now to learn, now to listen, now to speak. Every duty, therefore, that serves to preserve human fellowship and society must be ranked above the duty that consists in learning and knowledge.

159 Perhaps it should be asked whether this duty of community, which is most in accord with nature, should also always be ranked above moderation and restraint. I do not think so. For some acts are so foul, and others so wicked, that a wise man would not commit them even to save his country. Posidonius collected a great many of them, but some so revolting, so obscene, that it seems shameful even to mention them. The wise man, then, will not do such things for the sake of the republic, nor will the republic wish them done on its behalf. But the matter is made easier by this: no occasion can arise when it would be in the republic’s interest for the wise man to do any of them.

160 Let this, then, be taken as established: in choosing among duties, the class of duties that is bound up with human society takes first place. For considered action will follow on knowledge and practical wisdom; so it comes about that to act with deliberation is worth more than to think wisely. But enough of this. The topic itself has been so thoroughly opened up that it is not hard, in looking for our duty, to see which duty should be put before which. Within community itself, too, there are degrees of duty from which one can see what is owed to each: our first duty is to the immortal gods, the second to our country, the third to our parents, and then, step by step, to the rest.

161 From this brief discussion we can see that people are often in doubt not only whether a thing is honorable or shameful, but also, when two honorable courses are proposed, which is the more honorable. This topic, as I said above, was passed over by Panaetius. But let us now go on to what remains.

1 Son Marcus, after a year of hearing Cratippus, and in Athens, you ought to be well stocked with the rules and teachings of philosophy. The teacher is very important, and so is the city. Cratippus can add to your knowledge, and the city can add examples. Still, I think you should do what I always did. I joined Latin with Greek, and I did this not only in philosophy but also in public speaking. So I advise you to be equally good in both kinds of speech. I think my writing has helped people in this way. Not only those who know no Greek, but even the learned, think they have gained something in speaking and judging.

2 So you will learn from the leading philosopher of this age, and you will learn for as long as you want. But you should want to learn for as long as it takes to make real progress. You will read my books, which do not differ much from the Peripatetics. We all want to be Socratics and Platonists. In matters of fact, use your own judgment. I do not stop you. But your Latin speech will certainly become fuller if you read my books. Do not think I say this with pride. I grant that many people know philosophy. But to speak well, clearly and with style is the skill of an orator. I have spent my life on that study. So if I claim this skill for myself, I think I have some right to it.

3 So I strongly urge you, my dear Cicero, to read carefully not only my speeches but also these books on philosophy. They are nearly equal to the speeches. The speeches have greater force. But this calm and balanced style of writing must also be cultivated. I do not see that any Greek has yet managed to work hard in both styles, the style for the courts and the calm style of argument. Demetrius of Phalerum may be an exception. He was a careful thinker and a weak speaker, but his style was sweet. You can recognize him as a pupil of Theophrastus. As for how far I have made progress in both, let others judge. I have certainly followed both.

4 I think Plato, if he had wished to take up the court style, could have spoken with great weight and in full detail. And I think Demosthenes, if he had kept what he learned from Plato and had wanted to deliver it, could have written with grace and brilliance. I judge Aristotle and Isocrates in the same way. Each of them was so pleased with his own style that he looked down on the other. But I decided to write something to you at this time, and much more later. I wanted to begin with a subject that is most suited to your age and to my authority. Philosophy has many serious and useful topics, and philosophers have discussed them with care and in detail. But the teaching on duties seems to have the widest reach. No part of life is free from duty: not public or private life, not court business or home life. This is true whether you act in a matter that concerns only yourself or make an agreement with another. All honor in life depends on keeping duty and cultivating it. All shame comes from neglecting it.

5 This question is shared by all philosophers. Who would dare to call himself a philosopher without teaching rules of duty? But some schools overturn all duty by the ends of good and evil that they propose. Take a school that sets the highest good so that it has nothing to do with virtue. Such a school measures good by personal gain, not by honor. If its followers keep to this view and are not sometimes beaten by their natural goodness, they cannot practice friendship, justice or generosity. No one who judges pain the greatest evil can be brave, and no one who calls pleasure the greatest good can be self-controlled.

6 These matters are so clear that they need no argument. Still, I have argued them elsewhere. If these schools want to agree with themselves, they cannot say anything about duty. Nor can they teach firm and stable rules of duty that fit with nature. The only exceptions are those who say that virtue alone is to be sought, or who say that honor above all is to be sought for its own sake. So the teaching on duty belongs to the Stoics, the Academics and the Peripatetics. The views of Aristo, Pyrrho and Erillus were rejected long ago. Yet they would still have had a right to discuss duty, if they had kept some ranking of things. Then there would have been a way into finding duties. So at this time, and on this question above all, I will follow the Stoics. I will not act as their translator. As is my habit, I will draw from their sources, using my own judgment and choice, as far as seems right in each case.

7 Since all discussion of duty will follow, I think it is right to define first what duty is. I am surprised that Panaetius left this out. Every teaching that a reasoned mind takes up about any subject must start from a definition. Then it is clear what the subject is that is being discussed.... Every question about duty has two parts. One part concerns the end of the good. The other part concerns the rules by which life can be shaped in all its parts. Examples of the first kind ask whether all duties are complete, and whether one duty is greater than another, and other questions of the same kind. The rules of the second kind are handed down. Although they belong to the end of the good, that link is less obvious. They seem to concern more the training of common life. In these books I must explain them.

8 There is also another division of duty. Some duty is called middle duty, and some is called complete. I think we should call complete duty right action. The Greeks call it katorthoma. Middle duty they call kathekon, a common duty. They define the two in this way. Whatever is right is a complete duty. A middle duty, they say, is what can be given a reasonable account of why it was done.

9 So, as Panaetius thinks, there are three kinds of deliberation when a person decides what to do. People doubt whether an act is honorable or shameful. When they consider this, their minds are often pulled in opposite directions. Then they ask whether it helps the comfort and pleasure of life, the means and wealth, power and influence, by which they can help themselves and their own people. They ask whether the thing they are deciding on is advantageous. All such deliberation falls under the reasoning about usefulness. There is a third kind of doubt. It arises when what seems useful seems to fight against what is honorable. Usefulness pulls a person toward itself, and honor seems to pull the other way. So the mind is torn while deciding, and it feels an anxious care in thinking.

10 In this division, it is a great fault to leave something out. Two matters have been left out. We usually deliberate not only whether something is honorable or shameful. We also deliberate, when two honorable things are offered, which is more honorable. In the same way, when two useful things are offered, we ask which is more useful. So the reasoning that he thought had three parts must be divided into five. First we must speak of the honorable, and this in two ways. Then, in the same way, we must speak of the useful. Last, we must discuss how the two are compared.

11 From the beginning, nature has given every living thing the task of protecting itself, its life and its body. It must avoid what seems likely to harm it. It must look for and prepare what is needed for living, such as food, shelter and other things of that kind. Every living thing also shares a desire to pair and to have young, and a certain care for the young it has produced. But the greatest difference between a human and a beast is this. A beast is moved only by the senses. It adapts only to what is present and right in front of it. It feels very little of the past or the future. A human being has a share in reason. By reason we see what follows. We see the causes of things and know what comes before them and, as it were, leads up to them. We compare likenesses. We join and link future things to present things. So we easily see the course of a whole life, and we prepare the things needed to live it.

12 The same nature, by the power of reason, joins one human being to another, for speech and for common life. Above all, it creates a special love in people for their own offspring. It drives them to want to gather with others in groups and in company, and to take part in them himself. For these reasons, people try to get what supplies care and food, not only for themselves but also for a spouse, for children, and for others whom they hold dear and must protect. This care also rouses their spirits and makes them more ready to act.

13 Searching for and investigating the truth is above all a special feature of a human being. So when we are free of necessary business and cares, we want to see, to hear and to learn something. We think that knowing things that are hidden or wonderful is needed for living well. From this it is understood that what is true, plain and pure is most suited to human nature. Joined to this desire to see the truth is a certain wish to lead. A mind well formed by nature does not want to obey anyone, except a teacher, a guide, or a ruler who commands justly and lawfully for the sake of what is useful. From this comes greatness of spirit and contempt for human things.

14 Nor is the power of nature and reason small in this, that only this one animal feels what order is, and what is fitting, and what measure is in deeds and words. So no other animal feels beauty, grace and the fitting harmony of parts among the things that are seen by the eye. Nature and reason carry this likeness from the eyes to the mind. They think beauty, steadiness and order must be kept even more in plans and deeds. They take care not to do anything improper or womanish. Then in all opinions and deeds they take care not to think or do anything out of lust. From these things is formed and made that which we are seeking, the honorable. It is honorable even if it has not been made famous. And what we truly call praiseworthy by nature is praiseworthy even if no one praises it.

15 My son Marcus, you can already see the shape and the face of what is honorable. Plato says: "If people could see it with their eyes, it would stir up a wonderful love of wisdom." Every honorable thing comes from one of four sources. It lies in seeing the truth clearly and with skill. Or it lies in keeping human society safe, giving each person what he is owed, and keeping promises. Or it lies in the size and firmness of a high spirit that cannot be beaten. Or it lies in the order and measure of all that is done and said, and in this there is restraint and self-control. These four are tied together. Still, each one gives rise to its own kinds of duty. The first source is the one we named first, where we place wisdom and good sense. From it comes the search for truth and its discovery, which is the special job of this virtue.

16 For whoever sees most clearly what is most true in each matter, and can see and explain the reason most sharply and most quickly, is usually held to be the most prudent and the wisest. So truth lies under this as, so to speak, the material it deals with and works in.

17 The other three virtues have tasks set for them. They must secure and protect the things by which the course of life is held together. In this way the fellowship and union of people is kept. And the excellence and greatness of the spirit shine out, both in increasing one's wealth and advantages for oneself and one's own, and even more in despising these very things. Order, steadiness, moderation and things like these work in that kind of matter, in which a certain action is needed, not just the stirring of the mind. For when we apply a certain measure and order to the things that are dealt with in life, we will keep honor and grace.

18 Of the four parts into which we have divided the nature and power of the honorable, the first, which lies in knowing the truth, touches human nature most closely. For all of us are pulled and led toward the desire for knowledge and learning. We think it is fine to excel in it. But we think it is shameful and bad to slip, to err, not to know, or to be deceived. In this kind of thing, which is both natural and honorable, two faults must be avoided. One is that we take things we do not know for things we know, and too quickly agree with them. Whoever wants to escape this fault, and all should want to, will use time and care in considering things.

