I regard the De Officiis as one of the most perfect treatises on morals which the world possesses, whether for the truth of the lessons given, for their universality, or for the beauty and lightness of the language. It is on a subject generally heavy, but is treated with so much art and grace as to make it a delight to have read it, and an important part of education to know it. It is addressed to his son, and is as good now as when it was written. There is not a precept taught in it which is not modern as well as ancient, and which is not fit alike for Christians and Pagans. A system of morality, we might have said, should be one which would suit all men alike. We are bound to acknowledge that this will suit only gentlemen, because he who shall live in accordance with it must be worthy of that name. The "honestum" means much more in Latin than it does in English. Neither "honor" nor "honesty" will give the rendering—not that honor or that honesty which we know. Modern honor flies so high that it leaves honesty sometimes too nearly out of sight; while honesty, though a sterling virtue, ignores those sentiments on which honor is based. "Honestum" includes it all; and Cicero has raised his lessons to such a standard as to comprise it all. But he so teaches that listeners delight to hear. He never preaches. He does not fulminate his doctrine at you, bidding you beware of backslidings and of punishments; but he leads you with him along the grassy path, till you seem to have found out for yourself what is good—you and he together, and together to have learned that which is manly, graceful, honest, and decorous.
In Cicero's essays is to be found always a perfect withdrawal of himself from the circumstances of the world around him; so that the reader shall be made to suppose that, in the evening of his life, having reached at last, by means of work done for the State, a time of blessed rest, he gives forth the wisdom of his age, surrounded by all that a tranquil world can bestow upon him. Look back through the treatises written during the last two years, and each shall appear to have been prepared in some quiet and undisturbed period of his life; but we know that the last polish given by his own hands to these three books De Officiis was added amid the heat and turmoils of the Philippics. It is so singular, this power of adapting his mind to whatever pursuit he will, that we are taught almost to think that there must have been two Ciceros, and that the one was eager in personal conflict with Antony, while the other was seated in the garden of some Italian villa meditating words by obeying which all men might be ennobled.
In the dialectical disputations of the Greek philosophers he had picked up a mode of dividing his subject into numbers which is hardly fitted for a discourse so free and open as is this. We are therefore somewhat offended when we are told that virtue is generally divided "into three headings."[319] If it be so, and if it be necessary that we should know it, it should, I think, be conveyed to us without this attempt at logical completeness. It is impossible to call this a fault. Accuracy must, indeed, be in all writers a virtue. But feeling myself to be occasionally wounded by this numbering, I mention it. In the De Officiis he divides the entire matter into three parts, and to each part he devotes a book. In the first he considers whether a thing is fit to be done or left undone—that is, whether it be "honestum" or "turpe;" in the second, whether it be expedient, that is "utile," or the reverse; and in the third he compares the "honestum" and the "utile," and tells us what to choose and what to avoid.
The duty due by a citizen to his country takes with him a place somewhat higher than we accord to it. "Parents are dear, children are dear to us, so are relations and friends; but our country embraces it all, for what good man would not die so that he might serve it? How detestable, then, is the barbarity of those who wound their country at every turn, and have been and are occupied in its destruction."[320] He gives us some excellent advice as to our games, which might be read with advantage, perhaps, by those who row in our university races. But at the end of it he tells us that the hunting-field affords an honest and fitting recreation.[321] I have said that he was modern in his views—but not altogether modern. He defends the suicide of Cato. "To them," he says, speaking of Cato's companions in Africa, "it might not have been forgiven. Their life was softer and their manners easier. But to Cato nature had given an invincible gravity of manners which he had strengthened with all the severity of his will. He had always remained steadfast in the purpose that he would never stand face to face with the tyrant of his country."[322] There was something terribly grand in Cato's character, which loses nothing in coming to us from the lips of Cicero. So much Cicero allows to the stern nature of the man's character. Let us look back and we shall find that we make the same allowance. This is not, in truth, a lesson which he gives us, but an apology which he makes.
