Cicero was a famous Roman orator and lawyer and his prose is considered the best that Latin has ever produced. A cornucopia of his work survives precisely for that reason, and amongst them On Duties was particularly popular during the Renaissance because it provided instruction for civic-minded Italians. In the opening you learn this book is actually a letter: Cicero's son is in Greece learning philosophy, so Cicero thought it wise to send him his own manual of philosophy. I've seen this often in ancient and medieval works. Back on my xanga, I mentioned Abelard's Historia calamitatum was a letter. As was Augustine's famous City of God.

Although I've been reading and translating these for years, it wasn't until just now I realized how fucking weird this is. I still write to people, and usually they're about four to five pages with my tiny handwriting. Can you imagine getting a fucking book in the mail and finding out it's just your dad wanting to give you advice? Or let's go back to City of God. The copy on my bookshelf is 1091 pages in tiny print. In handwriting that could easily double. "Here's your mail. Your friend Augustine thought it would be important to talk about how God relates to everything in history and prattled about it for about two thousand pages." Holy shit, I thought the two hours I devote to a single letter was a long time. At some point during the process I think I would forget what the hell I was writing about. And remember, this was before they had computers to help with the editing process. Nevermind that, this was before they even had paper. That's a lot of devotion to communication.