19 There is a second fault: some people give too much eagerness and too much labor to hard and hidden matters, which are not needed. If these two faults are avoided, the effort and care given to honorable things that are worth knowing will rightly be praised. We have heard of Gaius Sulpicius in the study of the stars, and we ourselves knew Sextus Pompeius in geometry. Many people have worked at logic, and more at civil law. All these arts deal with the search for truth. But to be pulled away from public action for the sake of such study goes against duty. All the praise of virtue is found in doing. Yet activity is often broken off, and there are many returns to study. The restless motion of the mind can then keep us in the pursuit of knowledge, even without our trying. Every thought and movement of the mind will be spent either on choosing honorable courses that bear on living well and happily, or on the study of knowledge. I have now spoken of the first source of duty.

20 Of the other three, the widest in reach is the principle by which the fellowship of people among themselves, and as it were the common life of living together, is held together. There are two parts of this. One is justice. In justice the splendor of virtue is greatest, and from it good men are named. Joined to justice is kindness, which may also be called goodwill or generosity. But the first duty of justice is that no one harms another, unless he has been provoked by injury. The second is that people use common things as common, and private things as their own.

21 No property is private by nature. It becomes private in one of these ways. Long ago, people took land that was empty. Or they won it in war. Or it came by law, by agreement, by sale, or by lot. This is why the land of Arpinum is called the land of the Arpinates, and the land of Tusculum belongs to the people of Tusculum. The division of private property works in a similar way. Because each person's share comes from things that were common by nature, each person should keep what has fallen to him. If anyone grabs for himself what belongs to another, he breaks the law of human society.

22 Plato wrote well that we are not born for ourselves alone. Our country claims one part of us, and our friends claim another part. The Stoics also hold that everything that grows on the earth is made for human use. And people are born for the sake of other people, so that they can help one another. So we must follow nature as our guide. We must bring common benefits into the open. By exchanging duties, by giving and receiving, and by our skills, our work and our resources, we must bind people together in society.

23 The foundation of justice is good faith. That means keeping one's words and agreements, and being truthful. Some may think this is too harsh, but let us dare to follow the Stoics. They carefully ask where a word comes from. They believe that the word fides, good faith, is named from the fact that what was said is done. There are two kinds of injustice. One kind is done by those who inflict harm. The other is done by those who, when they can, do not ward off the injury from those who suffer it. A person who attacks another without cause, driven by anger or some other disturbance, seems to raise his hand against an ally. A person who does not defend someone, and does not resist the wrong when he can, is just as much at fault as if he deserted his parents, his friends or his country.

24 Those wrongs that are done on purpose, to cause harm, often come from fear. The person who plans to harm another is afraid that, unless he does it, he himself will suffer some loss. But most people set out to do wrong in order to get what they have desired. In this fault, greed has the widest reach.

25 People want money for two reasons: for the needs of life, and for the pleasures of living well. Among those with a bigger spirit, the wish for money aims at power and at the ability to do favors for others. Marcus Crassus, not long ago, said that no sum of money is large enough for a man who wants to lead the state, if its yield cannot pay for an army. Fine displays and a refined style of living, with elegance and plenty, also give delight. These things have made the hunger for money endless. Still, a man should not be blamed for growing his estate if he harms no one. But he must always avoid doing wrong.

26 Most people are drawn most strongly into this, so that they forget justice, when they fall into the desire for command, for office and for glory. Ennius says: "There is no sacred fellowship, and no good faith in a kingdom." This applies more widely. Whatever it is that not more than one person can excel in, the rivalry for it is usually so fierce that it is very hard to keep a sacred fellowship. The recklessness of Gaius Caesar showed this recently. He overturned all divine and human laws for the sake of a rule that he had imagined for himself through a mistake of opinion. Yet this kind of desire is a problem. The desires for honor, command, power and glory usually arise in the greatest and most brilliant minds. So we must take even more care that no wrong is done in this area.

27 In every injustice it matters a great deal whether the wrong is done from some disturbance of the mind, which is usually brief and lasts only for a time, or whether it is done on purpose and after thought. Things that happen from some sudden movement are lighter than things that are done after planning and preparation. This is enough about inflicting injury.

28 There are usually several reasons for failing to defend others and for deserting one's duty. People either do not want to take on enmities, or labor, or expense. Or they are held back by carelessness, laziness or idleness, or by their own studies or occupations. So they let those whom they should protect be left alone. We must be careful here. It is not enough to be just because, as Plato says of philosophers, they are busy in the search for truth. They despise and think of as nothing the things that most people desire eagerly and fight over. That is not enough. Such people keep one kind of justice, not doing harm to anyone by wrong. But they fall into the other kind. Held back by their zeal for learning, they desert those whom they ought to protect. So they think they will not even enter public affairs unless forced. But it would be fairer to do this from willingness. A right act is only fully just if it is done willingly.

29 There are also people who say that they mind their own business, either from a wish to protect their property or from some dislike of other people. They seem to do no one any wrong. They avoid one kind of injustice, but they fall into the other. For they leave the fellowship of life, because they give nothing to it: no care, no work, no resources.

30 Since we have set out the two kinds of injustice, and given the causes of each, and have first laid down what keeps justice in place, we can easily judge what duty fits each time. That is, unless we love ourselves too much. Caring for other people's affairs is hard. Yet Chremes in the play of Terence says that he thinks nothing human is foreign to him. Still, we perceive and feel more what happens to ourselves, whether good or bad, than what happens to others, which we see as if from far away. So we judge those things differently from our own. That is why those who advise us not to do anything we doubt is fair or unfair give good counsel. Fairness shines by itself. Doubt is a sign of intended injury.

31 Sometimes the things that seem most fitting for a just person, and for the one we call a good man, change and turn into their opposites. Take returning something entrusted to you (even to a madman?), or keeping a promise. These and other things that belong to truth and good faith. Sometimes they must shift, and failing to keep them becomes the right thing to do. We must go back to the foundations of justice that I laid down at the start. First, no one should be hurt. Second, we should serve the common good. When circumstances change, these foundations call for a different action, and the duty is not always the same.

32 A promise or agreement may turn out to be useless to carry out, either for the one to whom it was made or for the one who made it. In the myths, Neptune had promised Theseus something. If he had not done it, Theseus would not have lost his son Hippolytus. Of the three wishes, as the story goes, this was the third, which he made in anger, asking for the death of Hippolytus. When it was granted, he fell into the greatest grief. So promises need not be kept if they are useless to the person to whom you made them. And it is not against duty, if keeping the promise would harm you more than it would help the other person, to put the greater before the less. For example, suppose you promised to appear as a lawyer for someone on a certain day, and in the meantime your son falls seriously ill. It is not against duty to not do what you said. It is rather the person who was promised who leaves duty, if he complains that he was left in the lurch. Who does not see that promises need not be kept when someone was forced to make them by fear, or tricked into making them by fraud? Most of these are set free by praetorian law, and some by statute.

33 Wrongs also often arise from a kind of trickery, from a very clever but malicious reading of the law. From this comes the old saying, now worn smooth in common talk: "the most strict law is the greatest wrong." Many errors of this kind are made even in public affairs. For example, there was a truce with an enemy for thirty days. One man ravaged the fields at night. He said the truce was for days, not for nights. Nor should our own countryman be approved. If it is true that Quintus Fabius Labeo, or someone else, I have nothing but hearsay, was given by the senate as arbiter over the boundaries between the people of Nola and the people of Naples, then he did this. When he came to the place, he spoke with each side separately. He told them not to act eagerly or greedily, and to prefer going back to going forward. When both sides had done this, a good deal of land was left in the middle. So he fixed the boundaries of each as they had said. He gave the land left in the middle to the Roman people. That is deceiving, not judging. So in every matter such cleverness must be avoided.

34 There are also some duties that must be kept even toward those who have wronged you. There is a measure to revenge and to punishment. I am not sure it is not enough that the one who provoked the wrong regrets it. Then he will not do such a thing again, and others will be slower to wrong. In public affairs above all, the laws of war must be kept. There are two ways to settle a dispute. One is by discussion, the other is by force. The first belongs to people, and the second to beasts. So we must turn to the second only if the first is not allowed.

35 So wars must be undertaken for this reason: that we may live in peace without wrong. And once victory is won, those who were not cruel or savage in war should be spared. So our ancestors even took the people of Tusculum, the Aequi, the Volsci, the Sabines and the Hernici into citizenship. But they completely destroyed Carthage and Numantia. I wish they had not destroyed Corinth. But I believe they had some reason for it, mainly the position of the place. They feared the place itself might one day urge people to make war. In my view, we must always look to peace, which will have no treachery in it. If my advice had been followed, we would have, if not the best state, at least some state. Now we have none. We must consider not only those we have conquered by force. We must also receive those who lay down their arms and take refuge in the good faith of the generals, even if the battering ram has struck the wall. In this, our people have so cared for justice that those who received conquered cities or peoples into their protection, as a matter of custom from our ancestors, became their patrons.

36 The fairness of war is laid down most carefully in the law of the Roman fetial priests. From this we can see that no war is just unless it is fought to win back what was taken, or unless it was first announced and declared. [A general named Popilius held a province. In his army a young recruit was the son of Cato. When Popilius decided to send home one legion, he also sent home Cato's son, who served in that same legion. But the young man had stayed in the army out of love for fighting. So Cato wrote to Popilius that, if he let the boy remain, he should bind him again with the military oath, since he had lost the first one and could not fight the enemy with it.

37 Such care was taken when a war was to be started.] We still have a letter from the elder Marcus Cato to his son, also named Marcus. In it he writes that he has heard the consul discharged his son while he served in the war against Perseus in Macedonia. So he warns him to avoid joining a battle. He says it is not lawful to fight the enemy unless you are a soldier. I also notice that a person who was an enemy in the full sense was called "perduellis," but the gentler word "hostis" was used, which softened the harshness of the matter. In our ancestors' speech, "hostis" meant what we now call a foreigner. The Twelve Tables show this: there is a fixed day for dealing with a foreigner, and a lasting right against a foreigner. What could be added to this gentleness, that we call the enemy we fight by so soft a name? Time has since made the word harsher. It has moved away from meaning "foreigner," and it now belongs properly to the one who takes up arms against us.

