Demetrius the Cynic lived in Rome in the first century and owned almost nothing. Seneca knew him personally and cited him in several works, not as a quotation from a book but as a living example.
Caligula offered him two hundred thousand sesterces. That was a sum a family could live on for decades; a Roman soldier earned about nine hundred a year.
Demetrius laughed and said that if the emperor had really wanted to tempt him, he should have tried it with his whole empire.
He did not take the money. Seneca tells the story and adds what he considers remarkable about it: not that Demetrius scorned the money, but that he had first worked out what he needed, so that the question was already answered before it was asked.
Demetrius was also attached to the circle around Thrasea Paetus, the senator who walked out of the chamber. When Thrasea had to die, Demetrius was with him.
Later he was banished by the emperor Vespasian along with the other philosophers. By tradition he was not thrown by that either; Vespasian is said to have remarked that he did everything to get himself abused, but that he would not kill him, because he does not kill a barking dog.
Seneca called him a man who did not possess wisdom but did practise it, and said he regarded him not as a teacher but as a witness: someone who showed the teaching could actually be carried out, which on paper always remains doubtful.
A sum that changes your life, offered by someone who asks nothing in return. Not yet.
The tempting sorting is that Demetrius despised money. His answer does something sharper than despising: it moves the question.
The offer came from outside and was not his; whether he accepted it was. But instead of comparing the sum with what he had, he compared it with what he needed. Then two hundred thousand turns out to be as irrelevant as two thousand, and there is nothing to weigh.
That is the usable core. Whoever does not know his own floor lets every offer set it for him, and that is exactly how people end up by accident in situations they did not want to be in.
And the joke about the whole empire is not bluster. He is saying: at a larger sum it might have started to shift, and that would still be about me and not about the money. He names the price he does not know.
Refusing is easier when you need nothing and have nobody to support. Demetrius had no family that would have been better off for that sum, and whoever does faces a different question than he did.
And there is something uncomfortable in the way he refused. Laughing at an emperor is not a sorting but a provocation; it is no longer only about what is his. The Stoa teaches independence from other people's opinion, and whoever keeps demonstrating how independent he is has not quite got there.
At what sum would you say yes to something you would rather not do? And do you know why exactly there?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions