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

The story of the child who works their way from humble origins to the great body of government of their country is not a new one. The politician who comes from nothing, achieves great power, and uses it to reach back down and help the people they came from is the story of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Clay. It’s the story of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel. It’s the story of Helvidius Priscus too.

Helvidius was born the son of a soldier stationed in the southern Italian lands of the Caraceni tribe of the Samnium region, in the town of Cluviae. Helvidius Priscus would rise from these humble plebeian origins to be a major figure in Roman life, with a career that spanned the reigns of five emperors.

Given the dates of his first political office, we can be confident he was born in 25 AD or earlier, and must have, from a young age, been a dedicated and earnest student. Tacitus tells us that from his early days he “devoted his extraordinary talents to higher studies, not as most youths do to cloak a useless leisure with a pretentious name, but that he might enter public life better fortified against the chances of fortune.” From Tacitus we also learn that his early teachers were Stoics, who counted “only those things ‘good’ which are morally right and only those things ‘evil’ which are base, and who reckon power, high birth, and everything else that is beyond the control of the will as neither good nor bad.”

Like Seneca’s brother Gallio, and like Scipio several generations before, Helvidius was adopted into a wealthy and powerful family, likely that of Helvidius Priscus, who served as a legate under the Syrian governor Quadratus. How young Helvidius—who took his new family’s name—met these allies we are not sure. Perhaps his adoptive father served in the army with his family, perhaps the bright up-and-comer dazzled the heirless couple with his educational promise.

In any case, he was no longer the plebeian son of a nobody, but someone on the rise. Fortune does that, Seneca had written, brings us low, as well as proud. Breaks our hearts as well as gives us lucky breaks.

What matters is what we do with either one, and Helvidius, trained as a Stoic, would not waste the material life gave him.

After achieving the first rung of magistracy by winning the post of quaestor in Achaea, the young Helvidius distinguished himself enough in character and success that he married Thrasea’s daughter Fannia. It would have been like marrying into the Cato family, as Brutus had, except the old man was still there to teach and to inspire. As Tacitus tells us, from Thrasea, Priscus learned everything about “the spirit of freedom” and how to, “as citizen, senator, husband, son-in-law, and friend,” prove “equal to all of life’s duties, despising riches, determined in the right, unmoved by fear.” Priscus and his new wife moved to a beautiful home in Rome, a startling transition from his early life in the camps on the Roman frontier.

By 56 AD, Helvidius won the office of tribune of the plebs, where he distinguished himself by defending the poor against a punitive young treasurer, Olbutronius Sabinus, who abused his authority to liquidate their assets. Priscus made a convincing enough case against Sabinus that Nero stepped in to declare that future treasury officers would be held to a higher standard.

It was a begrudging reform that Nero could not have enjoyed having to make.

The specifics of Helvidius’s political career, as for several other Stoics, are a mystery to us until it careened off course and into open conflict with the ruling regime. In 66 AD, Thrasea was brought up on charges for plotting against Nero. Helvidius’s alleged sympathies for Brutus and Cassius of Julius Caesar’s time—perhaps heard in an offhand remark, or in something he had written—were used as evidence against his beloved father-in-law.

Shortly thereafter, Helvidius was asked to help Thrasea commit suicide. No sooner had Thrasea’s blood poured from his body than Helvidius and his grieving wife were sent with their two children to distant Macedonia in exile.

After two years and Nero’s death, Helvidius was recalled to Rome by the emperor Galba. Unlike Rutilius Rufus, who had chosen to stay where he was, free of Rome’s insanity, Helvidius was hopeful enough to return. Perhaps Nero had been only a bad dream—a passing tyranny—and the new emperor would be better.

Certainly Helvidius’s first actions reveal a naive faith in the stability of Rome at that time. Almost immediately, he brought impeachment charges against Eprius Marcellus, the man who had persecuted Thrasea and himself. This faith in the institutions of his country were quickly shaken—how many other senators shared guilt with Marcellus, how fair-weather was the new emperor’s support of the son of an executed traitor—and Helvidius ended up dropping his charges. Within months, Galba was dead, and thus began the so-called “Year of the Four Emperors,” in which the throne resembled a game of musical chairs.