38 When a contest is over rule and the glory of war is sought, there must still be the same causes that I just called the just causes of wars. But wars for which the glory of rule is the goal should be fought less bitterly. For we contest with a fellow citizen in one way if he is our enemy, and in another way if he is our rival. With a rival the contest is over honor and standing. With an enemy it is over life and reputation. So with the Celtiberians and the Cimbri the war was fought as with enemies, to decide which side would survive, not which would rule. With the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, the Carthaginians and Pyrrhus, rule was contested. The Carthaginians broke faith, and Hannibal was cruel. The others were more just. There is a famous saying of Pyrrhus about returning prisoners: "I do not ask for gold, and do not give me a price. We do not haggle over war, but fight it. Let us decide our lives with iron, not with gold. Let us test by valor whether you or I are to rule, and whether Fortune brings what she brings. And hear this word as well: I have decided to spare the freedom of those whose valor Fortune has spared in war. I give them; take them; I give them with the great gods willing."

39 This is a royal opinion, and worthy of the family of Aeacus. Even if individuals, under pressure of the time, have promised something to an enemy, good faith must still be kept in that very promise. In the First Punic War, Regulus was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians. He was sent to Rome to arrange the exchange of prisoners, and he swore that he would return. When he came, he first advised the senate not to return the prisoners. Then, when his relatives and friends tried to keep him in Rome, he chose to go back to death rather than break the faith he had given to the enemy.

40 In the Second Punic War, after the battle of Cannae, Hannibal sent ten men to Rome. They had sworn that they would come back unless they had won the release of the prisoners taken in battle. The censors placed all ten of them among the aerarii, a class of people who had lost their voting rights, for as long as each lived, because they had broken their oath. The same punishment went to the man who had found a loophole in the oath through trickery. He had left the camp with Hannibal's permission, then came back soon after, saying he had forgotten something. Then he left the camp again and believed that his oath no longer held. He had kept the words but not the meaning. In keeping faith, we must always consider what we meant, not only what we said. The greatest example of justice toward an enemy set by our ancestors came when a deserter from Pyrrhus offered the senate to poison the king and kill him. The senate and Gaius Fabricius sent him back to Pyrrhus. So the Romans would not approve a death won by crime, even for an enemy who was powerful and had started the war himself.

41 That is enough about the duties of war. Let us also remember that justice must be kept even toward the lowest people. The lowest condition and fortune is that of slaves. Those who advise us to treat them as hired workers, demanding their work and giving them what is fair, give good advice. There are two ways to do wrong: by force or by fraud. Fraud seems like the fox's way, and force like the lion's way. Both are very far from being human. But fraud deserves greater hatred. Of all injustice, none is worse than that of those who, while they are deceiving most, make sure they seem to be good men. That is enough about justice.

42 Next, as I planned, I will speak about kindness and generosity. Nothing suits human nature better. But it has many limits. We must see first that kindness does not harm the very people it seems to help, or others. Second, our kindness must not be greater than our means. Third, each person must be given what fits his standing. This is the foundation of justice, and all these things must be referred to it. People who do a favor to someone that harms the person they seem to want to help are not kind or generous. They should be judged as harmful flatterers. And those who harm others in order to be generous to still others are guilty of the same injustice. It is like taking what belongs to others and turning it to their own use.

43 There are many people, eager for show and for glory, who take from some what they give to others. They think they will be seen as kind to their friends if they make them rich by any means. But this is so far from duty that nothing could be more opposed to duty. So we must take care to use generosity that helps our friends and harms no one. For this reason, the transfer of money by Lucius Sulla or by Gaius Caesar from its rightful owners to others should not be seen as generous. Nothing is generous that is not also just.

44 The second limit is that kindness must not be greater than our means. Those who want to be kinder than their resources allow first do wrong in this way: they treat their own close people unjustly. For they take to strangers the means that it would be fairer to give to their own people and to keep for them. Such generosity often carries a desire to seize and take by wrong, so there will be the means to give. We can also see that many people, not so much generous by nature as led by a kind of glory, do many things to look kind. These things seem to come from showing off more than from goodwill. Such pretense is more closely tied to vanity than to generosity or to honor.

45 The third rule is that in kindness there must be a choice based on worth. In this we must look at the character of the person to whom the kindness is given. We must look at his goodwill toward us, at our shared community and fellowship of life, and at the services he has already done for our benefit. It is good if all these things come together. If not, the more numerous and weightier reasons will count for more.

46 Since we live not among perfect people who are wholly wise, but among people with whom we do very well if they show even the semblance of virtue, I think we must also understand this. We must not neglect anyone who shows some sign of virtue. And each person should be cultivated in proportion to how much he is adorned with the gentler virtues: modesty, self-control, and that same justice about which much has already been said. For a brave and great spirit in a person who is not perfect or wise is usually more heated. The gentler virtues seem rather to belong to a good man. That is enough about character.

47 As for the goodwill that each person has toward us, the first duty is to give the most to the one who loves us most. But we should judge goodwill not by the passion of love, as young men do, but by its steadiness and constancy. If kindnesses already received mean that a favor must be returned rather than first given, then greater care must be taken. For no duty is more necessary than repaying a favor.

48 Hesiod tells us to repay what we have borrowed with a larger measure, if we can. What then should we do for someone who has done us a favor? Should we copy fertile fields, which yield much more than they have received? If we do not hesitate to show duty to those whom we hope will help us, what kind of duty should we show to those who have already helped us? There are two kinds of generosity. One is in giving a favor, the other in repaying one. Whether we give or not is in our power. But it is not right for a good man to refuse to repay, as long as he can do so without injustice.

49 Among the favors we have received, we must sort them by rank, and there is no doubt that the largest debt is owed for the largest favor. But above all we must weigh the spirit, the zeal and the goodwill with which each favor was given. Many people do many things with a kind of recklessness, without thinking. Stirred by a mood that covers everyone, or by a sudden gust of feeling, they do favors. Such favors should not be counted as great as those given after judgment, carefully and steadily. But when we decide where to put a favor, or how to repay one, and everything else is equal, the main duty is this: help the person who needs help most. Most people do the opposite. They serve most eagerly the one from whom they hope to gain the most, even if that person has no need of them.

50 The bond of human society and fellowship will be kept best if we show the most kindness to each person in proportion to how close he is to us. But the first principles of the natural community of humans must be traced back further. The first is the bond that joins the whole human race. Its tie is reason and speech. Through teaching, learning, sharing, arguing and judging, speech and reason join people together in a natural partnership. Nothing separates us further from wild animals. Courage is often said to be found in horses and lions, but we do not say they have justice, fairness or goodness. They have no share in reason or speech.

51 This fellowship is widest among people with each other, and it reaches all people with all. Among these, the common use of all the things that nature has produced for human use must be kept. Those things that are defined by laws and by civil law must be kept as they are defined. For the rest, we must observe the Greek proverb: all things are common among friends. Among all people there are common things, of the kind that Ennius put in a single example, which can be passed to very many people: "A man who kindly shows the way to someone who has lost it, is like one who lights another's lamp from his own. He does not lose any light himself by lighting the other's." From this one example he teaches enough: whatever can be lent without loss should be given, even to a stranger.

52 From this come these common duties: not to block running water, to allow anyone who wishes to light his own fire from our fire, and to give faithful advice to someone who is deciding. These things are useful to those who receive them, and not troublesome to the giver. So we must use them and always add something to the common good. But since the means of individuals are small, and the number of those in need is endless, general kindness must be referred back to Ennius' end, "he still shines himself." That is, so that we have the means to be kind to our own people.

53 There are several steps in the fellowship of people. Leaving aside that endless fellowship, the closer one is that of people of the same race, nation and language. These bind people most closely together. Closer still is being of the same city. For citizens share many things: the forum, temples, colonnades, roads, laws, rights, courts, votes, customs, friendships, and many dealings and business with many people. Closer still is the bond of kinsfolk. From that vast fellowship of the human race, it is shut into a small and narrow space.

54 Since every living thing has by nature the urge to have offspring, the first partnership is marriage itself. The next is the children. Then comes one household, with everything held in common. This is the beginning of a city, and the seedbed of the state. Next come the ties between brothers, then between cousins, who can no longer be held in one house and so move into other houses, as into colonies. Then come marriages and in-law ties, which bring still more relatives. This spreading and this offspring is the origin of states. The bond of blood and goodwill holds people together with love.

55 It is a great thing to have the same memorials of our ancestors, to share the same rites, and to have common burial places. But of all fellowships, none is more excellent or firmer than that of good men who are alike in character and joined by friendship. For that honor, which we often speak of, moves us even when we see it in another. And the one in whom it seems to be present becomes our friend.

56 Although every virtue draws us to itself and makes us love those in whom it seems to be found, justice and generosity do this most of all. Nothing is more lovable or more tying than sameness of good character. When people share the same pursuits and the same wishes, each takes as much delight in the other as in himself. Then what Pythagoras wants in friendship comes about: many become one. There is also a large fellowship made from favors given and received on both sides. When these exchanges are mutual and pleasing, the people involved are bound by a firm partnership.

57 But when you weigh everything with reason and feeling, none of the partnerships is more serious, and none more dear, than the one each of us has with the country. Parents are dear, children are dear, relatives and family friends are dear. But one country gathers all these loves into one. What good man would hesitate to die for her, if he could be of use? How much more hateful is the brutality of those who have torn their country apart with every crime, and who are and have been busy destroying her to the ground.

58 But if a comparison is made to decide to whom the greatest duty is owed, first come the country and the parents. We are bound to them by the greatest favors. Next come our children and the whole household. Their eyes are fixed only on us, and they have no other refuge. After them come the relatives who agree with us, and who often share our fortune. So the necessary help of life is owed most of all to those I have just named. The common life, shared living, counsel, talk, encouragement, consolation, and sometimes even rebuke, are most powerful in friendships. And the most pleasant friendship is the one joined by likeness of character.

59 But in giving all these duties we must see what each person most needs, and what each person can or cannot get without us. So the degrees of closeness are not the same as the degrees of time. Some duties are owed more to some than to others. For example, you will help your neighbor more quickly in gathering in his crops than your brother or your family friend. But if there is a lawsuit in court, you will defend your relative or friend rather than your neighbor. So these things and others like them must be considered in every duty, and we must take the habit of it. Then we can become good reckoners of duties. By adding and subtracting, we can see what the total comes to, and so understand how much is owed to each person.

