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Ep. 19: Agrippinus Goes to Exercise · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  It is late morning in Rome, in the reign of Nero.
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  In the Senate house, a trial is under way.
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  The man on trial is not in the room.
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  His name is Paconius Agrippinus.
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  He is a senator, and he is a Stoic.
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  Somewhere across the city he has a morning to get through, and he has decided what
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  to do with it.
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  I want to begin with that empty place in the Senate, because everything in this
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  story depends on how much hangs on a room he is not standing in.
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  Let's get our bearings.
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  Nero's Rome was a dangerous place to sit in the Senate.
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  Around the years 66 and 67, a wave of prosecutions fell on men who were known for
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  their independence and their philosophy.
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  The most famous was Thrasea Paetus, a leading Stoic senator.
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  Thrasea was condemned to death.
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  The Roman historian Tacitus describes these trials in the sixteenth book of his
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  Annals, and Agrippinus is swept up in the same season.
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  Now, what was the charge against Agrippinus?
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  Here I'm leaning on a footnote by George Long, the translator I'm reading from
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  today, who cites Tacitus.
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  Long writes that the charge was that he inherited his father's hatred of the head of
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  the Roman state.
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  Hold on to that for a moment.
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  It is not quite a charge about something he did.
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  It is a charge about a feeling he was said to have inherited.
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  And the father is real.
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  Long's note adds that the father of Agrippinus had been put to death under the
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  emperor Tiberius, and he points to Suetonius for that.
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  So this senator grew up knowing exactly what an emperor's displeasure could do to a
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  family.
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  He did not need Nero to teach him.
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  The shadow of one emperor's court had already fallen across his house,
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  and now another emperor's court was looking at him.
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  I should be plain about what I'm doing here.
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  I'm not telling you anything I've worked out from the archives.
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  I'm passing along what Tacitus and Suetonius say, as Long's notes report it,
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  and what Epictetus tells his students.
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  The one thing I'm adding is the walk of the story itself, and I'll mark my own
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  guesses when I make them.
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  The story comes to us from Epictetus, in the Discourses, as Long translates them.
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  Epictetus is teaching his students about what is in our power and what is not,
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  the same boundary we've walked along before, with the leg in the fetter and the list
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  at the start of the Manual.
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  And he reaches for Agrippinus as a living example.
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  Just before the scene, he gives us the senator's own motto.
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  Agrippinus said, and I'm quoting Long exactly: "I am not a hindrance to myself."
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  Then comes the scene itself.
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  Here it is, word for word from Long's translation.
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  When it was reported to him that his trial was going on in the Senate,
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  he said: "I hope it may turn out well; but it is the fifth hour of the day"
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  this was the time when he was used to exercise himself and then take the cold bath,
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  "let us go and take our exercise."
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  After he had taken his exercise, one comes and tells him, "You have been condemned."
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  "To banishment," he replies, "or to death?"
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  "To banishment."
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  "What about my property?"
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  "It is not taken from you."
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  "Let us go to Aricia then," he said, "and dine."
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  Let's slow down and look at how this goes, because it is built very carefully.
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  First, the news arrives that the trial is under way.
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  Agrippinus does not say it is nothing.
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  He says, "I hope it may turn out well."
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  That is an honest, human wish.
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  He is not pretending to be made of stone.
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  But the very next clause turns on a little word: "but."
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  It is the fifth hour of the day.
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  By the Roman way of counting, that falls in the late morning,
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  roughly around eleven by our clocks, though the Roman hours stretched and shrank
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  with the seasons.
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  And Epictetus tells us what that hour means to this man: it is when he is used to
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  exercise himself and then take the cold bath.
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  It is his habit.
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  It is his own appointment, and nobody else wrote it.
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  I imagine the scene at this point.
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  A courtyard or an exercise ground, the stone still cool from the night,
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  the air smelling of dust and oil.
