This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[92]
“If a man thinks that he is selling brass, when he
is actually selling gold, should an upright man inform
him that his stuff is gold, or go on buying for one
shilling1 what is worth a thousand?”
It is clear enough by this time what my views are
on these questions, and what are the grounds of
dispute between the above-named philosophers.
[p. 369]
24. The question arises also whether agreements 2 and promises must always be kept, “when,”
in the language of the praetors' edicts, “they have
not been secured through force or criminal fraud.”
If one man gives another a remedy for the dropsy,
with the stipulation that, if he is cured by it, he
shall never make use of it again; suppose the
patient's health is restored by the use of it, but some
years later he contracts the same disease once more;
and suppose he cannot secure from the man with
whom he made the agreement permission to use the
remedy again, what should he do? That is the
question. Since the man is unfeeling in refusing
the request, and since no harm could be done to
him by his friend's using the remedy, the sick man
is justified in doing what he can for his own life and
health.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.