60 Doctors, generals and orators cannot achieve anything worthy of great praise just by learning the rules of their art, without practice and exercise. So the rules for keeping duty are indeed handed down, as I am doing myself. But the greatness of the matter also requires practice and exercise. From those things that belong to the law of human society, I have now said almost enough about how the honorable is led, and from it the fitting duty.

61 We must understand this. Four kinds of virtue give rise to honor and duty. The one that seems most splendid is the one that is done by a great and lofty spirit, one that looks down on human affairs. So in blame, the easiest thing to say is something like this: "You young men have a woman's spirit," or "while that maiden has a man's spirit," and things of that kind. "You son of Salmacis, win spoils without sweat or blood!" But when we praise deeds done with great spirit and with courage and great excellence, we praise them somehow with a fuller voice. That is why the speakers have their field of praise: Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae, Leuctra. Here are our own Cocles, the Decii, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, and Marcus Marcellus, and countless others. Above all, the Roman people itself stands out for greatness of spirit. And the love of military glory is shown by the statues we see, which are nearly all dressed in military gear.

62 But that lofty spirit, shown in danger and hardship, is a fault if it lacks justice. If it fights not for the common safety but for its own interest, it is wrong. Such spirit is not virtue. It is rather a savagery that drives away all humanity. So the Stoics define courage well, when they call it a virtue that fights on behalf of fairness. For this reason, no one who won a name for courage through ambush and malice has earned praise. Nothing can be honorable that lacks justice.

63 So Plato's words are excellent. He says: "Not only knowledge that is cut off from justice should be called cleverness rather than wisdom. Even a mind ready to face danger, if it is driven by its own desire and not by the common good, should be called recklessness rather than courage." So we want brave and great men to be good, plain-dealing, friends of truth, and least deceitful. These qualities are part of the praise owed to justice.

64 But there is a troubling thing here. In this lofty and great spirit, stubbornness and an excessive desire to rule most easily arise. In Plato, the whole custom of the Spartans is set on fire by the desire to win. So the more someone stands out in greatness of spirit, the more he wants to be first of all, or rather the only one. But when you desire to be above everyone, it is hard to keep fairness, which is most especially the mark of justice. So people do not accept being beaten in argument, or by any public and lawful right. In the state, men of this kind are usually spenders of money and party leaders. They want to get the greatest power, and to be above others by force rather than to be equal in justice. But the harder it is, the more splendid it is. For there is no time when justice should be absent.

65 So those should be counted brave and great-spirited who do not do wrong but ward off wrong. True and wise greatness of spirit judges that the honorable, which nature most of all follows, lies in deeds and not in glory. Such a person would rather be first than seem to be first. For the one who depends on the mistake of an unskilled crowd should not be counted among great men. Those with the highest spirit are most easily driven to unjust actions by the desire for glory. This is a slippery place, because it is hard to find anyone who, after taking up labors and entering dangers, does not want glory as the wage for what he has done.

66 In general, a brave and great spirit is seen most in two things. One is looking down on external things. For it is firmly believed that a man should admire, wish for and seek nothing except what is honorable and fitting. He should not give way to any person, any disturbance of mind, or any fortune. The other is this: when you are in the state of mind I have described above, you do great deeds that are very useful, but also very hard, and full of labor and danger, both for your life and for many matters that concern life.

67 The whole brilliance, greatness, and, I may add, usefulness of these two things lies in the second. But the cause and reason that makes great men lies in the first. In it lies what makes spirits excellent and despise human things. This is seen in two ways: if you judge only what is honorable to be good, and if you are free of every disturbance of mind. For a brave and great spirit must count small the things that seem great and splendid to most people. It must despise them by a steady and firm reason. And it must bear the things that seem bitter, which occur in great numbers and variety in human life and fortune, so that you do not depart from the state of nature at all, nor from the dignity of the wise man. That is the mark of a strong spirit and of great steadiness.

68 But it does not fit that someone who is not broken by fear should be broken by desire. Nor should someone who has shown himself unconquered by labor be conquered by pleasure. So we must avoid these, and flee the desire for money. For there is nothing so small-minded and petty as loving riches. Nothing is more honorable and more noble than despising money. To despise money if you do not have it, and, if you have it, to use it for kindness and generosity. We must also beware of the desire for glory, as I said above. For it takes away freedom, and for freedom great-spirited men must always struggle. Nor should we seek commands. At times we should not accept them, and at other times we should lay them down.

69 We must be free of every disturbance of the mind. That includes not only desire and fear, but also grief, too much pleasure and anger. Then calm and security of mind will be present, which brings both steadiness and dignity. Many people, both in the past and today, have sought the calm I describe. They have withdrawn from public affairs and taken refuge in leisure. Among them are the most noble philosophers, who are far the leaders, and certain serious and dignified men. They could not bear the customs of the people or of the leaders. Some of them lived in the countryside, delighted with their own property.

70 These men had the same goal as kings: to lack nothing, to obey no one, and to live free. The mark of freedom is to live as you wish. So those who crave power and those leisure-seekers I named have something in common. Each thinks he can reach the same thing: one if he has great wealth, the other if he is content with what he has and with little. Neither view should be dismissed altogether. But the life of the leisured is easier and safer, and weighs less on others. Yet for the human race, the life of those who have given themselves to the state and to great undertakings is more productive, and better fitted to fame and to greatness.

71 So perhaps we should allow that people who do not take part in public affairs may do so, if they have an outstanding talent and have devoted themselves to learning. Also allowed are those who have withdrawn from public affairs because of weak health or some other serious cause, and who have given the power to govern it to others, and the praise as well. But for those who have no such cause, if they say they despise the commands and offices that most people admire, I think this should be counted not as praise but as fault. It is hard not to approve their judgment, in that they despise glory and think it worth nothing. But they seem to fear the labors and troubles, and also the offenses and rejections, as a kind of disgrace and shame. For there are some who in opposite things are not very consistent with themselves. They despise pleasure very strictly. They are softer in pain. They neglect glory, and yet they are broken by disgrace. And they do this without enough steadiness.

72 But for those who have by nature the means to act, the way is to set aside all hesitation in seeking office and in governing the state. A city cannot be ruled, or the greatness of a spirit shown, in any other way. For those who take part in public affairs, the greatness and contempt for human things that I often speak of must be used, just as much as by philosophers. perhaps even more. And calm and security of mind are needed. If they are to be free of anxiety and to live with dignity and steadiness.

73 These things are easier for philosophers. There are fewer points in their life at which fortune can strike. They need fewer things. And if something adverse happens, they cannot fall so heavily. For this reason, greater movements of the mind are stirred up, and greater efforts are made by those who govern the state than by those who live quietly. So greatness of spirit and freedom from anxieties must be used all the more by them. Whoever comes to govern the state should take care not to look only at how honorable the matter is. He should also see whether he has the means to accomplish it. In that very question he must consider whether he might despair too quickly out of laziness, or be too confident out of desire. In all undertakings, before you approach them, careful preparation must be used.

74 Most people think that war matters are greater than matters of the city. This view must be reduced. Many have sought wars because of the desire for glory. This happens most often in great minds and talents, and all the more if they are suited to military affairs and eager to wage wars. But if we want to judge truly, many matters of the city have been greater and more famous than matters of war.

75 Themistocles is rightly praised, and his name is more famous than that of Solon. The victory at Salamis is cited as the clearest witness of his success. Yet that victory may be put before the plan of Solon. But the plan of Solon, by which he first set up the Areopagus, must be judged no less splendid than that. For the one did good once, while the other will always do good to the state. By this plan the laws of the Athenians are kept, and the institutions of their ancestors. Themistocles could not name anything in which he had helped the Areopagus. But the Areopagus could truly say that it had helped Themistocles. For the war was waged by the plan of the senate, which Solon had set up.

76 The same may be said of Pausanias and Lysander. Although the Spartans are thought to have won their empire through these men's deeds, they must not be compared, not even in the smallest part, with the laws and discipline of Lycurgus. Indeed, for these very reasons their armies were more obedient and braver. For my part, when we were boys Marcus Scaurus did not seem to yield to Gaius Marius, and when we took part in public life Quintus Catulus did not seem to yield to Gnaeus Pompeius. Weapons abroad are worth little unless there is wise counsel at home. Africanus, a unique man and a unique general, did no more for the state by destroying Numantia than Publius Nasica did, as a private citizen at the same time, when he killed Tiberius Gracchus. That matter was not only a question of home policy. It touched on war too, since it was carried out by force and by hand. But even that was planned by urban counsel, without an army.

77 The best saying is one which, I hear, is often thrown at us by wicked and envious people: "Let arms yield to the toga, and let the laurel yield to praise." If I set aside other examples, did not the arms yield to the toga when we were steering the state? Indeed, there was never a greater danger in the state, nor a greater peace. So through our counsel and care, the arms fell from the hands of the most reckless citizens, and quickly they fell by themselves. What deed was ever done so great in war? What triumph can be compared to it?

78 Let me boast a little to you, my son Marcus, for the inheritance of this glory and the imitation of these deeds belong to you. Gnaeus Pompeius, a man overflowing with military praise, said in the presence of many people that he would have brought home a third triumph in vain, unless he would have had a place to hold it because of my service to the state. So there are domestic kinds of courage that are not less than military ones. In these, even more effort and zeal must be spent than in the other.

79 In general, the honorable thing we seek from a lofty and great spirit is produced by the mind, not by bodily strength. Still, the body must be trained so that it can obey counsel and reason in carrying out tasks and in bearing hard work. What we seek as honorable lies wholly in the care and thought of the mind. In this, those who lead the state in the toga bring no smaller benefit than those who wage war. So by their counsel wars have often been either never started or finished, and sometimes even begun. Thus the advice of Marcus Cato brought about the Third Punic War, and his authority was strong even after his death.

80 So deciding by counsel is more to be sought than courage in fighting. But we must take care that we do not prefer this course to avoid war rather than for reasons of advantage. A war should be started in such a way that only peace seems to be the aim. A brave and steady spirit is not shaken by harsh times, nor thrown off its footing when things are in uproar, as the saying goes. It keeps a calm mind and sound counsel, and does not depart from reason.

