Fannia was the daughter of Thrasea and the wife of Helvidius Priscus, and followed her husband into exile twice before he was executed. Afterwards she asked the writer Herennius Senecio to compose a life of her husband, and gave him his diaries for the purpose. Under emperor Domitian that was lethally dangerous. When Senecio stood trial, he pointed at her. The prosecutor asked her threateningly whether she had requested it. I did ask him, she said. Did you give him the diaries? I gave them. Did your mother know? She did not. According to Pliny she did not utter a single word that would have reduced her own danger. She was exiled and her property seized, and the diaries and the book she took with her.
You can save yourself with one small qualification, and it costs you only the truth. Almost nobody would hold it against you.
The trial, the prosecutor and the sentence: not hers. Her answer was, word for word. Fannia saw that only one thing genuinely hers was at stake, and it was not her freedom. She lost everything else, and precisely because of that her husband's memory still exists.
Where would you add a small qualification to keep yourself out of the wind? And what exactly would that qualification cost you?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases