than banished to-morrow. What then did Rufus[1] say to him? If you choose death as the heavier misfortune, how great is the folly of your choice? But if, as the lighter, who has given you the choice? Will you not study to be content with that which has been given to you?
What then did Agrippinus[2] say? He said, “I am not a hindrance to myself.” When it was reported to him that his trial was going on in the Senate, he said, “I hope it may turn out well; but it is the fifth hour of the day”—this was the time when he was used to exercise himself and then take the cold bath—“let us go and take our exercise.” After he had taken his exercise, one comes and tells hinn, You have been condemned. To banishment, he replies, or to death? To banishment. What about my property? It is not taken from you. Let us go to Aricia then,[3] he said, and dine.
This it is to have studied what a man ought to study; to have made desire, aversion, free from hindrance, and free from all that a man would avoid. I must die. If now, I am ready to die. If, after a short time, I now dine because it is the dinner-hour; after this I will then die. How? Like a man who gives up[4] what belongs to another.
- ↑ C. Musonius Rufus, a Tuscan by birth, of equestrian rank, philosopher and Stoic (Tacit. Hist. iii. 81).
- ↑ Paconius Agrippinus was condemned in Nero's time. The charge against him was that he inherited his father's hatred of the head of the Roman state (Tacit. Ann. xvi. 28). The father of Agrippinus had been put to death under Tiberius (Suetonius, Tib. c. 61).
- ↑ Aricia, about twenty Roman miles from Rome, on the Via Appia (Horace, Sat. i. 5, 1):—
“Egressum magna me excepit Aricia Roma.”
- ↑ Epictetus, Encheiridion, c. 11: “Never say on the occasion of anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but say, ‘I have returned it.’”
in the time of the Emperor Claudius, heroically showed her husband the way to die (Plinius, Letters, iii. 16.) Martial has immortalised the elder Arria in a famous epigram (i. 14):—
"When Arria to her Paetus gave the sword,
Which her own hand from her chaste bosom drew,
‘This wound,’ she said, ‘believe me, gives no pain,
But that will pain me which thy band will do.’”