81 Still, it takes a great spirit, and also a great mind, to think ahead about what may happen in either direction. We should plan in advance what to do if each thing happens. We should not let it happen that we one day have to say, "I did not expect that." These are the works of a great and high spirit, of someone who is confident because of wisdom and good counsel. To fight at random in battle, and to clash with the enemy by hand, is a monstrous thing, like a beast. But when time and necessity demand it, we must fight with our hands, and put death before slavery and shame.

82 [When cities are to be overthrown and plundered, we must think very carefully. We must do nothing rashly and nothing cruelly. A great man, when things are stirred up, punishes the guilty, spares the common people, and keeps everything right and honorable in every fortune.] As I said above, there are people who put war before the affairs of the city. You will find many others for whom risky and hot plans seem greater and more splendid than quiet and considered ones.

83 We must never run away from danger altogether, so that we seem unwarlike and timid. But we must also avoid throwing ourselves into dangers without reason, for nothing can be more foolish. So in facing dangers we should copy the custom of doctors. They treat light illnesses gently, but when the illnesses are serious, they are forced to use dangerous and uncertain treatments. So in calm weather it is mad to wish for a storm. But to help in a storm, by any means, is the mark of the wise. This is all the more so if you can gain more good by a settled matter than you risk harm from a doubtful one. Risky actions in public affairs concern partly those who take them and partly the state.

84 In the same way, some people put their lives at risk, and others put their glory and the goodwill of citizens at risk. So we should be readier to face our own dangers than common ones. We should also be more willing to fight for honor and glory than for other advantages. Many have been found who were ready to pour out not only their money but even their lives for their country, yet who would not give up the smallest part of their glory, even when the state asked it. Take Callicratidas. He led the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War and did many outstanding things. But in the end he ruined everything, because he would not follow the advice of those who thought the fleet should be pulled back from Arginusae and should not fight the Athenians. He answered that the Spartans could build another fleet after losing this one, but that he could not run away without shame. That was a moderate blow to the Spartans. The other was deadly: when Cleombrotus, afraid of envy, rashly fought Epaminondas, the power of the Spartans collapsed. How much better was Quintus Maximus! Ennius says of him: "One man, by delaying, restored our state. He put safety before rumors. So now his glory shines brighter and brighter, later and later." This kind of error must be avoided in matters of the city too. For some people do not dare to say what they think, even when it would be best, because they fear being unpopular.

85 Those who are going to lead the state should keep two rules of Plato. First, they should protect the advantage of the citizens, and refer everything they do to it, forgetting their own gains. Second, they should care for the whole body of the state, and not, while guarding one part, abandon the rest. For the running of the state, like a guardianship, must be done for the benefit of those who were placed in its care, not for the benefit of those who were given the job. Those who look after one part of the citizens and neglect another bring the most destructive thing into a city: faction and discord. From this it happens that some seem to be men of the people, and others seem to be champions of the best men, while very few serve everyone.

86 From this came great discord among the Athenians. In our own state there were not only uprisings but also deadly civil wars. A serious and brave citizen, who deserves a leading place in the state, will avoid and hate these things. He will hand himself over entirely to the state. He will not chase after wealth or power, and he will protect the state in such a way that he takes thought for everyone. Nor will he call anyone into hatred or envy with false accusations. He will so cling to justice and honor that, while he keeps them, he would rather suffer severely and even face death than desert the things I have named.

87 Ambition and the scramble for office are altogether the most wretched things. Plato speaks of them well: "Those who compete with one another over who should run the state are like sailors fighting over who should steer the ship." He also teaches that "we should count as enemies those who take up arms against us, and not those who want to defend the state by their own judgment." That kind of disagreement, free of bitterness, was between Publius Africanus and Quintus Metellus.

88 Nor should we listen to those who think we must be harshly angry with enemies, and who believe that this is the mark of a great and brave man. Nothing is more praiseworthy, and nothing is more worthy of a great and splendid man, than gentleness and mercy. In free peoples, and in the fair exercise of law, we must also show ease and what is called greatness of spirit. Otherwise, if we grow angry at people who come at the wrong time or ask shamelessly, we will fall into a useless and hateful sternness. Still, gentleness and mercy must be praised only so far as a severity is used that the public interest requires. Without it, a state cannot be governed. But all punishment and reproof must be free of insult. They should serve not the interest of the one who punishes or rebukes, but the good of the state.

89 We must also take care that the punishment is not greater than the fault, and that people are not punished for the same causes while others are not even called to account. Above all, anger must be kept out of punishing. For someone who goes to punishment while angry will never keep that middle measure which lies between too much and too little. The Peripatetics approve of this measure, and rightly, if only they did not praise anger and say nature gave it for a useful purpose. But anger must be rejected in all things. And we should wish that those who lead the state be like the laws, which are guided to punishment not by anger but by fairness.

90 Also, in good times, when things go as we wish, we must greatly avoid pride, disdain and arrogance. For to bear success immoderately is a sign of lightness, just as it is with bad fortune. A fine thing is evenness in all of life, and the same face and the same look always. We have been told this of Socrates and likewise of Gaius Laelius. I see that Philip, king of the Macedonians, was beaten in his deeds and his glory by his son, but he was superior in ease and kindness. So one was always great, and the other often most shameful. Those who advise us that the higher we are, the more humbly we should behave, seem to advise rightly. Panaetius says that his pupil and friend Africanus used to say: "Horses, which are often excited and fierce from the frequent struggles of battle, are usually handed over to their trainers, so that they can be used more easily. In the same way, people who are unbridled by good fortune and too confident in themselves must be led, as into a circle of reason and learning, so that they see the weakness of human affairs and the changes of fortune."

91 Also, in the most favorable times we must use the advice of friends, and give their authority even more weight than before. At the same time, we must be careful not to open our ears to flatterers, or let ourselves be flattered. In this it is easy to be deceived. For we think ourselves so well suited to be praised, and that praise is deserved. From this come countless faults. Puffed up with opinions, people are shamefully mocked, and they fall into the greatest errors.

92 But enough of these things. We must judge this: the greatest deeds and the greatest spirit are shown by those who govern states, because their management reaches the widest and touches the most people. Yet there have been many men of great spirit in a quiet life too. Some of them searched for or attempted great things, and kept themselves within the limits of their own affairs. Others, standing between the philosophers and those who ran the state, took delight in their own property. They did not try to increase it by every possible means, nor did they shut their own people and their friends and the state out of its use, when it was needed. This property must first be gained honestly, without any shameful or hateful gain. Then it must be used to be useful to as many people as are worthy. Then it must be increased with reason, care and thrift, and not serve lust and luxury rather than generosity and kindness. If you keep these rules, you may live splendidly, with dignity and spirit, and also simply, faithfully, and truly as a friend of people.

93 Next we must speak of the one remaining part of honor. In it we see modesty, which is a kind of ornament of life, and also self-control, moderation, and all calming of disturbances of the mind, and the measure of things. Under this part comes what can be called in Latin "decorum", fitting behavior. The Greeks call it prepon.

94 Its force is such that it cannot be separated from the honorable. For what is fitting is honorable, and what is honorable is fitting. The difference between the honorable and the fitting is easier to grasp than to explain. For whatever is fitting shows itself once honor has gone before it. So in this part of honor, which we are discussing here, and in the three earlier parts, what is fitting can be seen. It is fitting to use reason and speech wisely, to act with care in what we do, and in every matter to see and defend what is true. To err, to slip, to be deceived is as unfitting as to rave and lose one's mind. All just acts are fitting, and unjust acts, like shameful ones, are unfitting. The reason is the same for courage. What is done in a manly way and with a great spirit seems worthy of a man and fitting. What is done otherwise is unfitting, like what is shameful.

95 So this fittingness belongs to all honor, and it belongs in such a way that it is not seen through some hidden reasoning. It lies in plain view. There is something fitting, and it is understood in every virtue. It can be separated from virtue more in thought than in fact. As the charm and beauty of a body cannot be separated from its health, so this fittingness we speak of is wholly mixed up with virtue, though the mind can tell them apart in thought.

96 Fittingness can be divided in two. We understand one kind in general, which runs through all honor. Another kind lies under it and belongs to each single part of honor. The general kind is usually defined like this: fittingness is what agrees with the excellence of a human being, in the respect in which human nature differs from other living things. The lesser kind, under the general one, is defined as follows: fittingness is what agrees so closely with nature that moderation and self-control appear in it, together with a certain noble look.

97 We can understand this better from the fittingness that poets follow, about which more is usually said elsewhere. We say that poets keep what is fitting when they make and say what suits each character. If Aeacus or Minos were to say, "Let them hate, provided they fear," or "The parent himself is the tomb of his children," it would seem unfitting, since we have heard that these men were just. But when Atreus says it, applause breaks out, because the speech suits the character. The poets will judge what suits each person from the character. But nature herself has given us our character, with great excellence and superiority over all other living things.

98 So poets, in their great variety of characters, will also see what suits even flawed people. But nature has given us the parts of steadiness, moderation, self-control and modesty. The same nature teaches us not to neglect how we behave toward others. So it is plain how widely the fittingness that belongs to all honor extends, and also what is seen in each single kind of virtue. For as the beauty of a body, through the right arrangement of its limbs, moves the eyes and delights them because all its parts agree with a certain charm, so this fittingness that shines in life wins the approval of those among whom we live. It does so through the order, steadiness and moderation of all that is said and done.

99 So a certain respect must be shown toward people, toward the best and toward all others. For to neglect what each person thinks of you is not only the mark of an arrogant person, but of a wholly loose one. There is a difference in how we treat people between justice and modesty. The parts of justice are not to harm people. The parts of modesty are not to offend them. In this the force of fittingness is most clearly seen. I think that by these points what we call fitting has been understood.

100 The duty that comes from this has first a path that leads to agreement with, and the preservation of, nature. If we follow nature as our guide, we will never go astray. We will follow what is sharp and clear-sighted in nature, what fits with the joining of people in society, and what is strong and brave. But the greatest force of fittingness lies in this part that we are discussing. For we must approve not only the movements of the body, which fit with nature, but even more the movements of the mind, which likewise fit with nature.

101 The soul has two powers. One lies in desire. In Greek it is called "orme", and it pulls a person this way and that. The other lies in reason, which teaches and explains what must be done and what must be avoided. So reason should lead, and desire should obey. Every action must be free of rashness and carelessness. We should do nothing that we cannot give a reasonable cause for. This, in short, is the outline of duty.

102 We must see to it that desires obey reason. They must not run ahead of it, and nor lag behind and desert it through laziness or cowardice. They must be calm and free of every disturbance of the mind. From this all steadiness and all moderation will shine out. For desires that wander too far, and that are carried away as if leaping, whether in wanting or in fleeing, are not held back enough by reason. Such desires surely go beyond the proper end and measure. They leave and throw off obedience. They do not obey reason, to which by the law of nature they are subject. Such desires disturb not only the mind but also the body. We can see the faces of people who are angry, or who are moved by some lust or fear, or who are excited by too much pleasure. The face, the voice, the movements and the posture of all of them are changed.

103 From this we understand, to return to the form of duty, that all desires must be held in and calmed. We must rouse attention and care, so that we do nothing rashly or by chance, carelessly or without thought. For we were not born by nature to be made for play and jokes. We were made for seriousness, and for certain studies that are weightier and greater. We may use play and joking, but only as we use sleep and other rest, when we have done enough serious and important work. The kind of joking itself must not be wasteful or immodest, but well-bred and witty. Just as we do not give boys complete freedom to play, but only the kind that is not foreign to honorable behavior, so in joking too some light of a good character should shine out.

104 There are two kinds of joking. One is vulgar, shameless, disgraceful and obscene. The other is refined, urbane, clever and witty. Not only our own Plautus and the old comedy of the Athenians, but also the books of the Socratic philosophers, are full of the second kind. Many people have said witty things, such as the sayings collected by the elder Cato, which are called apophthegms. So it is easy to tell free joking from vulgar joking. The first is fitting even for a man of the strictest seriousness, if it is made at the right time and with an easy mind. The second is not fitting even for a free man, if it involves something base or obscene words. There must also be some measure in play, so that we do not spend everything on it, and are not carried away by pleasure into some disgrace. Our Campus Martius and the honorable pursuits of hunting give good examples of play.

105 But it always belongs to the whole question of duty to keep in mind how far the nature of man is above cattle and other beasts. Beasts feel nothing except pleasure, and they rush toward it with all their force. But the human mind is fed by learning and by thinking. It always either seeks something out or does something. It is led by the delight of seeing and hearing. Even if someone is somewhat inclined toward pleasures, as long as he is not of the herd (for some people are men only in name), but is somewhat more upright, then even if he is caught by pleasure, he hides and conceals his desire for it out of modesty.

106 From this it follows that bodily pleasure is not worthy enough of human excellence. It should be despised and rejected. But if someone gives some place to pleasure, he must keep a careful limit in enjoying it. So food and care of the body should serve health and strength, not pleasure. And if we consider what excellence and dignity there are in nature, we will understand how shameful it is to melt away in luxury and to live softly and daintily, and how honorable it is to live thriftily, self-controlled, strictly and soberly.

107 We must also understand that nature has, as it were, dressed us in two roles. One is shared by all of us, because we all take part in reason and in the excellence of reason, by which we rise above the beasts. From it all honor and fitness comes, and from it the method of finding our duty is sought. The other is given to each person individually. For in bodies there are great differences. We see some who are strong in speed for running, others in strength for wrestling. And so in appearances some have dignity, others charm. In the same way, there are even greater differences in minds.

108 Lucius Crassus and Lucius Philippus had much charm. Even greater charm, and more deliberately, was found in Gaius Caesar, son of Lucius. But at the same times, Marcus Scaurus and the young Marcus Drusus had a remarkable seriousness. Gaius Laelius had much cheerfulness, and his friend Scipio had greater ambition and a more serious life. Among the Greeks, we are told that Socrates was sweet, witty, and in all speech a pretender, whom the Greeks called an "eiron". By contrast, Pythagoras and Pericles gained the highest authority with no cheerfulness at all. We are told that Hannibal among the Carthaginians was clever, and that among our own leaders Quintus Maximus was. They could easily hide, keep silent, pretend, lay traps and anticipate the plans of the enemy. In this kind of skill, the Greeks put Themistocles and Jason of Pherae ahead of others. Especially cunning and clever was the act of Solon, who pretended to be mad, so that his life would be safer and he would do much more good for the state.

109 There are others who are very different from these. They are simple and open. They think nothing should be done in secret or by trickery. They worship the truth and hate fraud. There are also others who will put up with anything, serve anyone, if only they reach what they want. We saw this in Sulla and Marcus Crassus. Among this kind, we are told that the Spartan Lysander was the most cunning and most patient. By contrast, Callicratidas, who was commander of the fleet next after Lysander, was of another sort. In talk, too, there are those who, however powerful, manage to seem just one of the crowd. We saw this in Catulus, in the father and in the son, and the same in Quintus Mucius Mancia. I have heard from older men that this was also true of Publius Scipio Nasica, while his father, who punished the ruinous schemes of Tiberius Gracchus, had no charm in speech, not even like Xenocrates, the most severe of the philosophers. And for that very reason he was great and famous. There are countless other differences of nature and character, none of them to be blamed.

110 Each person must keep firmly to his own character, not a faulty one, but his own. In this way the fittingness we seek is kept more easily. We must do this without fighting against all of nature. While keeping nature whole, we should follow our own. Even if other things are more serious and better, we should still measure our pursuits by the rule of our own nature. For there is no point in going against nature, or in chasing what you cannot reach. From this it becomes clearer what fittingness is, because, as they say, nothing fits when Minerva is against it. That is, when nature opposes it and resists it.

111 If there is anything fitting at all, certainly nothing is more so than evenness: in the whole of life, and in each single action. You cannot keep it if you copy the nature of others and give up your own. For just as we should use the language that is native to us, so that we are not rightly laughed at, like some people who force Greek words in, so we must bring no discord into our actions and our whole life.

112 This difference of natures has so much force that sometimes one person should take his own life, and another should not, in the same circumstances. Was there any other reason for Marcus Cato than for the others who surrendered themselves to Caesar in Africa? Perhaps it would have been counted as a fault for the others if they had killed themselves, because their lives and character were gentler and easier. But Cato had been given by nature an incredible seriousness. He strengthened it by a lasting steadiness, and he always remained in the purpose he had chosen. So for him it was better to die than to look on the face of a tyrant.

113 How much Ulysses suffered in that long wandering! He served women, if Circe and Calypso are to be called women, and he wanted to be friendly and pleasant to everyone in every talk. At home he even put up with the insults of male and female slaves, so that he might one day reach what he wanted. But Ajax, as he is described, would have preferred to die a thousand times rather than endure those things. When we think about these examples, we must weigh what each person has that is his own. We must govern ourselves by it, and not wish to try out what would suit others. For what suits each person most is what is most his own.

114 So each person should know his own nature, and be a sharp judge of his own good and bad qualities. Then actors will not seem to have more sense than we do. They do not choose the best plays, but those that suit them best. Those who rely on their voice choose the Epigoni and Medus. Those who rely on gesture choose Melanippe and Clytemnestra. Rupilius, whom I remember, always chose Antiope. Aesopus rarely chose Ajax. So will an actor see this on the stage, and a wise man not see it in life? We will work hardest at the things we are best suited for. But if at some time necessity pushes us toward things that are not in our nature, all care, thought and diligence must be used so that we can do them at least as little unfittingly as possible. We should not strive so much to follow good qualities that were not given to us, as to avoid our faults.

115 To the two roles I have described, a third is added, which some chance or circumstance imposes. A fourth is also added, which we choose for ourselves by our own judgment. Kingship, command, noble birth, offices, wealth, power, and the things opposite to these are set by chance and governed by the times. But which role we ourselves wish to play comes from our own will. So some devote themselves to philosophy, some to civil law, and some to eloquence. Each person prefers to excel in a different virtue.

116 Those whose fathers or ancestors were distinguished by some glory usually strive to excel in the same kind of praise. For example, Quintus Mucius, son of Publius, excelled in civil law, and Africanus, son of Paulus, in military affairs. Some add to the praise they received from their fathers some praise of their own. So this same Africanus added eloquence to his military glory. Timotheus, son of Conon, did the same. He was not less than his father in the praise of war, but he added to it the glory of learning and talent. Sometimes it happens that some people, giving up the imitation of their ancestors, follow a path of their own. Those who, born of obscure ancestors, set great goals for themselves usually labor hardest at this.

117 So when we ask what is fitting, we must take in all these things in mind and thought. Above all, we must decide what kind of people we want to be, and in what kind of life. This is the hardest of all decisions. In early youth, when the power of judgment is weakest, each person chooses the kind of life that he has loved most. So he is bound to a certain kind of life and course before he can judge what is best.

118 Prodicus tells, as we find in Xenophon, that when Hercules was becoming a man, which is the time that nature gives for choosing what path of life one will enter, he went out into the wilderness and sat there for a long time, thinking hard. He saw two roads, one of Pleasure and one of Virtue, and he wondered which he should take. This may have been possible for Hercules, "born of Jupiter", but it is not possible for us. We copy whoever seems good to us, and we are pushed toward their studies and customs. Most often, taught by the instructions of our parents, we are led into their habits and ways. Others are carried along by the judgment of the crowd, and they most eagerly desire what seems most beautiful to the greater part. Yet some have followed the right path of life by a kind of good fortune, or by the goodness of nature, without the discipline of parents.

119 But the rarest kind is of those who, adorned by an excellent greatness of talent, or by distinguished learning and teaching, or by both, have had the time to think about which course of life they most want to follow. In this kind of thinking, all counsel must be called back to each person's nature. For in all that we do, as I said above, we ask what is fitting from the way each person was born. But in planning the whole of life, much greater care must be given to this, so that we can stay steady in our life as a whole, and not limp in any duty.

120 Nature has the greatest power in this choice, and fortune comes second. In choosing a way of life we must take account of both, but more of nature. For nature is much firmer and steadier. Fortune sometimes seems to fight against nature, as if she were herself mortal fighting an immortal nature. So whoever has turned all his plan of life toward his own nature, provided it is not faulty should keep steady, for that is most fitting, unless he sees that he has made a mistake in choosing his way of life. If that happens, and it can happen, the change of habits and customs must be made. If the times help us, we will make the change more easily and more conveniently. If not, it must be done slowly and step by step. Just as wise people think it more fitting to loosen friendships that give less pleasure and are less approved gradually, rather than to cut them off suddenly.

