Ambrose: De officiis. Volume 1: Introduction, Text, and Translation. Volume 2: Commentary. Pp. 982 (numbered continuously). Edited by Ivor J. Davidson. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Oxford University Press, 2001. isbn 0 19 827023 2 (Vol. 1), 827024 0 (Vol. 2), and 924578 9 (set). £120

Abstract

One of the most influential books of antiquity was Cicero's De officiis, which used to be read by virtually every educated person until the middle of the nineteenth century and is today read by hardly anyone. Written in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, it was concerned to provide a moral guide amidst the chaos then afflicting the Roman Republic. Over four centuries later St Ambrose wrote a work with the same title, whose structure was largely based upon that of Cicero's treatise. Cicero wrote his work purportedly for his son Marcus; Ambrose for his spiritual sons, i.e. the clergy in Milan. Surprisingly, Ambrose's work did not have the influence in the Middle Ages one might have expected it to have had, partly because it was overshadowed by the Liber regulae pastoralis of Pope Gregory the Great, but it has always been recognized as a highly important work and one of unique interest because of its link with its famous literary predecessor. Not that Ambrose was anxious to acknowledge any debt to Cicero, to whom he refers almost derisively simply as quidam saecularium doctor (De virginibus 3.25). But that is partly the point. It would not—for this reviewer at least—be too much to speak of the fascination of Ambrose's work as one which supremely bears out the comment of R. G. Collingwood on the Latin Fathers: When we find many of the Fathers like Jerome, Ambrose and even Augustine speaking of pagan learning and literature with contempt and hostility it is necessary to remind ourselves that this contempt arises not from lack of education or a barbarous indifference towards knowledge as such, but from the vigour with which these men were pursuing a new ideal of knowledge, working in the teeth of opposition for a reorientation of the entire structure of human thought. (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History [Oxford, 1963], p. 51, italics added)