Otho, the next emperor, would serve for barely three months—just enough time for Helvidius to receive permission to bury Galba. After the death of Otho, Helvidius gained the office of praetor, where he quickly found himself at odds with the new emperor, Vitellius, who himself lasted only eight months. In what must have seemed like an endless series of unresolved but exhausting battles of wills, Helvidius found himself cornered in 70 AD, in opposition to the new emperor, Vespasian, over whether the Senate or the emperor controlled the empire’s spending.

While these conflicts for legislative supremacy were real, certainly Helvidius’s Stoic disdain—which some might call impudence—for sovereigns undoubtedly heightened the tension. We are told that Helvidius, who had learned from Thrasea that nothing unearned is worth respect, took to calling the new emperor by his private and not his imperial name. Indeed, at the height of Vespasian’s fame, following his triumphal return from Syria, Helvidius was the only senator who chose to address the man as if he was a commoner. In all his edicts as praetor, Helvidius refused to recognize Vespasian by his royal titles.

Was it recklessness or a sincere refusal to bow before someone he believed was not his superior? Or was it simply exhaustion with the endless parade of two-bit leaders that the Senate had been forced to put up with?

We know that in time this disrespect became more pronounced. Suetonius tells us that Helvidius began to speak out directly against Vespasian. Epictetus provides us an exchange that portrays the man as utterly fearless:

When Vespasian sent for Helvidius Priscus and commanded him not to go into the senate, he replied, “It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the senate, but so long as I am, I must go in.” “Well, go in then,” says the emperor, “but say nothing.” “Do not ask my opinion, and I will be silent.” “But I must ask your opinion.” “And I must say what I think right.” “But if you do, I shall put you to death.” “When then did I tell you that I am immortal? You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow.”

You do your job, I’ll do mine, the Stoic says. You be evil, I’ll be good. Let everything else come what may.

Helvidius must have known that this approach was not long for this world, or at least for Rome. He hung on long enough to oversee the construction of the new Capitol building and the dedication of the new temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. In Tacitus, we see Helvidius Priscus standing as a kind of lonely but hopeful figure, trying to reach backward or forward to more peaceful times, where the common good was served by the state and a functioning republic would eclipse imperial excesses and the bloody succession of the Flavians.

It was not to be.

Vespasian, tired of being toyed with and undermined, decided to banish Helvidius once again. It likely says something about the power Helvidius still held that Vespasian kept the exile close so that he could keep an eye on him. In truth, it was more like a death row holding cell.

Not long after, Vespasian ordered Helvidius’s execution.

Helvidius’s wife would later commission a celebration of her husband’s life, but as with the best of the Stoics, it was not words that defined his legacy but his actions. Epictetus was inspired by him. Marcus Aurelius held him up as an example. And then, 1,927 years later, another man who had also grown up poor and had been adopted, but came to fall in love with the legislative body of his country—the senator Robert Byrd*—would take to the floor of the Senate at eighty-five years old to protest the overreaches in the name of “security” of his own president:

Helvidius Priscus spoke his mind; the emperor Vespasian killed him. In this effeminate age it is instructive to read of courage. There are members of the U.S. Senate and House who are terrified apparently if the president of the United States tells them, urges them, to vote a certain way that may be against their belief. So in this day of few men with great courage—relatively few—let us take a leaf out of Roman history and remember Helvidius Priscus.

When asked why he gave this speech, Byrd managed to unintentionally provide the perfect lesson from Helvidius Priscus’s life and those of the brave Stoics who had died opposing the reigns of Nero and his successors:

To me, that question misses the point, with all due respect to you for asking it. To me, the matter is there for a thousand years in the record. I stood for the Constitution. I stood for the institution. If it isn’t heard today, there’ll be some future member who will come through and will comb these tomes.