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

Thrasea Paetus was a man born out of step with his time. Born in Padua around the time of the death of Augustus, he belonged to a wealthy and noble family. As was common in the stories of many of the Roman Stoics, he was given the best and most respected tutors who instilled in him a talent for rhetoric, for the law, and, most of all, for principled living.

Where other Stoics had figured out a way to adjust to the changing times or smartly withdrew, Thrasea was a senator of old. It had been decades since Cato’s courage and commitment had cast a shadow in Rome, but so deep was Thrasea’s love of history and philosophy that the figures of the Republic’s distant past were almost alive and real to him. As Zeno had been told by the oracle that he could commune with the dead—through philosophy—so too could Thrasea.

Seneca would later write about how philosophers needed to “choose [themselves] a Cato”—a person who could serve as a kind of ruler to measure and straighten themselves against. Plutarch tells us that from an early age, Thrasea chose Cato as his Cato and later even wrote a book about him.

Thrasea was likely also inspired by the Scipionic Circle—which he would have seen depicted in Cicero’s writings—as we’re told that Thrasea’s house became a meeting place of like-minded poets, philosophers, and politicians. His dinner table was the setting, as Cato’s had been and Scipio’s too, for long discussions about virtue and duty and, sadly, the worrying state of affairs of their beloved country. On any given evening, many of the Stoics in the later pages of this book might have been seen at Thrasea’s home—from Seneca to Helvidius Priscus—and just as present would have been the ghosts of the Stoics who had lived before them.

Even his wife’s family brought their own heady legacy to the table: His wife, like Porcia, came from serious Stoic stock. In 42 AD, his mother-in-law committed suicide at the order of Emperor Claudius. Her last words were “See, it doesn’t hurt” to her husband, who was forced to follow suit.

With all this swirling about Thrasea—his early influences, his philosopher friends, his deep commitment to the public good—it was unlikely that he was ever going to go along to get along, no matter who was emperor. But Nero? Everything about Thrasea’s life made it impossible for him to tolerate such as his master. Nothing about him could simply accept what Rome had become—and he would be utterly fearless in this rejection of the status quo.

As Thrasea’s senatorial career grew, like Rutilius Rufus and Cato, he used his power to take up cases of extortion. In 57 AD he vigorously supported a case brought by Cilician envoys who had come to Rome to accuse their ex-governor, Cossutianus Capito, of extortion. As Tacitus put it, this “was a man stained with much wickedness,” and in fact, one who openly embraced his corruption. At trial, he didn’t bother to defend himself and was convicted and stripped of his senatorial rank.

In a sane political environment, this would have been the end of Capito’s career, but Rome under Nero was not sane. Within just a few years, Capito’s rank was restored and somehow saw him pursuing civil cases against other people, including one against a poet who had criticized Nero. The Senate sentenced the poet to death, only to be stopped by the intervention of Thrasea, who, like Seneca in his famous work On Clemency, argued for mercy and restraint. Nero acceded, but one gets the sense he could not have been happy letting even petty criticism go unpunished.

And yet as pesky as Thrasea was to Nero, Nero could not help but begrudgingly respect the tenacity of his opponent. When someone once criticized Thrasea for judging a case unfairly to Nero—likely expecting appreciation from their king—they were admonished for their sycophancy. “I wish,” Nero said, “Thrasea were as excellent a friend to me as he is a judge.”

It had been inevitable that Cato and Caesar, with their enormous gravitational pulls, would eventually clash. So it went for Thrasea and Nero, one a senator, the other Caesar; one restrained and principled, the other unmoored and consumed by ego. One demanding accommodation, the other refusing to even consider such a thing.

In 59 AD, when Nero murdered his mother, Thrasea was appalled. While Seneca seemed to be willing to overlook it, Thrasea’s fellow senators did him one better—not only accepting Nero’s preposterous explanation, sent in a letter to the Senate, that he needed to kill her because she was a traitor who had planned to kill him, but actually deciding to award him honors for committing matricide. Thrasea was so disgusted that he walked out and refused to vote.

In our times, senators sometimes abstain from voting as a form of political cover—if they don’t vote, they won’t be on the record either way. Thrasea’s abstention was something different. It was not cowardice but courage. He was refusing to dignify brazen corruption and evil. Cato had fought against Caesar and Pompey with filibusters, but that was when Rome was still nominally a republic. All Thrasea could do now was try to exert some moral authority, to tell people, “This is not normal.” So he did, refusing consent, refusing to rubber-stamp, whatever little that was worth.

