The next meeting of Great Books KC will be October 30, 2026.
We will discuss De Officiis, by Cicero
We will discuss De Officiis, by Cicero
Meeting Date & Time:
• Date: October 30, 2026
• Time 7:00 pm
Hybrid Zoom & In-Person Meeting:
• In-person meeting, Little Conference Room, Plaza Branch Library
• Zoom link sent to mailing list on day of meeting
• Request mailing list addition, send to GreatBooksKC@gmail.com
About the Play:
De Officiis (On Duties, On Obligations, or On Moral Responsibilities) is a 44 BC treatise by Marcus Tullius Cicero divided into three books, in which Cicero expounds his conception of the best way to live, behave, and observe moral obligations. The posthumously published work discusses what is honorable (Book I), what is to one's advantage (Book II), and what to do when the honorable and private gain apparently conflict (Book III). For the first two books Cicero was dependent on the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, but wrote more independently for the third book.
Regarding Available Translations: (from Bernard Norcott)
Translations of De Officiis (On Duties) by Marcus Tullius Cicero
I do not know of the quality of any of the translations except that of Walter Miller (which is a good translation).
M.T. Griffin and M.E. Atkins, Cicero: On Duties, 1991.
P.G. Walsh, On Obligations, 2001
Walter Miller, On Duties, 1913
Benjamin Patrick Newton, Marcus Tullius Cicero: On Duties, 2016
Raphael Woolf, On Moral Ends, 2023
One translation to avoid – not because it’s not good. It’s very good. But it’s incomplete and that’s the Penguin translation done by Michael Grant. The title of the book is Selected Works, and the work contains selections from several of Cicero’s philosophical works, and the selection from On Duties is only the final third of the text.
You can find Miller’s translation at the Perseus website (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu), and also on the Lacus Curtius site (out of University of Chicago) (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Officiis/home.html) and on the Project Gutenberg site: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47001
The work was composed in Cicero’s final year. Caesar had been assassinated, the Civil War was going on. Cicero’s political career was largely over, and so he retired to compose this treatise for his son. The work was published posthumously. The work was a standard for schoolboys (Cicero's Latin is exemplary), and the work, consequently had a large readership up to the start of the 20th c. It was, consequently, influential.
