On the Good Life

A Penguin Classics selection of Cicero’s writings on how to live — friendship, duty, old age, the place of public service, the relation between what is honourable and what is expedient — drawn from works written in the last decade of his life as the Republic collapsed around him. Cicero’s position is broadly Stoic but practical: philosophy is for use, and the good life is lived in the city rather than away from it.

Why it’s on the list: It opens the Pursuing the Good Life section — the list’s starting point for ethics as a practical question for someone with public responsibilities, from a writer who was simultaneously a philosopher and a working politician.

Where I saw it: On Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Pursuing the Good Life: Ethics and Personal Growth, saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 211-entry transcription lives on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Cicero — the author.
• Ethics — the field the volume works in.
• Stoicism — the tradition he writes closest to.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the list this came from.