Paconius Agrippinus came from a family that knew the price of independence: his father had been executed under Tiberius. In the year 66 his own case came before the Senate, in the same wave of prosecutions that condemned Thrasea Paetus. According to Tacitus, his accusers called him the heir of his father's hatred of emperors.
While the Senate deliberated, Agrippinus went about his ordinary day. It was the fifth hour, late in the morning, the time at which he always took his exercise and then a cold bath.
A messenger arrived: your case is being heard in the Senate. Good luck to it, said Agrippinus, but it is the fifth hour; let us go and exercise.
When he had finished, a second messenger came: you have been condemned. He asked one question at a time. Exile or death? Exile. And my property? It has not been confiscated. Then, he said, let us go to Aricia and have lunch there.
Aricia lay about 25 kilometres outside Rome on the Appian Way and was the usual first stop on the road south. He had been banished from Italy, so his remark meant, quite literally, that he was treating the first stage of his exile as an ordinary day's travel, beginning with the meal that was due.
Epictetus cites him in several places, always with respect. The line that explains the rest is his own: I am not a hindrance to myself. Elsewhere Epictetus tells how a man named Florus asked him whether to take part in Nero's shows. Agrippinus told him to go, and when asked why he did not go himself, answered that he did not even consider the question.
What became of him afterwards we do not know. No writings of his survive and no tomb is known. What we have is a handful of sayings and the way he spent that one morning.
While others decide your fate, you have to do something with the hours between the news and the outcome.
The tempting sorting is that he considered his banishment unimportant. His own questions deny it: exile or death, and what about my property. He wanted to know exactly what had been decided, because it made a real difference.
The cut sits in the time. The verdict lay with the Senate and would come when it came; waiting, brooding or pleading would have changed none of it. The hours between the news and the verdict were his, and that is a territory most people hand over without a fight.
That is the real exercise here, and it is more everyday than most of these cases. Almost nobody is banished; almost everybody regularly waits on a result, a message, someone else's decision. The question is always the same: whose are those hours.
His last answer completes it. When the outcome arrived, he adjusted his plan and not his day. It was time for lunch, and he had it, only somewhere else.
Exile with your property intact is not Gyaros. Agrippinus kept his means and only had to leave Italy, which is easier to carry than what happened to Musonius, and his nonchalance is partly the nonchalance of a man who got off lightly.
And there is a stance in it that can be read another way. Carrying on as though nothing is wrong can be equanimity and it can be denial; from the outside those two look identical. The difference lies in whether you have seen the blow and carry on anyway, or have refused to see it.
Which verdict of others are you waiting for, and how many of your days are you already paying toward it? What would change if you simply took your hour today?
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