“For a whole year now, Marcus my son, you have been a pupil of Cratippus, and you have been resident at Athens.”1 Thus begins De Officiis, Cicero’s philosophical swan song, written just before his death and published shortly after. It inquires about the nature of duty and the best means of engaging in public life. It is a work nearly forgotten today despite having inspired Western luminaries from Pliny to Frederick the Great.2 While the reader who expects a grand philosophical treatise will not be disappointed, however, he may experience the odd feeling of reading a message intended for someone else. As the opening line indicates, and as Cicero never quite lets the reader forget, his intended audience was not the world at large but his progeny.
Cicero’s focus on fatherly education gives more to the book than just its form. The primary argument of the work is that actions must be honorable to be considered useful and vice versa. He frequently illustrates his points using the examples of famous Greek and Roman fathers and sons. More than that, much of this argument is constructed using Cicero’s reflections on his relationship to his son, including the consequences his legacy will have for Marcus. What is honorable for either of them, he says, is in part defined by their duties to each other. Ultimately, Marcus would have to sustain that legacy on his own, as Cicero knows: “you must exercise your own judgment… without pressure from me.”3 The first few pages are particularly heartfelt. Cicero further tells his son that Nature “especially infuses in [men] surpassing love for their offspring.”4 Yet this love should not lead to indulgence: he therefore never tires of reminding Marcus of his obligations to Rome: “men have been begotten for men’s sake to be of service to each other.”5 While his love for Marcus is assured, he still demands goodness from his son. “So farewell, my dear Cicero,”6 he concludes. “Reassure yourself that you are most dear to me, but you will be much dearer if you are pleased to receive such advice and instruction as this.”7
It is not merely by chance nor because of a Ciceronian quirk that these two topics—the duties of public life and the relationship between a father and son—are paired. The inculcation of manhood requires the transmission of culture. Let us begin to define our terms. By culture, I mean the way of life of the community of which the family is part: the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that define who is and who is not a member of their society. For its part, manliness, Professor Harvey Mansfield tells us, is “confidence in the face of risk.”8 But how might a man develop this confidence? Well, possibly, from seeing his own father successfully navigate risk and recognizing that he could behave similarly. Often, this recognition comes from his father’s demand that he begin to do so.9
Wherever a boy gets the idea that he must grow up, he needs guidance lest he misapplies his youthful energy. If poor judgment leads him to hurt himself, he might at least learn a valuable lesson, but both he and the community deserve to know that someone will look after him and ensure that he does not do anything too destructive. Yet most young men today spend most of their time in environments, like schools, that overcorrect in that regard: they are given no acceptable outlet for their desire to discover what they are made of.10 Some of those boys will inevitably chafe at overly restrictive rules and lash out. More importantly, a society full of men who have not learned their limits through experience will be uninspired in peace and weak in war. This manly confidence both grows and is given direction when we learn that there are things for which it is worth taking risks. This might first involve defending one’s honor or sticking up for a sibling. Hopefully, a young man eventually decides that he is ready to stick his neck out for his family, his culture, and the defenseless. This recognition of value outside of himself makes him more willing to accept risks—if he only seeks his own good, cowardice is often a safer course. A boy may have the same strength as a man; what distinguishes the two is the willingness to use the freedom of adulthood to protect more important things than oneself. Most boys intuit that growing up means becoming free. The only thing more foolish than entirely indulging this desire for freedom is trying to stamp it out.
Without a widely practiced and civic-minded fatherhood, America will have too few citizens properly prepared for the task of self-government.
Fathers may not be strictly necessary for these lessons, but as Cicero repeats often, they have the duty to provide them. Fathers are also uniquely placed to help their sons navigate between these two extremes because they have had to do so in the same communities their sons will inherit. Homer, for instance, portrayed a Telemachus and an Ithaca which shared the same fate in Odysseus’ absence—a stasis that bred disorder. The former could not mature without a model, nor could the latter grow without a leader. Telemachus’ early efforts to take his father’s place, such as calling a council of his community’s leading men, were awkward because he had not seen his father manage the delicate task. More broadly, his lack of belief in his father’s legacy robbed him of the refinement necessary for the proper exercise of power. Only after learning about his father from the returned warriors of the Trojan War, and finally fighting by his side to reclaim their home, did Telemachus come into manhood.
It is this confidence and sense of duty, not just a man’s rational abilities, that makes him capable of engaging properly in public affairs. Ideally, fathers keep their homes from the disorder of wider society and reestablish order in their communities—and try to produce sons capable of defending that order. There are, naturally, other means by which a person might become prepared to engage in politics; one of the most enduring lessons of political philosophy is that magnetic leaders can arise from any class or corner of society.11 But this kind of father-son relationship is both powerful and relatively common, and it explains why we should neither be surprised nor disappointed to see men take a predominant role in public life. Women, especially in times of crisis, may take an interest in it; men, on the other hand, have a duty to attend to it. It is thus that we can understand policies like the Salic Law as attempts, imperfect though they may be, to recognize and grapple with the culturally load-bearing nature of the paternal relationship.12 It takes a man’s example to make a man.13
These ideas did not begin or end with Cicero. King James VI, for instance, thought in much the same terms. Better known for unifying the English and Scottish thrones and for commissioning his eponymous translation of the Holy Scriptures, he also composed a book of advice to his heir. This work, the Basilikon Doron, is a highly refined reflection on the nature of kingship. It explains even more directly than De Officiis why the form of a letter to one’s son is an appropriate form for this kind of advice: “Since I the authour thereof, as your naturall Father, must be carefull for your godly and vertuous education, as my eldest Sonne, and the first fruits of Gods blessing towards mee in my posteritie: and as a King must timously provide for your trayning up in all the points of a Kings Office…”14 In modern English, a father has a unique sense of his son’s place in the world and a unique knowledge of what is necessary for his son to properly succeed him. James continues: “being rightly informed hereby, of the waight of your burthen, ye may in time beginne to consider, that being borne to be a king, ye are rather borne to onus, then honos.”15 This is the same basic task that Cicero sets for his son, and it works only because James himself knew precisely how heavy that burden weighs. He also knew that a father’s desire to see his children safe and comfortable should be tempered by his desire to see his son make a man of himself and his knowledge that the things he cares for will need defending after he is gone. Each generation shouldn’t need to rederive these ideas for themselves, as long as their fathers try to pass them down and they try to listen.
