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

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.

THRASEA THE FEARLESS (THRA-see-ah PAY-toos)

Origin: Padua

B. 14 AD

D. 66 AD

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.