Nor was he afraid of who might take offense at that . . . or any stand he took.

He refused to vote for divine honors that Nero attempted to give to his new wife, Poppea—the one some contemporaries claimed he had murdered his mother for not approving of. At the trial of Claudius Timarchus—a robber baron “whom immense wealth has emboldened to the oppression of the weak,” as Tacitus put it—Thrasea called aggressively for exile. His speech was “hailed with great unanimity,” we are told, only to be set aside by the emperor, who seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything that served the common good. For three long years he stood openly opposed to Nero, who in turn began to more openly oppose him. In 63 AD, Nero refused to accept Thrasea’s entrance into his home when he accompanied his fellow senators to Nero’s palace to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter.

A Stoic must learn when to walk away when the cause is hopeless. Seneca realized this too late, well after he was complicit in enabling Nero. Thrasea had no such blood on his hands. When the Senate allowed Nero to reject Thrasea—one of their colleagues—he came to see that the state was long past helping. He would spend the next three years in semi-retirement, working on his writings about Cato and studying his philosophy, with little regard for the death sentence he figured would soon find him.

Tacitus tells us that Nero was simply looking for the right pretext. Capito, the man Thrasea had driven from the Senate years before, helped give it to him. Thrasea had allegedly refused to show support at the funeral of Poppea in 65 AD, and to this Nero and Capito took great offense (ironic, given the likelihood that Nero was involved in her death). In any case, with “a heart eager for the worst wickedness,” Tacitus says Capito’s charges were aimed at carrying out Nero’s yearning “to put Virtue itself to death” by killing off one of the few men in Rome not cowed by Nero’s tyranny. “The country in its eagerness for discord is now talking of you, Nero, and of Thrasea, as it talked once of Gaius Caesar and Marcus Cato,” Capito whispered with insidious intent.

It was a malicious, evil thing to say, and yet also the highest praise that Thrasea could have ever imagined. Such is life: Sometimes our enemies, by nature of their fears and their designs, pay us the ultimate compliment.

Thrasea refused to give Nero the pleasure of undermining him in secret. He wrote him directly: Name your charges and let me defend myself. Nero opened the letter expecting fealty, assuming that Thrasea would cower and beg for mercy. Instead, he found “the defiant independence of the guiltless man.” For Thrasea there was no other way to be.

For the Stoic, for us, there is nothing else worth being.

Now, as with Caesar and Cato, a fatal conflict was set in motion. Nero crossed his Rubicon by calling for Thrasea’s head, and the Senate, now decayed by five emperors over the last century, was more than willing to go along with the side of tyranny. Only Arulenus Rusticus, a fellow Stoic philosopher, dissented and offered to block the Senate’s decree and save Thrasea’s life. Thrasea asked him not to intervene. “You’re only at the beginning of your career in office,” he told this young man. “Consider well what path you will walk, in times like these, through politics.”* Thrasea did not need anyone’s protection. He had decided, like Cato, to bear whatever fate would bring to his door.

A defense went deliberately unoffered, as it had for Rutilius Rufus’s show trial so many years before.

The Senate voted to kill him, and to send his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, into exile.

When the first rumors of the news came, Thrasea was sitting with his friends in his gardens, as they had for so many years—poets, philosophers, and magistrates. Epictetus tells us that Thrasea, deep in a conversation on the immortality of the soul with Demetrius the Cynic, met the news with sardonic resignation: “I would rather be killed today than banished tomorrow.”

Nero offered Thrasea the same courtesy he had offered Seneca: He could choose the manner of his own death. For Thrasea, it was another moment for a conversation with the great dead men who were so real to him. Socrates. Cicero. Cato. Even the recently departed Seneca. “Nero can kill me,” Thrasea said, echoing Socrates’s last words, “but he cannot harm me.”

As he prepared to die, the first thing Thrasea did was urge his loved ones to leave, saying his goodbyes and asking them to take care of themselves. Then he pleaded with his wife, who wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and die alongside her husband. Thrasea, proving to be more empathetic than Seneca once again, begged his wife to persevere for the sake of their daughter, since she would be losing her own husband with Helvidius’s exile.

