In AD 66 he offered to veto the Senate's verdict on Thrasea Paetus, and Thrasea talked him out of it. In 93 he wrote Thrasea's praise and paid for it with his life.
Quintus Junius Arulenus Rusticus belonged to the circle around Thrasea Paetus, the group modern historians call the Stoic opposition. He was a tribune of the people in 66, a praetor in 69 and, late in life, consul in 92. In 69, during the civil war, the Senate sent him as an envoy to troops marching on Rome. They attacked the delegation and wounded him, and Tacitus finds the outrage the worse for his office and his personal standing.
In 66 Nero steered the Senate into condemning Thrasea. Rusticus, young and, Tacitus says, eager for glory, offered to use his power as tribune to veto the decree. Thrasea stopped him. It would be futile, he said: it would not save the accused and it would destroy the man who tried. His own life was finished, but Rusticus stood at the start of his career and should weigh carefully what road into public life he meant to take in times like these. The walk out that had begun it all is told in the case Thrasea and the walk out of the Senate.
Plutarch tells a scene he witnessed himself. He was lecturing in Rome, with Rusticus in the audience, when a soldier came in and handed Rusticus a letter from the emperor. The room fell silent and Plutarch paused so that he could read it. Rusticus would not. He left the letter sealed until the lecture was over and the audience had gone.
In 93, the year after his consulship, he was condemned for having written the praise of Thrasea, and executed. His books were burned in the Forum, together with the life of Helvidius Priscus by Herennius Senecio. His brother Junius Mauricus and his wife Gratilla were banished. The informer Regulus, Pliny reports, celebrated the death and published a speech calling Rusticus the ape of the Stoics, branded with his scar from the civil war.
Tacitus, Pliny and Plutarch all knew people involved, and Plutarch was in the room for the letter. The book is lost. Tacitus says Rusticus praised Thrasea; Suetonius says he praised both Thrasea and Helvidius and called them the most upright of men. A later Junius Rusticus, the teacher of Marcus Aurelius, is generally thought to have been his grandson.
Thrasea did the sorting for him in 66: the verdict was not his to change, his own future was. Rusticus kept that future, and 27 years later spent it on the one thing that was his, putting into writing what he thought of a good man. The sealed letter is the same lesson in miniature. The emperor's message would keep. His attention was his.
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · About this site · Questions or suggestions