Cicero Quote on Duties: The Honorable and the Expedient

Quote

"Nothing is truly expedient which is not at the same time honorable; and nothing is honorable which is not at the same time expedient." — Cicero, De Officiis (On Duties), Book III (44 BCE)

Author

Cicero (106–43 BCE) was the greatest orator of the Roman Republic, a statesman, and the philosopher who transmitted Greek ethics to the Latin world. His De Officiis, written in the last year of his life, became the standard textbook of secular ethics for two millennia.

Source

The quotation is the thesis of Book III of the De Officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE). The work is addressed to Cicero's son Marcus, and it develops the Stoic doctrine of the officia — the duties that fall to a human being in ordinary life. The translation follows M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins's Cambridge edition (1991).

Context

The De Officiis is organized around the two sources of action recognized by the Stoic ethics: the honorable (honestum) and the expedient (utile). Book I treats the honorable — the four virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance and the duties that flow from them. Book II treats the expedient — the pursuit of advantage, wealth, and power — and the means by which it is legitimately secured. Book III poses the question the whole work has been preparing: what happens when the honorable and the expedient conflict? Cicero's answer is the Stoic unity thesis stated in the quotation: the conflict is an illusion. Because the truly expedient is what serves the human good, and because the human good is the life of virtue, nothing can be truly expedient that is not honorable. The person who acts dishonorably in pursuit of advantage is not pursuing advantage at all — they are destroying the very thing they seek.

Meaning

The quotation states the practical core of the Stoic ethics as Cicero transmitted it. Its first clause — "nothing is truly expedient which is not at the same time honorable" — is the corrective to the cynical calculation: the advantage gained by fraud, betrayal, or injustice is not advantage but loss, because it corrupts the agent and destroys the trust on which all real advantage depends. Its second clause — "nothing is honorable which is not at the same time expedient" — is the corrective to the naive idealism: the honorable life is not a sacrifice of one's interests but the only rational pursuit of them, because the good of the soul is the greatest of goods and it is secured only by virtue. The two clauses together state the Stoic conviction that duty and self-interest coincide in the long run — not because the world rewards virtue, but because virtue is its own reward and the source of everything else that is worth having.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the philosophical exploration of duty and justice. Its doctrine of the unity of the honorable and the expedient is the Stoic answer to the question of whether virtue pays, and it connects to the wider tradition of eudaimonistic ethics, in which the good life and the moral life are ultimately one. The work in which it appears, the De Officiis, is among the principal sources through which the Stoic wisdom tradition reached the modern world.