On Duties is an interactive reading companion to Cicero's De Officiis — the treatise on moral obligation he wrote in 44 BCE, in the last months of his life, as a letter of instruction to his son. Adapting the Stoic philosopher Panaetius for Roman life, Cicero set out to answer a question that has never stopped mattering: what do we owe — to others, to the community, to ourselves — and how do we act when those duties seem to collide? This guide follows the work through its three books — the honorable, the expedient, and their apparent conflict — and a closing synthesis, pairing concise original commentary with the four cardinal virtues and reflection prompts meant to be argued with, not simply answered.
Cicero's central conviction — that the honorable and the truly advantageous can never finally be at odds — is presented here as a single, continuous argument to be tested rather than a doctrine to be received. Read alongside the work itself, the guide asks what that argument still demands of a reader today.
Part of the Interactive Reading Guides series, it is meant to be read alongside the original: a companion to your own encounter with the work, never a substitute for it. It reproduces none of Cicero's text; all commentary is original.