On Duties

Cicero

The ideas

30 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• Most hard choices aren’t good against evil. They set the right thing against the thing that pays, and you stall between them. The answer is blunt: when the two seem to split, the advantage you see isn’t real.

• A father in Rome writes to his son, who has spent a year in Athens studying under a famous teacher. He starts with duty because it touches everything. No part of life, public or private, at work or at home, is free of it.

• Everything right grows from 4 roots: seeing the truth, holding human society together, a strong spirit nothing can shake, and order and self-control in word and deed. They overlap, but each one produces its own kinds of duty.

• we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share.

• There are, on the other hand, two kinds of injustice—the one, on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted.

• Twisting the wording of a deal is its own kind of injustice. A general who agreed to a 30-day truce raided the enemy’s fields at night, because the deal said days. Romans already had a saying for this: “More law, less justice.”

• There are two ways of settling a dispute: first, by discussion; second, by physical force; and since the former is characteristic of man, the latter of the brute, we must resort to force only in case we may not avail ourselves of discussion.

• The only excuse for war is to live in peace unharmed, and the winner should spare enemies who fought without cruelty. The rule is applied loosely at home. Razing Carthage and Numantia counts as justified, and only Corinth’s destruction draws regret.

• Justice reaches even the lowest people, and in Rome that meant slaves. The old rule was to treat them like hired workers: make them work, and give them their due. It asks for decency inside slavery and never asks whether slavery is just.

• Kindness has 3 limits: it must harm no one, fit your means, and match what the person deserves. Taking from one person to give to another fails the first test, “for nothing is generous, if it is not at the same time just.”

• Your ties run in widening rings: all of humanity, your own people, your city, your family, your close friends. When duties compete, country and parents come first, then children and household, then other relatives. Close friends get advice, company, and even blunt correction.

• Courage without justice is a vice. “So then, not those who do injury but those who prevent it are to be considered brave and courageous.” The catch is that the biggest spirits also want power most, and the wish to be first makes fairness hard to keep.

• Winning in peace can beat winning in war. A naval victory served Athens once, but Solon’s laws served it for good. The father’s proof is his consulship, when he broke a plot inside Rome without fighting. He asks, “did not arms yield to the toga,” and boasts of it often.

• Being fair and being considerate are different. “It is the function of justice not to do wrong to one’s fellow-men; of considerateness, not to wound their feelings.” The second shows in tone, manners, and timing.

• Each person carries several roles: the reason everyone shares, your own particular gifts, what chance hands you, and what you choose. Actors pick the parts that suit their voices. Choose your path by your own nature, and don’t borrow someone else’s.

• The ranking of ways to earn a living is a Roman gentleman’s. Hired manual work and small shopkeeping count as vulgar, and shopkeepers supposedly profit only by lying, while wholesale trade and farming earn respect. It shows whose life these rules were built for.

• Other people help you most and hurt you most: “man is the source of both the greatest help and the greatest harm to man.” So the most useful skill is winning people’s goodwill, more than bending nature or animals to your will.

• For fear is but a poor safeguard of lasting power; while affection, on the other hand, may be trusted to keep it safe for ever.

• People trust you for 2 things, good judgment and honesty, and honesty counts for more. The cleverer a dishonest person is, the less anyone trusts him. So “justice without wisdom will be able to do much; wisdom without justice will be of no avail at all.”

• The shortcut to a good name, Socrates said, “is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.” Fakes don’t last.

• Protecting property is named as the main reason governments exist. Cancelling debts and redistributing land count as robbery, and the Gracchus brothers, who pushed land reform, are listed among the justly killed. The father fought debt cancellation as consul, and this is a property owner’s case.

• A Greek teacher, Panaetius, planned 3 questions: what is right, what is useful, and what to do when they clash. He never wrote the third. The father finishes it on one rule: “expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude.” Expediency here just means your own advantage.

• Taking from someone to profit by their loss “is more contrary to nature than is death or poverty or pain.” If each limb of a body drained its neighbors to grow strong, the whole body would die. Society fails the same way.

• Killing a close friend is the worst crime there is, unless the friend is a tyrant, and then Rome calls it the noblest deed. Julius Caesar had been stabbed by men close to him a few months earlier. He is the tyrant in view.

• Picture a ring that makes you invisible whenever you turn it. In an old story, a shepherd uses one to kill his king and take the throne. The real question is what you would do if no one could ever find out. A good person’s answer doesn’t change.

• Imagine grain is scarce on Rhodes, and a merchant arrives first, knowing more ships are close behind. One Stoic says he may keep quiet if he tells no lies. Another says he must speak, and that side wins: hiding what buyers need to know, for your own profit, is concealment.

• A Roman in Syracuse wanted a villa. A banker got fishermen to crowd the water in front of his house, sold it to him at a huge price, and the next day no boat was in sight. A Roman lawyer’s name for this was “Pretending one thing and practising another.”

• A Roman general, captured by Carthage, was sent home on oath to argue for a prisoner exchange. In the Senate he argued against it, then went back to his captors as he had sworn. Roman tradition says they tortured him to death; historians now doubt that part.

• Not everyone accepts that right and advantage never truly split. The Roman picture is that “fraud seems to belong to the cunning fox, force to the lion,” both beneath a human being. More than 15 centuries later, Machiavelli told a prince to be both.

• The father signs off with love: his son will be dearer to him still if he takes pleasure in this advice. They never saw each other again. About a year later, soldiers sent by the father’s political enemies hunted him down and killed him.

The book in short

In plain words

The ship full of food

A man owns a ship, and the ship is full of grain. He’s sailing it to an island where the people are starving. They have money, though, and they’re ready to pay him anything he asks.

But the man knows something they don’t. Right behind him, more ships are coming, all of them loaded with grain too. In a few days there will be food everywhere and the price will crash. If he keeps his mouth shut today, he sells high to desperate people and sails away rich. If he tells them what’s coming, the price drops and he makes far less.

Nobody would ever know he stayed quiet. So — does he tell them?

Hold onto that question, because an old man spent his last years turning it over. His name was Cicero, a Roman pushed out of power near the end of his life, and he was worried about his son, who was off at school in another country and not, by most accounts, studying very hard. So Cicero wrote the boy a long letter about the one thing he most wanted him to understand: how to be a good man. The letter is full of stories like the ship, and every one of them is really asking you the same thing. When doing the right thing is going to cost you, what do you actually do?

Two ways to be unfair

Most people think being unfair means doing something bad to someone — taking their stuff, hitting them, lying to them. And that’s true. That’s one way.

But Cicero says there’s a second way people forget, and it’s just as bad. It’s standing there while someone else gets hurt, when you could have stopped it, and choosing to do nothing.

Picture a kid getting pushed around in a hallway. The one doing the pushing is being unfair — anyone can see that. But the ten kids standing in a circle watching, who could step in and don’t? Cicero says they’re being unfair too. Doing nothing, when you could do something, is its own kind of wrong.

And he pushes it one step further. You owe fairness even to the people who can’t make you give it — someone with no power, no money, nobody standing behind them. It’s easy to be fair to a person who could hurt you back. The real test is whether you’re fair to the person who couldn’t.

A word you can’t take back

A big part of being fair, Cicero says, is keeping your word. When you promise someone something, you’ve thrown them a rope, and they’re holding the other end. If your promises mean nothing, nobody can build anything with you — not a friendship, not a team, not a whole country.

To show how far this goes, he tells the story of a soldier named Regulus.

Regulus was a Roman general, captured by Rome’s enemies in a war. His enemies wanted to make a deal, so they let him travel home to ask his own city to agree to it. But first he had to swear an oath: if Rome said no, he would come back and be their prisoner again.

So Regulus went home. And then he stood up in front of Rome and told them not to make the deal — he said it was bad for the city. They listened to him, and they said no.

Which meant Regulus now had to go back to his enemies, who were furious, and who were going to kill him. His friends begged him to stay. He had a way out. But he had given his word that he’d return, so he went back, and he died for it. That’s the story Romans told, anyway. Historians today aren’t sure how he died, and the cruelest parts may have been added later.

Cicero isn’t telling you to go die. He’s showing you how heavy a real promise is — heavy enough that one of his great heroes paid for it with his life.

But here’s the part that matters just as much: Cicero does not think you keep every promise no matter what. Picture a friend who hands you his sword and asks you to hold onto it. Later he comes back out of his mind, and you can see he might hurt someone with it. Do you hand it over? You did promise. Cicero says no. You keep your word to protect people, not to help someone do harm. The moment a promise turns into a weapon, it stops being a promise worth keeping.

The man who beat an army with words

All of this might make you think the strongest person is the toughest one — the fighter, the soldier, the one who wins by force. Cicero spent his life arguing the opposite.

He was proudest of a time he saved his own city without a fight in its streets. A dangerous man had a secret plan to seize Rome by force. Cicero, who was running the government that year, figured the plan out and stopped it — not with an army, but by dragging it into the open and talking the danger apart. Soldiers still had to beat the plotters’ army outside the city later, but inside Rome, words did the work. He thought that was worth more than any victory won with swords. The person who keeps the peace, he said, beats the person who wins the fight.

And he had no patience for the other kind of power, the kind that runs on fear. There’s an old line from a play, spoken by a cruel king: “Let them hate, if only they fear.” That’s how a bully runs a hallway, or a cruel king runs a country. Cicero says it never lasts. Fear is the weakest lock there is. The people you scare are just waiting for the day you slip — and the moment you do, all the hate they’ve been swallowing comes out at once. The person everyone is afraid of ends up with no one.

The opposite of fear is trust, and trust is the thing that actually holds. Almost everything good in your life reaches you through other people, and people help the ones they trust, not the ones they fear.

Be the one you actually are

There’s one more thing Cicero wanted his son to hear, and it’s quieter than the rest.

Don’t try to be good the way someone else is good. Each person, he says, has their own nature — their own real strengths, their own way of being built. The mistake is to find someone you admire and copy them, even when it doesn’t fit you at all. You end up doing badly the thing that suited them, instead of doing well the thing that suits you.

A loud, funny person and a quiet, careful person are never going to be good in the same way, and they shouldn’t try to be. The job is to figure out who you actually are, and then be that on purpose — all the way, without faking it, without saying sorry for it. You can’t be excellent as a copy of someone else. You can only be excellent as yourself.

The shortcut that isn’t one

So go back to the man on the ship, the one with the grain and the secret.

If he stays quiet and sells high, he sails away with more money, and that looks like winning. Cicero thought harder about this exact kind of moment than almost anything else, and here’s where he landed: it isn’t winning. Not really. The man traded something to get that money — he traded the kind of person he is. He turned himself into someone who squeezes desperate people when he thinks no one is watching. And now he has to be that person for the rest of his life, on every island, in every deal. That costs far more than the money was ever worth.

This was the one thing Cicero most wanted his son to believe: that doing the right thing and doing well for yourself are not enemies. They look like enemies in the moment, when the lie or the cheat or the stolen win is sitting right there and nobody would ever know. But the shortcut always charges you the same toll. It takes a piece of you.

He put it in a line worth carrying: we are not born for ourselves alone. Your life is tied to other people — your family, your friends, the strangers on the island — whether you like it or not. The good life isn’t the one where you beat them. It’s the one where you turn out to be someone they were right to trust.

That’s what an old man, near the end, most wanted to hand his son. And the man on the ship? Cicero says he tells them. Every time.

The long read

In the autumn of 44 BC, with Caesar a few months dead and the republic sliding toward the civil war that would soon kill him, Cicero sat down to write his son a letter that ran to three books. The young man, Marcus, was in Athens, studying philosophy under a respected teacher and, by every hint that survives, spending rather more of his father’s money on wine than on argument. Cicero was sixty-two, shut out of power, his life’s work in ruins around him. So he did what he had always done when the world stopped listening: he wrote. The result is not a private note but a public treatise dressed as fatherly advice — the last full statement of how a decent man should live, handed from a man who had run a state to a boy who had not yet run anything.

He chose his subject deliberately. Not the nature of the gods, not the ends of good and evil — the grand questions he had treated elsewhere — but officia: duties, the fitting actions a person owes from moment to moment. The Greek Stoics called this the field of the kathēkon, the “appropriate act,” and Cicero leaned on one of them, Panaetius, for the bones of his argument. But he made the material Roman and made it practical. This, he tells Marcus, is the part of philosophy that touches every hour of a life: “no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home … can be without its moral duty.” A man who gets this right lives well; a man who gets it wrong cannot be saved by cleverness about anything else.

Every choice, Cicero says, runs up against two questions, and the whole work is built on them. First: is the thing honestum — morally right, honorable, the kind of act a good man could be proud of? Second: is it utile — useful, advantageous, the kind of act that pays? Most of human confusion lives in the gap between those two questions, in the suspicion that what is right and what is profitable pull in opposite directions. Cicero structures his answer across the three books: the first asks what is honorable, the second what is advantageous, the third what to do when the two seem to collide. He will spend the most care on that collision, because he thinks almost everyone gets it wrong, and gets it wrong in the direction that wrecks them.

Start with the honorable. Where does moral goodness come from? Cicero gives a fourfold answer that is really the four cardinal virtues in working clothes. “All that is morally right rises from some one of four sources,” he writes — the search for truth, the holding-together of human society by justice, the greatness of a strong and unconquered spirit, and the order and measure of everything a person says and does. Wisdom, justice, courage, and what he calls decorum: the seemly, the fitting. The first is the pull of the mind toward what is true. But Cicero, a man of affairs to his bones, warns against the scholar’s temptation — to retreat so far into the pleasure of knowing that you abandon the people who need you. Knowledge that turns its back on duty is a kind of desertion.

Of the four, justice gets the longest and most careful treatment, because justice is what binds people into a society at all. No one, Cicero insists, exists purely for his own sake: “we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share” — a thought he credits to Plato and makes the root of every social duty. Here he draws his sharpest distinction, and it has outlived almost everything else he wrote. There are, he says, two ways to be unjust, not one. “There are, on the other hand, two kinds of injustice—the one, on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted.” The man who robs you is unjust; so is the man who watches you be robbed and, able to stop it, does nothing. Justice is not merely the rule against doing harm. It is also the standing obligation to prevent it. Most moral codes name the first injustice. Cicero insists you are guilty of the second.

And underneath justice sits one thing in particular: good faith. “The foundation of justice, moreover, is good faith—that is, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements.” This is the sinew that runs through the whole work — fides, the kept word. Cicero keeps returning to it because everything social rests on it. A promise is a thread thrown from one person to another, and if the thread cannot be trusted, nothing larger than a single isolated life can be built. Justice begins, for him, not with grand principles of fairness but with the small, daily, unglamorous fact of meaning what you said. He also warns of a subtler betrayal: the man who turns the letter of the law into a tool against its spirit, twisting a statute by over-clever reading until it does the opposite of what it was for. Out of that habit, Cicero notes, grew the proverb “More law, less justice” — the reminder that an injustice done strictly by the rules is still an injustice.

From this he draws conclusions that were not obvious in a slaveholding warrior-state and are striking even now. Justice constrains how you treat an enemy: a war must be openly declared and justly caused, and faith pledged even to an enemy must be honored. Justice reaches the people with the least power to demand it. “But let us remember that we must have regard for justice even towards the humblest,” he writes — and then names the humblest as slaves, and says to treat them as you would hired workers, owed their due. It is worth being honest about what this is and is not. Cicero does not question slavery itself; he assumes it, as his whole class did, and the assumption is a wall his moral imagination stops at. What he does is extend the reach of obligation downward, into a place his contemporaries thought obligation did not go. The instinct — that justice is owed most carefully where it can be claimed least — is sound. The blind spot beside it is real. Both are in the same sentence.

Justice also sets the limit on its great partner, generosity, which Cicero calls liberality. Kindness is a virtue, but a kindness that takes from one person to give to another is no virtue at all — it is injustice wearing a friendly face. And generosity has to be sustainable: empty your purse for applause and you will end up taking from others to refill it, because “the affection they gain from the objects of their gifts is not so great as the hatred they incur from those whom they despoil.” Give within your means, give to those who will use it well, and remember that the showiest giving is often the least just.

