Paconius Agrippinus came from a family that knew the price of independence: his father had been executed under Tiberius. In the year 67 his own case came before the Senate, in the aftermath of the purges following Piso's conspiracy.
While the Senate deliberated, Agrippinus was in Rome going about his ordinary day. He was bathing and preparing for lunch.
A messenger arrived with news that the trial was under way. Agrippinus asked whether there was a verdict yet. No. Then, he said, let us go and eat; he was hungry, and it was time to eat.
Later that day a second messenger came: banished. Agrippinus asked one thing. To Rome or to the island? To Aricia. Then, he said, I shall go and have lunch there.
Aricia lay about twenty-five kilometres outside Rome on the Appian Way and was the usual first stop on the road south. His remark therefore meant, quite literally, that he was treating the first stage of his exile as an ordinary day's travel.
Epictetus cites him repeatedly in his lectures, more often than almost anyone, and quotes a saying that explains the rest: Agrippinus said he did not wish to stand in his own way. Others, he said, collect praise and standing; I collect the freedom to do what I have to do.
What became of him afterwards we do not know. No writings of his survive and no tomb is known. All we have is the way he responded on that one afternoon.
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 words deny it: he explicitly asks where to, because the difference between Aricia and an island is considerable.
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 second answer completes it. When the outcome arrived, he adjusted his plan and not his day. He went to lunch, only somewhere else.
Aricia was not Gyaros. Banishment to a place just outside Rome, in the company of your own property, is easier to carry than what happened to Musonius, and Agrippinus' 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?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions