Cicero: On Duties in toki pona

Cicero’s On Duties is a practical manual for moral decision-making. It is concerned with real life: promises, reputation, money, public service, friendship, temptation, pressure and the moments when the honorable and the useful appear to conflict.

This edition reimagines the text in toki pona, the minimalist language built around a tiny core vocabulary. The translation creates a calmer, lower-noise reading experience, where ethical choices become simpler to inspect and harder to hide behind rhetoric.

The book uses a two-layer format: toki pona in Latin script and the same lines repeated in sitelen pona. The visual rereading slows the text down and turns moral reflection into a more deliberate practice.

The edition includes an English reference text and a phrase-focused glossary organized around recurring anchor formulas. Book I focuses on moral rightness and the map of virtue. Book II examines usefulness, influence, work and public life. Book III tests the hardest case: what to do when the honorable and the useful seem to diverge.

This is a book about attention, integrity and stable action, made sharper by a language that forces the reader to simplify what they think they mean.