Told during lunch that his trial was under way in the senate, Agrippinus asked to be informed of the verdict and went on eating. Exiled that afternoon, he set off for Aricia and had dinner there.
Agrippinus was a Roman senator of the Neronian period and a Stoic. His father had been put to death under Tiberius. Tacitus records that he was banished from Italy in AD 66, in the same wave of prosecutions that reached Thrasea Paetus. What survives of him as a philosopher comes almost entirely from Epictetus, who used him repeatedly as a model of a person who has settled in advance what is his.
The best known scene has Agrippinus at Aricia, taking his midday meal, while in Rome the senate is hearing his case. Word arrives that the trial has begun. He asks to be told how it turns out and carries on. The verdict comes: banishment, not death. He asks whether his property has been left to him, hears that it has, and says they will dine at Aricia then.
What Epictetus admires is the absence of an interval. There is no moment in which Agrippinus suspends his life to await the news, because he has already decided which part of the matter belongs to him.
Epictetus also preserves a line of his that explains the behaviour. Agrippinus is said to have refused to give himself trouble on top of the trouble the world was giving him: I will not stand in my own way. And when others went to Nero's games or accepted parts in his entertainments because it was safer, Agrippinus declined, on the reasoning that a man who agrees to play a bad role starts to become the role.
The exile is attested in Tacitus. The lunch and the sayings come from Epictetus, in lecture notes taken down by a student, and they are told to make a philosophical point. Epictetus was writing within living memory of the man, which counts for something, but these are teaching stories rather than reportage.
Agrippinus is the practical version of the teaching, where Canus is the heroic one. He did not face an executioner; he faced a hearing, an inconvenience, a change of address. Most people will never be tested the way Canus was, and will be tested the way Agrippinus was many times: news arrives about a matter you cannot influence, and you decide whether the afternoon still belongs to you.
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