On Duties

$30.00

From the publisher:

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a preeminent Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher who introduced philosophy into Rome, and through Rome, into Christendom and the modern world. He lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially, and in his correspondence, we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time.

Cicero’s On Duties has been championed throughout history by important thinkers including Thomas Aquinas, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, and it was one of the earliest books printed on the Gutenberg Press. The true significance of On Duties lies in its examination of several fundamental problems of political philosophy, the most important being the possible conflict between the honorable and the useful. The honorable encompasses the virtues of human beings, which include justice and concern for the common good. The useful refers to the needs of living beings, which includes certain necessities and concern for private good. Only by understanding the possible conflict between these two sides of human nature, Cicero declares, may we understand our duties to our community and to ourselves.

Description

Product Description

On Duties

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a preeminent Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman. Of about 106 of his speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which Cicero wrote more than 800. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek. Cicero’s On Duties, along with other works, afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because he did not write them for publication.

Cicero’s influence on Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. According to Michael Grant, “the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language”. Cicero introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as evidentia, humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.