Then comes the question that makes the whole argument turn: must a promise always be kept? Cicero, the lawyer, knows better than to say yes. A promise made under false pretenses does not bind; neither does one whose keeping would harm the very person you made it to, nor one that has curdled into a weapon against others. If a friend leaves a sword with you for safekeeping and comes back for it out of his mind, you do not return it; the duty of safekeeping has been overtaken by a larger duty. Good faith is the foundation, but good faith serves human welfare, not the other way around. Against this stands his favorite example, the one he returns to with something like reverence: Regulus, the Roman general captured by Carthage and sent home on his oath to return if Rome would not trade prisoners, who argued in the Senate against the exchange, then went back, as Cicero tells it, to death by torture, because he had sworn he would. The oath was extracted by an enemy. Cicero thinks Regulus was right to keep it anyway — that a great spirit pays even the price an enemy set, rather than become the kind of man who lies. Here the cool analyst of broken promises meets the patriot who cannot let go of the unbroken one, and Cicero does not fully reconcile them. The tension is the point.

Regulus carries us into the third virtue, greatness of spirit — the noble, unconquered mind. Cicero wants to rescue courage from the soldier who has monopolized it. True greatness of spirit, he argues, despises external things, fears nothing that fortune can take, and shows itself far more in steady civic labor than in the glamour of the battlefield. He distrusts the love of preeminence, the hunger to be first, because it tempts even good men to trample justice on the way up — and a brave act that breaks justice is not brave, only dangerous. Real glory is the kind you earn by serving the commonwealth and never chased for its own sake. It is here that Cicero writes his most famous and least modest line, defending the statesman against the general: “Not to mention other instances, did not arms yield to the toga, when I was at the helm of state?” The toga is the civilian’s dress, the arms the soldier’s; Cicero is reminding everyone that in 63 BC he broke Catiline’s plot inside Rome with words and law rather than swords, though the plotters’ army in the field still had to be beaten in battle at Pistoria a few weeks later. The principle is genuinely his — that the peacemaker outranks the warrior — and the self-promotion is genuinely his too. He could not write a book about not seeking glory without slipping in a claim to his own. Read him whole and you get both.

The fourth virtue is the hardest to translate and the most quietly modern: decorum, propriety, the fittingness of conduct. It is the order and measure that should govern speech, gesture, work, and bearing — doing the right thing in the right way, at the right scale, without excess. Cicero hangs on it a striking idea: that each of us plays several roles at once. We share one nature as rational beings; we each also have a particular nature, our own temperament and gifts; we are handed a role by circumstance and birth; and we choose a fourth by our own will. The art of living is to act in keeping with all four — to follow universal reason without betraying your own grain, to take up the part fortune dealt without pretending it is someone else’s. This is why he counsels self-knowledge over imitation: do well what suits you rather than badly what suited someone else. He descends to small things here and is better for it — how to hold a conversation, when to yield the floor, why anger makes every judgment worse, how a calm bearing is itself a moral act.

The second book turns from the honorable to the useful, and Cicero springs a trap on the reader who expected a change of subject. What is truly advantageous to a person? Almost everything we need, he observes, comes to us through other people — our safety, our wealth, our work, our reputation, all of it routed through human cooperation. So the deepest source of lasting advantage is the goodwill of others: to be trusted, admired, and loved is worth more over a life than to be feared. The tyrant’s motto — let them hate, so long as they fear — is not shrewd but suicidal, because fear is the most brittle guard a man can post around himself, and the hatred it breeds outlasts the power that caused it. The road to genuine advantage, then, runs straight back through the virtues of the first book: justice and generosity, honestly practiced, are not the enemies of self-interest but its most reliable engine. Cicero is already collapsing the gap between the honorable and the useful before he has formally addressed it.

Which is the work of the third book, and the climax of the whole. The apparent conflict between the right and the profitable, Cicero argues, is an illusion — a trick of short sight. “It is beyond question that expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude.” The seemingly-useful wrong is never actually useful, once you reckon the whole cost, including what it does to the person who commits it. He reports that Socrates used to curse the people who first pried apart the right and the useful as though they were separable, because once a mind believes it can profit by injustice, no argument reaches it anymore. And he gives the principle its hardest, plainest form: “for a man to take something from his neighbour and to profit by his neighbour’s loss is more contrary to nature than is death or poverty or pain or anything else that can affect either our person or our property.” Stripping another person for your own gain does not merely break a rule. It tears the fabric that makes you a person among persons. The man who does it has bought a private advantage by attacking the thing that made advantage possible at all.

