Told that the Senate was hearing his case, Agrippinus said it was his hour for exercise and went. Condemned to exile, he asked about his property and set off to have lunch at Aricia.
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 as a model of a person who has settled in advance what is his.
The best known scene is in the first chapter of Epictetus's Discourses. Word is brought to Agrippinus that his case is being heard in the Senate. Good luck to it, he says, but it is the fifth hour, the hour at which he always took his exercise and then a cold bath, so let us go and exercise. When he has finished, someone comes to tell him he has been condemned. Exile or death? Exile. And my property? Not confiscated. Then let us go to Aricia, he says, and have lunch there. Aricia was the first stop on the road south out of Rome.
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 draws the lesson himself: if I must die later, I will have lunch now, since it is time for lunch.
Epictetus also preserves a line of his that explains the behaviour: I am not a hindrance to myself. And he tells how a man named Florus, unsure whether to take part in Nero's shows, asked Agrippinus for advice. Agrippinus told him to go. Asked why he did not go himself, he answered: because I do not even consider it. The point Epictetus draws from it is that once you start weighing such a question in terms of safety and advantage, you are already close to forgetting who you are.
The exile is attested in Tacitus. The morning of the verdict 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 speaking 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 trial and exile from Italy, with his property intact. 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 morning still belongs to you.
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