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

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.