A boy may have the same strength as a man; what distinguishes the two is the willingness to use the freedom of adulthood to protect more important things than oneself.
We seem rather disinclined to do so. Indeed, traditional conceptions of masculinity are commonly denigrated.16 A father wishing to impart these lessons to his son fights against both the popular treatment of fathers as, at best, buffoonish and those who would indulge his son in the belief that he doesn’t have any positive duties after all.17 As a result, Americans have very little consensus over what values and history ought to be passed from one generation to the next; it seems difficult to speak of a coherent way of life into which a man might be raised. This absence of purpose is responsible for the malaise and frustration that seems to grip so many. Unlike with more tangible problems, such as economic disaster or war, we have no clear idea of how to react. But commentators attempting to diagnose this social problem would do well to return to De Officiis, which reminds us that it is not merely social: “as to which of these we owe the greatest obligations, our country and our parents must take first place.”18 National restoration will not occur until families are reintegrated. Without a widely practiced and civic-minded fatherhood, America will have too few citizens properly prepared for the task of self-government.
This unity of our obligations to our nation and our families was an expression of the Roman virtue of piety. Not merely confined to the worship of the Supreme Deity, as the term is used today, it meant one’s embodied, active love for that which raised him. Pietas was that thing in man that brought him to sacrifice everything in the service of his community. I have left until now the most evocative instance of this form of piety in the Western tradition: the relationship of Anchises and Aeneas. While Homer and Cicero and James VI give us the lessons of fathers, Virgil offers the story of a son. The Romans, the great poet reveals, spring from Aeneas’ root—but before that, he had to flee the destruction of the Trojan War. Virgil gives us the striking moment when the die is cast:
But now the roar of flames grows louder all through Troy
and the seething floods of fire are rolling closer.
‘So come, dear father, climb up onto my shoulders!
I will carry you on my back. This labor of love
will never wear me down. Whatever falls to us now,
we both will share one peril, one path to safety.’19
This act—this great act of piety—gave continuity between the Romans and their Trojan ancestors. The gods of Anchises’ household thus received their due worship once more.
Part of manhood is realizing that, try as you might, you can never set the whole world right. Anchises knew this. So did Cicero and King James. Today, we are called to make real a world that our fathers could leave us only as a possibility. We cannot blame them for this any more than for the coming of a rainstorm; fortune strikes some men harder than others. It is for us, rather, to prove that we learned their lessons well enough, that we have become the kind of men ready to rebuild some semblance of order. We pray that Troy might yet be saved. But, if the time comes, we must be ready to take Anchises upon our backs once more and reestablish our people where they might be blessed for a thousand generations more.
XENOPHON
A version of this article originally appeared in Forever Young, the December 2024 print issue of the Salient.
Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.1.
De Officiis, Introduction, xxxiv-xliv
De Officiis, 1.2.
De Officiis, 1.12
De Officiis 1.22
As the family name, Cicero referred to both father and son. No doubt the elder Cicero uses it here as another implicit reminder of their shared legacy.
De Officiis 3.121
Manliness, Harvey Mansfield, p. 23.
This pathway, while typical, is not universal. Certainly other role models and teachers—a grandfather, an uncle, even a single mother—might help flesh out one’s idea of manhood.
See, for instance, Suzzane Bates, “Of boys and men,” Deseret News, 2022
This is not to say that all or even most political philosophers encourage us to give such characters power—most obviously, the monarchical theorists have very strict limits on which persons may rule. It is merely to say that from Plato’s acknowledgement that gold-souled individuals may be born to farmers to the “towering genius” of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, political theorists have recognized the role of chance in the birth of people capable of rallying others to a cause.
The Salic Law was a Frankish code providing for absolute male primogeniture which enjoyed wide influence throughout medieval Europe.
As with much of this argument, it bears repeating that I am speaking of that which is generally, but not necessarily universally, true.
“To Henry My Dearest Sonne, and Natural Successor,” in James I, The Political Works of James I, BASILIKON DORON. OR HIS MAIESTIES INSTRVCTIONS TO HIS DEAREST SONNE, HENRY THE PRINCE.
Ibid.
Cleanthes, “The Man Problem,” in Matriarchy, Harvard Salient, Sep. 2022.
As opposed to the negative duties to, say, not kill anyone or express unpopular beliefs.
De Officiis, 1.58, emphasis added
The Aeneid, Book 2, trans. Robert Fagles.
Brilliant essay. Pair it with a reading of Rudyard Kipling's "If."
Be careful using the example of Aeneas if you want women on board with your ideas. That image of a “family” has no woman in it; she was expendable. The Holy Family would bring me with you better.