121 When someone changes his way of life, he must take great care to be seen to have done it for good reasons. But since I said a little while ago that we should copy our ancestors, let this be the first exception: we must not copy their faults. Second, if nature will not allow someone to copy some things, the blame is not his. For example, the son of the elder Africanus, the one who adopted the son born to Paulus, could not be as much like his father as his father had been like his own, because of his poor health. So if he cannot plead cases, or hold the people in assemblies, or wage wars, he should still show the qualities that are in his own power: justice, good faith, generosity, modesty and self-control. Then no one will look for what he lacks. The best inheritance that fathers pass to their children is the glory of virtue and of deeds done. It is worth more than any estate. To bring shame on it must be judged a crime and a fault.

122 Duties are not the same for different ages. Some duties belong to the young and others to the old, so we must say something about this difference. A young man should respect his elders. From them he should choose the best and most approved, and he should lean on their counsel and authority. For the inexperience of early youth must be guided and ruled by the wisdom of the old. This age must be kept far from lusts, and trained in hard work and endurance, both of mind and body, so that its diligence may flourish in military and civil duties. Even when young men want to relax their spirits and give themselves to pleasure, they must avoid excess. They must remember modesty. This will be easier if their elders are unwilling to be present at such things.

123 For older people, the labors of the body should be lessened, but the exercises of the mind should even be increased. They should take care to help their friends, the young, and above all the state, as much as they can with counsel and wisdom. Nothing must be guarded against more in old age than letting oneself sink into sluggishness and idleness. Luxury is shameful at every age, but in old age it is most disgraceful. If excess in lust is added, it is a double evil. Old age itself gains disgrace, and it makes the excess of young people more shameless.

124 It is not out of place to speak also about the duties of magistrates, of private citizens, and of foreigners. The particular task of a magistrate is to understand that he bears the role of the state. He must uphold its dignity and honor, keep the laws, distribute the rights, and remember what has been entrusted to his good faith. A private citizen must live under the same law as other citizens, as their equal. He should be neither humble and beaten down, nor arrogant. In public affairs he should want what is calm and honorable. For we usually call such a person a good citizen, both in our thoughts and in our words.

125 The duty of a foreigner, or of a resident alien, is to do nothing except his own business. He should seek out nothing about others, and he should be least of all inquisitive about the affairs of another state. In this way, duties will generally be found when we ask what is fitting and suitable for persons, times, and ages. Nothing is so fitting as to keep steadiness in every action and in every decision.

126 But since fittingness is seen in all deeds and words, and even in the movement and posture of the body, and since it rests on three things (beauty, order, and an adornment suited to the action), it is hard to explain. Still, it will be enough to understand it. Within these three things lies also the care that we may be approved by those with whom and among whom we live. So a few words should be said about these matters too. First, nature herself seems to have taken great account of our body. She placed our face and the rest of our shape, in which there is an honorable appearance, in plain view. But the parts of the body given for the needs of nature, which would have an ugly and foul look, she covered and hid.

127 Human modesty has imitated this very careful work of nature. Whatever nature has hidden, all people of sound mind also remove from sight. They take pains that these parts are as hidden as possible, and that they serve their necessary purposes in secret. The parts of the body that are needed for use, and their uses, they do not name with their own words. What is not shameful to do, but only to do openly, is obscene to name. So neither the open performance of those things is free from insolence, nor the obscenity of speech.

128 We should not listen to the Cynics, or to those who have been almost Cynics among the Stoics. They blame and mock us because we count words as shameful that are not shameful in themselves, while we call by their own names the things that are shameful. To rob, to cheat, and to commit adultery are shameful acts, but they are not said to be obscene. To beget children is honorable as an act, but its name is obscene. They argue many things of this kind against modesty. But we should follow nature, and avoid everything that is repugnant to the approval of eyes and ears. Standing, walking, sitting, reclining, the face, the eyes, and the movements of the hands should keep that fittingness.

129 In these matters two things above all must be avoided: anything womanish or soft, and anything hard or rustic. Nor should we grant to actors and orators that these things suit them, while they are loose for us. In the old discipline, the custom of the stage has so much modesty that no one comes out on stage without a loincloth. For they fear that if some parts of the body were exposed by chance, they would be looked at without grace. In our custom, grown sons do not bathe with their parents, nor sons-in-law with their fathers-in-law. So this kind of modesty must be kept, especially since nature herself is our teacher and guide.

130 There are two kinds of beauty. In one lies charm, and in the other lies dignity. We should consider charm to be womanly and dignity to be manly. So any adornment not worthy of a man should be removed from appearance. A similar fault must be guarded against in gesture and movement. For the movements of the wrestling school are often offensive, and some gestures of actors are not free from silliness. In both kinds, what is right and simple is praised. The dignity of appearance must be kept by a good complexion, and the complexion by exercise of the body. Cleanliness should also be used. It should be neither offensive nor overly refined. It should only avoid rustic and inhuman carelessness. The same measure must be kept in clothing. In it, as in most things, moderation is best.

131 We must take care not to use a walk that is too slow and soft, so that we seem to be like the floats in parades. Nor should we take up in our hurry such great speed that breathing is stirred, the face changes, and the mouth is twisted. From these things a strong sign is given that steadiness is absent. But we must work even harder to keep our movements of mind from departing from nature. We will achieve this if we take care not to fall into disturbances and loss of composure, and if we keep our attentive minds on preserving fittingness.

132 There are two kinds of movement of the mind. One belongs to thought, the other to desire. Thought is chiefly occupied in seeking out the truth. Desire pushes us to act. So we must take care to use our thought on the best things, and to make our desire obey reason. Since speech has great power, and there are two kinds of it, we should give the first kind, which is contention, to lawsuits, public assemblies and the senate. The second kind, which is conversation, belongs to circles of friends, discussions, meetings, and it also follows dinners. There are rules of the rhetoricians for contention, but none for conversation. Yet perhaps there could be rules for this too. But teachers are found through the eagerness of learners. For this kind of speech there are no learners, while everything is filled with a crowd of rhetoricians. Still, the rules of words and of sentences will apply to conversation as well.

133 We have voice as the sign of speech. In voice we should aim at two things: that it be clear and that it be sweet. Both must be sought from nature. But practice will improve one, and imitation of those who speak precisely and gently will improve the other. There was nothing in the Catuli that would make you think they used letters with exact judgment, although they were lettered. But others were like that too. Still, the Catuli were thought to use the Latin language best. Their sound was sweet, their letters were neither pressed out nor crushed, so that the speech was neither unclear nor affected. Their voice was without strain, neither languid nor loud. The speech of Lucius Crassus was fuller, and no less witty. but the Catuli's reputation for speaking well was no less than his. Caesar, the brother of the elder Catulus, surpassed all in wit and jokes, so that in that very kind of forensic speech he defeated the disputes of others by his talk. So in all these things we must take pains, if we seek what is fitting in everything.

134 Let conversation be of this kind, in which the Socratics above all excel. It should be gentle and not stubborn, and it should have charm. Nor, as if it had come into its own possession, should it shut others out. In other things, and especially in common talk, one should think it fair to take turns. Above all, one should see what things one is talking about. If they are serious, one should use seriousness. If they are light, one should use charm. Above all one should take care that the talk does not show some fault in one's character. This happens most often when people, eagerly and for the sake of slander, speak about absent people in a way that is mocking or severe, spiteful and insulting.

135 Conversations are usually about household affairs, about the state, or about the arts and learning. So we must make an effort, if the talk has begun to wander to other things, to bring it back to these subjects. but suited to whoever is present. For we do not take delight in the same things at all times, or in the same way. We must also notice how far the talk gives pleasure. As the way of beginning was, so must be the measure of ending.

136 As in all of life the best rule is to avoid disturbances, that is, excessive movements of the mind that do not obey reason, so conversation must be free of such movements. There must be no anger, no greed, no laziness or idleness, or anything of the kind. Above all, we must take care that we seem to respect and to love those with whom we talk. Sometimes necessary rebukes arise. In these one may perhaps use a louder voice and a sharper weight of words, and one must also take care to seem angry. But just as we come to burning and cutting rarely, and reluctantly, only when no other cure can be found, so we come to this kind of rebuke rarely and reluctantly, and never except when needed. Yet anger must stay far away, for nothing can be done rightly or with thought while it is present.

137 For the most part it is allowed to use a gentle rebuke, joined with seriousness, so that both strictness is applied and insult is kept away. We must also show that the very harshness of the rebuke was taken up for the sake of the person being rebuked. It is right, even in those disputes that happen with our bitterest enemies, to keep our seriousness even if we hear unworthy things, and to drive out anger. Things done with some disturbance cannot be done steadily, and they are not approved by those who are present. It is also shameful to speak well of oneself, especially with false claims, and to imitate the boastful soldier to the mockery of the listeners.

138 Since we are following everything through, and we at least want to, I must also say what kind of house suits an honored man and a leader. Its purpose is use, and the plan of the building must be fitted to that. Yet care for convenience and dignity must still be applied. We are told that Gnaeus Octavius, the first of his family to become consul, was honored for building a splendid house on the Palatine, full of dignity. When the public came to see it, people thought it had helped its owner, a new man, to win the consulship. Later Scaurus tore that building down and added the site to his own house. So the first man brought the consulship into his own house. The other, the son of a very great and famous man, not only brought back a rejection for his enlarged house, but disgrace and misfortune as well.

139 A man's dignity may be enhanced by his house, but it must not be sought wholly from it. The owner must bring honor to the house, not the house to the owner. As in other things, we must take account not only of ourselves but also of others. So in the house of a famous man, where many guests must be received and crowds of people of every kind are admitted, care must be taken for roominess. On the other hand, a large house often becomes a disgrace to its owner if it is empty, especially if it was once often full under another master. For it is hurtful when passers-by say: "O old house, alas, how unlike the master you have now!" In these times, we can say this of many houses.

140 We must take care, especially if we are building ourselves, not to go beyond due measure in cost and grandeur. In this matter much harm also comes from example. Many people eagerly copy the deeds of leaders, especially in this direction. Who copies the virtue of Lucius Lucullus, a very great man? But how many have copied the splendor of his country villas! Of these, a measure must surely be kept, and they must be brought back to moderation. The same moderation must be carried over to all use and care of life. But that is enough for now.

