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

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.