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  I imagine a servant or a friend hovering near, eager to talk,
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  ready to say that surely he should go to the Senate, or send word,
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  or do something.
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  That is my picture, and it isn't in the text.
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  What is in the text is five words: "let us go and take our exercise."
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  Then the second beat.
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  After he has exercised, one comes and tells him he has been condemned.
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  Epictetus gives us no name for the messenger.
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  I imagine a breathless man at the edge of the bathing room,
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  not knowing whether to speak.
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  But look at what Agrippinus asks.
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  He does not ask, "How could they?"
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  He does not ask for a speech to be sent to the Senate.
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  He asks the question that matters most: "To banishment, or to death?"
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  Think about that question.
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  In the same weeks, Thrasea Paetus, a man of the same philosophy,
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  was condemned to death.
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  Agrippinus does not know which verdict he has.
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  That is a real question with a real edge on it, and he asks it plainly.
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  The answer: banishment.
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  Then the third question, and I find it the most human of the three.
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  "What about my property?"
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  He is not above wanting his house and his fields.
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  The answer comes back: "It is not taken from you."
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  So he has lost Rome and Italy, and he has kept his estate.
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  And his response is the line that has been repeated for nearly two thousand years:
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  "Let us go to Aricia then, and dine."
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  Aricia is a small detail that matters.
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  Long's footnote tells us it lay about twenty Roman miles from Rome,
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  on the Via Appia, and he points to the poet Horace, who mentions the town in one of
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  his satires as a stop on a journey out of the city.
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  Twenty Roman miles is something like sixteen of our miles.
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  So it is the first stretch of the road south.
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  It is where a traveler leaving Rome might end his first day.
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  So here is how I read the line, and this part is my own interpretation.
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  Agrippinus takes the worst news of his public life and turns it into a travel plan
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  with a meal at the end of it.
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  Exile becomes a change of dining room.
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  That is not because exile is nothing.
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  A man who loves his city, his friends, and his place in the Senate loses something
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  real when he is sent away.
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  It is because the thing he is able to do next is still ordinary.
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  There is a road.
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  There is a town.
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  There is dinner.
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  And notice what Epictetus makes of it.
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  Right after the scene, he says that this is what it is to have studied what a man
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  ought to study.
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  Agrippinus has made his desire and his aversion free from hindrance.
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  The Senate's verdict was never going to be his to decide.
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  His exercise hour was.
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  His dinner was.
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  And the way he held his own mind while the verdict came in was his as well.
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  That is the same line Epictetus draws in the Manual, between what is our own act and
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  what is not, and the same line he draws when he says you may fetter my leg,
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  but not my will.
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  I want to be honest about one thing, though.
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  We should not turn Agrippinus into a hero who knew he was safe.
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  He did not know.
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  He asked whether it was banishment or death, because he honestly did not know.
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  His outcome was milder than Thrasea's, and a good deal of that was out of his hands.
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  What was in his hands was the morning.
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  He did not let fear or hope for the verdict take his exercise from him,
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  or his cold bath, or his composure when the news came.
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  There is also nothing theatrical here.
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  We have no speech, no defiance, no gesture aimed at the emperor.
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  Stoicism in this scene is not a performance for the Senate.
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  It is a man keeping faith with the ordinary shape of his day.
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  A bath.
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  A meal.
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  A road out of town.
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  I find that moving in a quiet way, because most of us will never stand in front of
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  an emperor, but all of us have a fifth hour, and a hard piece of news that arrives
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  just before or just after it.
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  And that is perhaps the whole of what the senator teaches.
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  He cannot change the room he is not standing in.
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  He can walk to his own exercise ground, and he can walk out onto the Appian Way when
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  the time comes.
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  I imagine him, near evening, tired from the road, seated at a table in
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  Aricia with the lamps lit, among friends.
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  The text does not say that.
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  But the text does say where he was headed, and what he meant to do when he got
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  there.
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  He meant to dine.
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  Good morning, and take your own hour as it comes.