Cicero
De Officiis 1 - what a decent man may do for money
De Officiis · Written in late 44 BCE, in the months after Caesar's murder, while Cicero was out of the politics he had helped make.
Cicero tells his student son which ways of earning a living a gentleman may admit to. Tax collectors and money-lenders are beneath contempt, shopkeepers cannot profit without lying, and wholesale trade is nearly respectable — provided you get out of it and buy land. Sixteen centuries of European feeling about commerce start here.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (1913). Miller was an American classicist and archaeologist, and his English is clear, formal and a little starchy - he keeps Cicero's periods intact where a later translator would break them, and he does not modernise. His vocabulary in the occupations passage is worth watching, because it is doing interpretive work: sordidus becomes 'vulgar', illiberalis becomes 'unbecoming a gentleman', and mercatura is 'trade' throughout while the Latin marks scale by adjective rather than by a different noun. The class judgement is sharper and more Edwardian in the English than in the Latin, which is a hazard in a passage that is about exactly that.