Read his advice given in the following line for the outward demeanor of a gentleman: "There are two kinds of beauty. The one is loveliness, which is a woman's gift. But dignity belongs to the man. Let all ornament be removed from the person not worthy of a man to wear—and all fault in gesture and in motion which is like to it. The manners of the wrestling-ground and of the stage are sometimes odious; but let us see the actor or the wrestler walking simple and upright, and we praise him. Let him use a befitting neatness, not verging toward the effeminate, but just avoiding a rustic harshness. The same measure is to be taken with your clothes as with other matters in which a middle course is best."[323]
Then he tells his son what pursuits are to be regarded as sordid. "Those sources of gain are to be regarded as mean in the pursuit of which men are apt to be offended, as are the business of tax-gathers and usurers. All those are to be regarded as illiberal to which men bring their work but not their art." As for instance, the painter of a picture shall be held to follow a liberal occupation—but not so the picture dealer. "They are sordid who buy from merchants that they may sell again: they have to lie like the mischief or they cannot make their living. All mere workmen are engaged in ignoble employment: what of grandeur can the mere workshop produce? Least of all can those trades be said to be good which administer only to our pleasures—such as fish-mongers, butchers, cooks, and poulterers."[324] He adds at the end of his list that of all employment none is better than agriculture, or more worthy of the care of a freeman. In all of this it is necessary that we should receive what he says with some little allowance for the difference in time; but there is nothing, if we look closely into it, in which we cannot see the source of noble ideas, and the reason for many notions which are now departing from us—whether for good or evil who shall say?
In the beginning of the second book he apologizes for his love of philosophy, as he calls it, saying that he knew how it had been misliked among those round him. "But when the Republic," he says, "had ceased to be—that Republic which had been all my care—my employment ceased both in the Forum and the Senate. But when my mind absolutely refused to be inactive, I thought that I might best live down the misery of the time if I devoted myself to philosophy."[325] From this we may see how his mind had worked when the old occupation of his life was gone. "Nihil agere autem quum animus non posset!" How piteous was his position, and yet how proud! There was nothing for him to do—but there was nothing because hitherto there had been so much that he had always done.
He tells his son plainly how an honest man must live. To be ashamed of nothing, he must do nothing of which he will be ashamed. But for him there is this difficulty: "If any one on his entrance into the world has had laid upon him the greatness of a name won by his father, let us say—as, my Cicero, has perhaps happened to you—the eyes of all men will be cast upon him, and inquiry will be made as to his mode of life. He will be so placed under the meridian sun that no word spoken or deed done by him shall be hidden.[326] * * * He must live up to the glory to which he has been born." He gives to his son much advice about the bar. "But the greatest praise," he says, "comes from defending a man accused; and especially so when you shall assist one who is surrounded and ill-treated by the power of some great man. This happened to me more than once in my youth, when, for instance, I defended Roscius Amerinus against Sulla's power. The speech is with us extant still."[327] He tells us much as to the possession of money, and the means of insuring it in a well-governed state. "Take care that you allow no debts to the injury of the Republic. You must guard against this at all hazards—but never by taking from the rich and giving it to the poor. Nothing is so requisite to the State as public credit—which cannot exist unless debtors be made to pay what they owe. There was nothing to which I looked more carefully than this when I was Consul. Horse and foot, they tried their best; but I opposed them, and freed the Republic from the threatened evil. Never were debts more easily or more quickly collected. When men knew that they could not ignore their creditors, then they paid. But he who was then the conquered is the conqueror now. He has effected what he contemplated—even though it be not now necessary for him."[328] From this passage it seems that these books must have been first written before Cæsar's death. Cæsar, at the time of Catiline's conspiracy, had endeavored to annul all debts—that is, to establish "new tables" according to the Roman idiom—but had failed by Cicero's efforts. He had since affected it, although he might have held his power without seeking for the assistance of such debtors. Who could that be but Cæsar? In the beginning of the third book there is another passage declaring the same thing: "I have not strength enough for silent solitude, and therefore give myself up to my pen. In the short time since the Republic has been overturned I have written more than in all my former years."[329] That, again, he could not have written after Cæsar had fallen. We are left, indeed, to judge, from the whole nature of the discourse, that it was written at the period in which the wrongs done by Cæsar to Rome—wrongs at any rate as they appeared to Cicero—were just culminating in that regal pride of action which led to his slaughter. It was written then, but was published a few months afterward.