Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

For generations, Stoics had been in close proximity to power. In Athens, they had been diplomats and the teachers of the best and the brightest. In the Republic, they had been generals and consuls. Since Arius and Athenodorus, they had been the advisors to the young princes of the empire.

But none had actually been a sovereign. Gaius Rubellius Plautus, born in 33 AD, was the first Stoic with royal blood. The great-grandson of Tiberius through his mother, Julia, and because of Tiberius’s adoption, a great-great-grandson of Augustus, he was in line for the throne from the rival Julio-Claudian line.

Yet for all his wealth and prestigious lineage, we’re told that Plautus lived an austere and quiet life. His study of philosophy had made him an old soul, a living embodiment of the old mos maiorum, one who commanded respect from all who met him. He did not lust for power; he did not abuse his wealth. He was, then, quite a contrast not just to his great-grandfather Tiberius, but to nearly all the emperors to come after them both.

Would he be the first Stoic emperor? The philosopher king that Plato had spoken of so long before?

It was possible, but it would not be an easy road. In the way that Cato seemed to create enemies unintentionally—his virtue an inherent rebuke to the corrupt and the tyrannical—Plautus was, by his very nature, fated to clash with Nero. Two men of high birth, they were otherwise opposites. One, through his mother, had grand ambitions. The other wished to maintain his studies and live by his internal code. One was willing to do anything—no matter how depraved—to achieve those aims. The other would do nothing to betray his.

It should not surprise us then that Nero began to make designs against his third cousin, or that his paranoia would make this man a rival. It must have been obvious to everyone, including Plautus. First, Nero murdered his stepbrother, Britannicus, after his mother, Agrippina, had threatened that she would side with Britannicus if Nero did not straighten out. Then a rumor spread that Agrippina might marry Plautus to replace Nero on the throne. Whether it was true or not, this was the pretext he used to drive his mother from Rome and what eventually fixed it in his mind that he must kill the woman who had birthed him.

Although the Stoics had written of the dangers of superstitions and believing in silly, supernatural signs, clearly Seneca failed to instill that lesson in Nero. Between August and December of 60 AD, an unbelievably bright comet stretched across the sky above Rome, one like none seen before. It was an omen, people believed, that a change in monarchy was coming. Nero would be replaced. Around this same time, Tacitus tells us that a tremendous bolt of lightning struck the dinner table at Nero’s enormous lakeside villa at Sublaquaeum. Due to the proximity to Plautus’s birthplace, Nero and the guests took this as a dangerous portent: Plautus was to replace Nero.

The Stoic would be king.

Or would he?

In response, Nero attempted something out of character: He simply wrote to Plautus that Rome would be more peaceful if he took his leave to his grandfather Drusus’s estates in Asia. Perhaps this unusual bit of restraint—at least in a matter more grave than petty—was the result of Seneca’s intervention, one of the last bits of moral influence he was able to exert. Plautus decided it was an offer he could not refuse.

So he, accompanied by his wife, Antistia, and their children, along with “a few of his intimate friends,” went into exile in Syria. Tacitus suggests that the great Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, who counseled Plautus in Syria “to have courage and await death,” accompanied him into exile, where Plautus attempted to busy himself with philosophy. Cicero popularized the story of the “Sword of Damocles”—the threat of death and uprising—that intimidated all kings. So it was for Plautus . . . without the benefit of actually being one.

But this is what Stoicism trains us for: to be able to focus in even the most distracting of situations, to be able to tune out anything and everything—even creeping death—so that we lock in on what matters.

With Seneca on the outs, Nero was unmoored and, as in today’s time, ambitious and shortsighted politicians sought to wield this volatile man to their own ends. One such figure, Tigellinus, stoked Nero’s paranoia to eliminate enemies and to keep Rome in chaos. Tacitus recounts him whispering to Nero, “Plautus, with his great fortune, did not even affect a desire for peace, but, not content to parade his mimicries of the ancient Romans, had taken upon himself the Stoic arrogance and the mantle of a sect which inculcated sedition and an appetite for politics.”

It was all Nero needed to hear: The order to kill Plautus was set.

Part of what had motivated Nero must have been the knowledge that many people would have supported Plautus had he actually acted on the ambitions that Nero projected onto him. That is our deepest fear anyway: that the people we loathe are actually better than us, and that we loathe them not because they are inferior but because they have something we lack.

There was an irony in Nero’s attack on Plautus that he would not have appreciated but Seneca had long predicted. As he wrote in Oedipus, “He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears.” Plautus had not had designs on the throne, but now Antistius Vetus, Plautus’s father-in-law, wrote to him to gather forces and take up arms. Others advised the same. It took some time for the assassins to reach Asia, long enough for rumors to spread that Plautus did in fact rise up and defend himself. Revolution, it seemed, was in the air.

But that was not Plautus’s style. Although he had the money to fund an entire army, he decided not to. Perhaps he would have rather been the victim of a tyrant than to be responsible for another bloody war in which countless others died. Perhaps it was Musonius’s advice that convinced him: “Choose to die well while it is possible, lest shortly it may become necessary for you to die, but it will no longer be possible to die well.”

Unmoved by the calls for civil war, Plautus prepared himself for the end. The Stoic would not be king. He would not even live to see thirty.

Like Agrippinus before him, Plautus refused to let the threat of death deter him from his daily routine. It was on a quiet afternoon in 62 AD, as he stripped to exercise, that Nero’s killers arrived. They would not even offer him the dignity of suicide. A centurion cut down this young philosopher while a court eunuch watched to confirm that the deed had been done. Together they brought back the severed head as proof.

Nero’s depravity had reached sadistic levels. Holding Plautus’s head before an audience, he referred to himself in the third person. “Nero, why did you fear a man with such a nose?” Not finished with his humiliation, he wrote to the Senate to inform them that Plautus had been an unstable figure who had threatened Rome (remember the tactic from Rutilius Rufus’s time: Accuse the good man of exactly what you, the evil man, are yourself guilty of). Nero lacked the courage to own his dirty work, but he demanded credit for protecting the peace.

Perhaps we cannot fault Seneca—then trying to retire from public life—too much for his enabling of Nero, because it was clearly endemic to the times. The Senate rubber-stamped Nero’s smear and did him one better, choosing to expel Plautus from their ranks posthumously, simply to please their petulant king. Within weeks, Nero divorced his wife, tossing her Plautus’s confiscated estate in the settlement, and prepared to remarry.

Although Seneca—inexplicably—still seems not to have had enough, and would remain loosely in Nero’s service for a few more years, Thrasea, one of the few remaining Stoics in Rome, pulled an Agrippinus and declined to attend the wedding.

Nero had invented an enemy in Plautus and given himself a real one in Thrasea. Now he would have something, someone to fear.