Book 2 of De Officiis is devoted to an exploration of the utile, what is beneficial or advantageous for humans in pursuing desirable objectives, and the resources needed to achieve them. As Section 1 discusses, it focuses on the human resource that someone intent on a successful political career will best harness, and on outlining the methods for attaining it. That outline then provides Cicero with a basis for the main body of the book, which has two main parts, the first expounding the methods he endorses for achieving glory, with an accent on the need for justice in pursuing it, the second examining liberality, and good and bad ways of exercising it. Section 2 turns to the detail of his analysis of the complexities of liberality and its vocabulary. Section 3 asks whether glory is the main pay-off he sees as the fruit of liberality, and argues that gratitude is of no less importance. A brief conclusion notes that the cohesion of the res publica emerges as the primary object of appropriate human concern, and comments on Cicero’s view that in its safeguarding lies simultaneously our main advantage and the ultimate focus of the social virtues of justice and beneficence.

This chapter investigates the connections between classical ideals of generosity and the portrayal of largesse found in romance literature and other vernacular texts in the central Middle Ages. It investigates the place of generosity in the romances of antiquity, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and those of later romance writers. Based on this survey, the chapter argues that, while aristocratic audiences adapted and transformed many of the ideals they found, their conception of largesse was deeply dependent on the portrayal of generosity found in classical literature and moral philosophy.