When the officials arrived with the death decree, Thrasea retired to his bedroom with Demetrius the Cynic and Helvidius Priscus. Perhaps they talked philosophy for a few minutes, or maybe Thrasea advised Helvidius to carry on the fight from a distance. Eventually, they got down to business. Thrasea asked his companions to open the veins on both his arms.

As he lay bleeding out, he—in a nod to Seneca’s famous suicide only a year before—offered a prayer of libation to Jupiter the Deliverer and said to the young man who had delivered his death sentence, “You have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.” Then he turned to Demetrius and uttered his last words, which, like Thrasea and the rest of us, were writ on water and disappeared into the abyss of history.

Nero had eliminated another enemy, and a potential check against his excesses. But as Seneca had warned him, crimes return upon those who commit them, and no one can murder or kill enough to make themselves invincible.

As with all despots and gangsters, Nero’s support eroded slowly, and then all at once. The plot against him that Seneca had been caught up in showed that the people had begun to turn on their deranged king. Conspirators, facing certain death, began delivering the truth that Nero had long sought to avoid: “No one in the army was more loyal to you than I,” Sabrius Flavus told him, “when you deserved our love. But I began to hate you, after you became the murderer of your mother and wife, a chariot driver, an actor and an arsonist.” Another soldier, when asked why he would try to kill the emperor, explained, “It was the only way I could help you.”

Even the willingness of Rusticus to stand with Thrasea was a sign of dissension inside a Senate that had been hitherto unanimous in its support of Nero’s excesses. But still, these were only flickers. The final years of Nero’s life were marked by more murders and more indulgent performances. Rigging singing contests so he could win, he toured the empire lapping up praise from increasingly exhausted citizens.

Eventually, it was the army that first turned on him. Suddenly, Nero had lost the beam on top of which his intimidation rested. Now he could not even flee Rome with protection from previously loyal henchmen.

It was an anonymous Praetorian guard who would give the final hint to Nero: “Is it as awful as that, to die?” he asked. Nero awoke one morning to find that most of his bodyguards had abandoned their posts. James Romm describes what would have awaited him were he captured: “Nero would be held immobile with his neck in the fork of a tree, then beaten to death with stout rocks. His ravaged corpse would be flung from the Tarpeian Rock, in imitation of the death deserved for Rome’s worst criminals.”

Nero, who had so long ignored Seneca’s lessons on dying, and who had driven Thrasea to suicide and executed Plautus among countless others, now tested two daggers against his flesh. He hesitated and resheathed them, hoping to wait just a little longer. He took the time to ask his remaining companions to make sure that he not be decapitated after his death—a shameful hypocrisy from the man who had hoisted Plautus’s head up by the hair and mocked the dead man’s nose.

Then, steeling himself, Nero grabbed one of the knives and stabbed himself in the throat.

One of the conspirators against Nero in 65 AD had joked, when staring at the hastily dug grave Nero’s goons had prepared, “Not even this is up to code.” Nero’s malevolent incompetence extended to his own suicide: He had picked the most painful way to possibly do it . . . and failed anyway. Finally, Epaphroditus, a former slave and Nero’s aide, stepped forward and jiggled the dagger, which nicked the artery enough to begin the end of Nero’s reign. His second-to-last words, as blood filled his throat, were typical Nero nonsense. “This,” he burbled, “is loyalty.”

Just then, the soldiers returned, hoping to deliver the kind of public death sentence to which Nero had sentenced to so many others. As a centurion attempted to stop the bleeding, Nero laughed and said, “Too late.”

He was dead.

Many Stoic philosophers had gruesomely preceded him—Rubellius Plautus, Barea Soranus, Seneca, and of course Thrasea—to almost no point but Nero’s ephemeral satisfaction. Yet no one who heard of Nero’s death or saw him alive would have thought he got the better end of the deal.

Thrasea said that Nero had the power to kill but not harm, which was true, with one exception. Nero had harmed himself over and over again, and filled his thirty years with a kind of living death that stands to this day as an example of the worst kind of leadership.

Cato. Thrasea. Those two names are watchwords for courage, for wisdom, for moderation, and for justice.

Nero? A pejorative for excess, incompetence, delusion, and evil. Proof of William Blake’s line that the most potent poison ever known rests in a Caesar’s laurel crown.