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

Augustus’ court: his wife, his daughter, his grandsons, his stepsons, his sister, Agrippa, the relatives, servants, friends, Arius, Maecena, the doctors, the sacrificial priests . . . the whole court, dead . . . someone has to be the last. There, too, the death of the whole house.

Athenodorus died. Arius died. Augustus died . . . and the wheels of time kept turning.

AGRIPPINUS THE DIFFERENT (Agri-PEE-nus)

Origin: Unknown

B. Unknown

D. After 67 AD

We don’t know much about Paconius Agrippinus besides the fact that his father was executed by the emperor Tiberius, the successor of Augustus, on trumped-up charges of treason. We don’t know what Agrippinus wrote, or where he was born—or even when he was born and when he died.

We know that he lived in the age of Tiberius’s successors, two corrupt and violent emperors, Claudius and Nero, but where he went to school, or how he entered government service, remains a mystery to us.

Yet for all the unknowns about Agrippinus, he leaps out from the historical record as a kind of swashbuckling and distinctive figure, one who stood out even among the bravest and best-known Stoics of his time.

This was no accident. Because in a Roman Empire that had by the time of Claudius and Nero given itself over fully to avarice and corruption, anyone who truly lived by the Stoic principles—as Agrippinus did—would stand out.

According to Agrippinus, we are all threads in a garment—which means that most people are indistinguishable from each other, one thread among countless others. Most people were happy conforming, being anonymous, handling their own tiny, unsung role in the fabric. Who can blame them? Under a tyrant, the best strategy is usually to keep a low profile, to blend in so one does not catch the attention of the capricious and cruel ruler who holds the power of life and death.

But to Agrippinus, even having lost his father under such circumstances, this kind of compromise was inconceivable. “I want to be the red,” he said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful. . . . ‘Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?”

Years later there would be a song by Alice in Chains, which would say in a nutshell what Agrippinus believed in his heart: “If I can’t be my own, I’d feel better dead.”

Individuality and autonomy, these are things many people pay lip service to—in fact, it’s almost become a new form of conformity. We talk about being our unique selves, about letting our colors shine, but deep down we know this is just talk. Under pressure, when it really counts, we want the same things as everyone else. We do the same things as everyone else.

Not Agrippinus. He was willing to stand out—to be bright red—even if it meant being beheaded or exiled.

Nor was this desire driven by ego or a love of attention, as it unfortunately is even among those rare men and women who reject convention.

“It right to praise Agrippinus,” Epictetus tells us, “because, although he was a man of the very highest worth, he never praised himself, but used to blush even if someone else praised him.” It was standing on principle that brought fame to Agrippinus, and yet if he could have taken his stands in private, without attracting attention, he would have.

What he drew his fame from was his able service as the governor of Crete and Cyrene, surprising many with his dedication as an administrator, while others were using the same positions to line their pockets. Tacitus tells us that Agrippinus had inherited his “father’s hatred towards emperors” after the injustice he had seen done to his “guiltless” father. It was an injustice indeed—for not only was his father likely innocent, his actual death sentence was finally executed after the highly sensitive emperor was teased by a palace dwarf for having waffled on the issue. It’s remarkable this absurd mockery of the courts did nothing to diminish Agrippinus’s commitment to the law and to applying it fairly and earnestly when the duty later fell to him.

“When Agrippinus was governor,” Epictetus would recount admiringly, “he used to try to persuade the persons whom he sentenced that it was proper for them to be sentenced. ‘For,’ he would say, ‘it is not as an enemy or as a brigand that I record my vote against them, but as a curator and guardian; just as also the physician encourages the man upon whom he is operating, and persuades him to submit to the operation.’”

This commitment was increasingly unusual in an empire where avarice was rewarded and principles were baggage. It does not seem to have occurred to Agrippinus, however, to be anything other than pure and committed and clear-eyed.