141 In taking up any action, three things must be kept. First, desire must obey reason. Nothing is more useful for keeping duties. Second, we must notice how large the thing is that we want to achieve. We should take up neither more care and effort nor less than the cause needs. Third, we must make sure that the things that concern a generous look and dignity are kept in measure. The best measure is to hold to the fittingness I spoke of before, and not to go further. Still, of these three, the most important is that desire obeys reason.

142 Next I must speak about the order of things and the fitness of times. This knowledge falls under what the Greeks call "eutaxia." It is not the thing we translate as modestia, which carries the idea of measure, but the eutaxia that means keeping order. We may call it modestia as well, if we like. The Stoics define it so that modestia is the knowledge of placing in their proper positions the things that are done or said. So the force of order and of placing seems to be the same. For they also define order as the arrangement of things in suitable and fitting places. They say that the place of an action is the fitness of time. The Greeks call the right moment for an action "eukairia," and in Latin it is called opportunity. So this modestia, which we explain as I have said, is the knowledge of the times that are right for acting.

143 The same definition may apply to prudence, which we spoke of at the start. But here we are asking about moderation, self-control and similar virtues. So what belonged to prudence was said in its place. Now we must speak of the parts of these virtues, which we have been discussing for a long time, the parts that concern modesty and the approval of those among whom we live.

144 So the order of actions must be kept, so that, as in a steady speech, all things in life fit together and agree. It is shameful and very faulty to bring talk fit for a dinner party, or any frivolous talk, into a serious matter. Pericles acted well. His colleague in the praetorship was the poet Sophocles. They had met to discuss their shared duty, and by chance a handsome boy walked past. Sophocles said: "What a beautiful boy, Pericles!" Pericles answered: "A praetor, Sophocles, should keep not only his hands but also his eyes clean of such things." Yet if Sophocles had said the same thing while judging athletes, he would have deserved no fair reproach. So great is the force of place and time. If a man who is about to plead a case thinks it through on the road or while walking, or thinks about something else more closely, no one blames him. But if he did the same at a dinner, he would seem rude, because he had no sense of the time.

145 Matters that differ widely from good manners, such as singing in the forum, or some other great perversity, are easy to see and do not need much warning or instruction. But small faults, which many people cannot notice, must be avoided with more care. When strings or pipes are out of tune even a little, a skilled person usually notices it. So we must see to it in life that nothing is out of tune. We must do this all the more, because the harmony of our actions is greater and better than the harmony of sounds.

146 As the ears of musicians notice even the smallest fault in the strings, so we, if we want to be keen and careful judges who watch for faults, will often learn great things from small ones. From the glance of the eyes, from the raising or lowering of the eyebrows, from sadness, from cheerfulness, from laughter, from speech, from silence, from the strain or softness of the voice, and from other things like these, we will easily judge which of these is done fittingly, and which departs from duty and from nature. In this area it is useful to judge from others how each of these things looks. Then, if something is unfitting in them, we will avoid it ourselves. For somehow we see faults more in others than in ourselves. That is why people learn most easily when teachers copy their faults in order to correct them.

147 When choosing among things that cause doubt, it is also wise to consult learned people, or people experienced in practice, and to ask what they think of each kind of duty. For most of us tend to be led where nature herself leads. In this we must look not only at what each person says, but also at what each person thinks, and even why he thinks it. Painters, sculptors and poets all want their work to be judged by the public, so that if several people find a fault, it can be fixed. They ask themselves and others what went wrong. In the same way, many things we do, leave undone, change and correct must be settled for us by the judgment of others.

148 As for the things that are done by custom and by civil institutions, nothing needs to be taught about them. For those customs are themselves rules. No one should be led by the mistake of thinking that because Socrates or Aristippus did or said something against the custom and civil habits, he is also allowed to do so. They gained that freedom through great and divine goods. The whole system of the Cynics must be thrown out. It is hostile to modesty, and without modesty nothing can be right or honorable.

149 Those whose lives are well known for honorable and great deeds, and who think well of the state and have served or are serving it well, we must watch and honor as people who have held some office or command. We must give much to old age. We must yield to those who hold a magistracy. We must make distinctions between citizens and foreigners, and between a foreigner who comes for private reasons and one who comes on public business. In short, without going through each case, we must cherish, protect and keep the bonds and the fellowship of the whole human race.

150 Now about crafts and trades, which are to be counted as free and which as base, this is roughly what we have learned. First, trades that bring people into hatred are disapproved, such as tax collectors and moneylenders. Vulgar and base are the trades of all hired workers, whose labor is bought, not their skill. For in them the wage itself is the price of slavery. Those who buy from merchants in order to sell at once should also be thought base, for they gain nothing unless they lie a great deal, and nothing is more shameful than falseness. All craftsmen work in a base trade. A workshop can have nothing free about it. Least of all should those crafts be approved that serve pleasures: fishmongers, butchers, cooks, poultry-fatteners and fishermen, as Terence says. Add to these, if you like, perfume-makers, dancers, and the whole business of dice.

151 But the crafts in which there is greater wisdom, or from which a considerable benefit is sought, such as medicine, architecture, and the teaching of honorable subjects, are honorable for those whose rank suits them. Trade, if it is small, must be thought base. But if it is large and rich, bringing many goods from everywhere and sharing them with many without falseness, it is not greatly to be blamed. And if the merchant, satisfied with his gains, or rather content, moves from the open sea into harbor, and from the harbor into the fields and estates, he may rightly be praised. Of all the things by which something is acquired, nothing is better than farming. Nothing is more fruitful, nothing sweeter, and nothing more worthy of a free man. I have said a good deal about it in my book on Cato the Elder, so you will take from there what belongs to this place.

152 I think I have said enough about how duties are drawn from the parts of honor. But among the things that are honorable, there can often be a contest and comparison: which of two honorable things is more honorable. Panaetius left out this point. For since all honor comes from four parts, of which one is knowledge, another is community, a third is greatness of spirit, and a fourth is moderation, these must often be compared with one another when choosing a duty.

153 I hold that the duties that come from community are more in keeping with nature than those that come from knowledge. This can be supported by an argument. Suppose a wise man lived with an abundance of everything. With great leisure he could consider and contemplate all that deserves knowledge. Yet if he were so alone that he could not see a human being, he would leave life. The first of all virtues is that wisdom which the Greeks call "sophia." For prudence, which the Greeks call "phronesis," we take to be something else: it is the knowledge of what should be sought and what avoided. But the wisdom I called first is the knowledge of divine and human things. It contains the fellowship and union of gods and of people among themselves. If it is the greatest, as it is, then the duty that comes from community must surely be the greatest too. For knowledge and contemplation of nature would be somehow incomplete if no action followed. And that action is seen most clearly in protecting the interests of people. So it belongs to the fellowship of the human race. Therefore this must be placed before knowledge.

154 The best people show this in their deeds, and judge it so. Who is so keen to see and know the nature of things that, if he were thinking and studying matters most worthy of knowledge, and suddenly danger and peril came to his country where he could help, he would not drop all those studies and cast them aside, even if he believed he could count the stars or measure the size of the universe? And he would do the same if the danger were to a parent or a friend.

155 From these things it is understood that duties of justice, which serve the advantage of people, must be placed before studies and scientific duties. Nothing should be dearer to a human being than this. Even those very people whose studies and whole lives were devoted to knowing things did not withdraw from increasing the advantages and benefits of people. For they taught many people, so that these might become better citizens and more useful to their states. Lysis the Pythagorean taught Epaminondas of Thebes. Plato taught Dion of Syracuse. And many have taught many. We ourselves, whatever we have contributed to the state, if we have contributed anything, have come to it prepared and adorned by teachers and learning.

156 Not only while alive and present do they teach eager learners. Even after death, they reach the same aim through the monuments of their writing. They have left out no topic that concerns laws, customs or the running of the state. So they seem to have turned their leisure to our business. Thus those men devoted to learning and wisdom put their understanding and prudence chiefly to the advantage of people. For this reason too, it is better to speak fully, if only wisely, than to think most keenly without eloquence. For thought turns in on itself. Eloquence embraces those with whom we are joined by fellowship.

157 Just as swarms of bees gather not to make honeycombs, but because they are by nature gathering creatures, and they make honeycombs as a result, so people, and far more so, gathered by nature, use their skill in acting and thinking. So unless that virtue, which consists in protecting people, that is, in the fellowship of the human race, touches knowledge, knowledge will seem lonely and barren. Likewise, greatness of spirit, if it is cut off from human community and union, becomes a kind of savagery and monstrousness. So it comes about that the association and community of people wins over the study of knowledge.

158 It is also not true, as some say, that people formed a community and a fellowship with others because of the needs of life. They say that we could not get and do what nature requires without others. But if everything that concerns food and care were supplied to us by a magic wand, as they say, then the best minds would leave all business and devote themselves wholly to knowledge and learning. It is not so. For such a person would avoid solitude. He would look for a partner in study, and he would want to teach, to learn, to listen and to speak. So every duty that helps to join people together and to protect their fellowship must be placed before that duty which is contained in knowledge and learning.

159 Perhaps one should ask whether this community, which is most fitting to nature, should always be placed before moderation and modesty. It is not so. For there are some things so foul, and some so shameful, that a wise man would not do them even to save his country. Posidonius gathered very many of these. Some of them are so grim and obscene that even to speak of them seems shameful. So a wise man will not undertake these things for the sake of the state. Nor would the state itself want them taken up on its behalf. But the matter is better arranged in this way: no time can come when it would be in the interest of the state for a wise man to do any of those things.

160 So let this be established: in choosing duties, that kind of duty excels which is held together by the fellowship of people. Considered action will follow knowledge and prudence. So it comes about that acting with consideration is worth more than thinking with prudence. But enough of this for now. The place itself has been opened, so that it is not difficult, when searching for a duty, to see what should come first for each person. Within the community itself there are degrees of duty, from which it can be understood what each person owes most. First come the immortal gods. Second is the country. Third are the parents. Then the rest are owed in turn, step by step.

161 From these things, briefly discussed, it can be understood that people are accustomed to doubt not only whether something is honorable or shameful, but also, when two honorable things are offered, which is more honorable. This is the point that Panaetius, as I said above, left out. But now let us go on to the rest.