Then Cicero does what he does best: he stops asserting and starts working the hard cases, holding each dilemma up to the light to see whether the profit really is a profit. Suppose, he says, a grain merchant sails into Rhodes during a famine, his ship loaded, knowing that behind him a fleet of other grain ships is already on the way. Prices are high; they will crash when the others land. Must he tell the starving Rhodians what he knows, or may he sell high and stay silent? Two Stoic teachers had split on it — one saying the seller owes full disclosure, the other saying he need only avoid an outright lie. Cicero comes down on the side of disclosure: concealment for gain is a quiet form of the same injustice as theft, and the honest course is also, in the long reckoning, the useful one. He runs the same blade through a man selling a house with hidden faults, through the question of whether a promise extorted by pirates binds you. Case after case, the method holds: name the apparent advantage, then ask whether an honorable man could take it — and find, every time, that what looked like a clash between doing right and doing well was the reader’s confusion, not a fact about the world.

He ends where a father would. The whole long argument folds back into a single bequest to a son far away: that the good and the genuinely advantageous are one thing, not two, and that a life spent acting as if they were enemies is a life spent robbing yourself. Cicero hopes the books will be worth more to Marcus than the lectures in Athens. Whether the boy ever took the lesson, history does not record. But the argument outlived them both, and Rome, and the empire after Rome, carried in copies that medieval monks and Renaissance humanists treated almost as scripture — a dying statesman’s insistence that you cannot, in the end, cheat your way to a good life.

One real line. “for a man to take something from his neighbour and to profit by his neighbour’s loss is more contrary to nature than is death or poverty or pain or anything else that can affect either our person or our property.” — Cicero, On Duties, 3.21.

What didn’t hold. These are not failed experiments but the places where later readers push back on Cicero, and where his world shows through the argument.

• The acceptance of slavery (1.41). Cicero extends justice toward slaves — treat them as you would paid workers — but never questions the institution itself. The reach of his obligation is admirable for his class; its ceiling is the moral limit of that class. Modern readers cannot take the framing as settled, only the impulse beneath it.
• The aristocratic frame on honorable work. Cicero ranks occupations by gentility — wholesale trade and the liberal professions dignified, retail and manual labor demeaning, farming alone honorable among the practical trades. This is a class snobbery presented as natural law, and it is where the book most plainly belongs to a Roman senator’s world rather than ours.
• The never-conflict thesis (Book 3). That the honorable and the advantageous can never truly conflict is the load-bearing claim of the whole work, and it is an assertion rather than a proof — it holds only if you grant Cicero’s Stoic premise that nothing gained by injustice counts as real advantage. A reader who measures advantage in plain outcomes will find genuine cases where the wrong thing pays and is never found out. Cicero’s answer — that it costs you yourself — is powerful, but it is a moral conviction, not a demonstration, and later thinkers from Machiavelli onward built whole arguments on doubting it.
• The self-promotion (1.77 and elsewhere). A book counseling against the hunger for glory keeps reminding the reader of its author’s glory. It is not a flaw in the reasoning so much as a window into the man — and a useful caution that even a clear-eyed moralist argues partly to defend his own record.
• Regulus’s torture (3.99–115). Cicero tells the death by sleeplessness as history, but Polybius, the best surviving source for the war, does not report it, and most historians now think the torture story was invented, perhaps to excuse the torture of two Carthaginian prisoners by Regulus’s widow that Diodorus reports. The kept oath is the lesson Cicero draws; the torture is legend.
• The tyrant exception (3.19, 3.32). Killing even a close friend is called the noblest of deeds if the friend is a tyrant, and a tyrant is owed no fellowship at all. Written months after Caesar’s assassination, in a book that names Caesar as the tyrant (2.23–24, 3.83), this is a partisan’s defense of a recent killing as much as a general rule.
• Property and the Gracchi (2.73–85). Cicero makes the protection of property the chief purpose of the state, calls debt relief and land redistribution robbery, and counts the Gracchi among the justly killed. He had fought debt cancellation as consul, and this is the politics of his class argued as justice.
• Rome’s wars (1.35). The rules of just war come with Rome’s own record approved: razing Carthage and Numantia counts as justified, and only Corinth’s destruction draws a regret, softened by a guess at Rome’s reasons.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.