A defense went deliberately unoffered, as it had for Rutilius Rufus’s show trial so many years before.
The Senate voted to kill him, and to send his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, into exile.
When the first rumors of the news came, Thrasea was sitting with his friends in his gardens, as they had for so many years—poets, philosophers, and magistrates. Epictetus tells us that Thrasea, deep in a conversation on the immortality of the soul with Demetrius the Cynic, met the news with sardonic resignation: “I would rather be killed today than banished tomorrow.”
Nero offered Thrasea the same courtesy he had offered Seneca: He could choose the manner of his own death. For Thrasea, it was another moment for a conversation with the great dead men who were so real to him. Socrates. Cicero. Cato. Even the recently departed Seneca. “Nero can kill me,” Thrasea said, echoing Socrates’s last words, “but he cannot harm me.”
As he prepared to die, the first thing Thrasea did was urge his loved ones to leave, saying his goodbyes and asking them to take care of themselves. Then he pleaded with his wife, who wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and die alongside her husband. Thrasea, proving to be more empathetic than Seneca once again, begged his wife to persevere for the sake of their daughter, since she would be losing her own husband with Helvidius’s exile.
When the officials arrived with the death decree, Thrasea retired to his bedroom with Demetrius the Cynic and Helvidius Priscus. Perhaps they talked philosophy for a few minutes, or maybe Thrasea advised Helvidius to carry on the fight from a distance. Eventually, they got down to business. Thrasea asked his companions to open the veins on both his arms.
As he lay bleeding out, he—in a nod to Seneca’s famous suicide only a year before—offered a prayer of libation to Jupiter the Deliverer and said to the young man who had delivered his death sentence, “You have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.” Then he turned to Demetrius and uttered his last words, which, like Thrasea and the rest of us, were writ on water and disappeared into the abyss of history.
Nero had eliminated another enemy, and a potential check against his excesses. But as Seneca had warned him, crimes return upon those who commit them, and no one can murder or kill enough to make themselves invincible.
As with all despots and gangsters, Nero’s support eroded slowly, and then all at once. The plot against him that Seneca had been caught up in showed that the people had begun to turn on their deranged king. Conspirators, facing certain death, began delivering the truth that Nero had long sought to avoid: “No one in the army was more loyal to you than I,” Sabrius Flavus told him, “when you deserved our love. But I began to hate you, after you became the murderer of your mother and wife, a chariot driver, an actor and an arsonist.” Another soldier, when asked why he would try to kill the emperor, explained, “It was the only way I could help you.”
Even the willingness of Rusticus to stand with Thrasea was a sign of dissension inside a Senate that had been hitherto unanimous in its support of Nero’s excesses. But still, these were only flickers. The final years of Nero’s life were marked by more murders and more indulgent performances. Rigging singing contests so he could win, he toured the empire lapping up praise from increasingly exhausted citizens.
Eventually, it was the army that first turned on him. Suddenly, Nero had lost the beam on top of which his intimidation rested. Now he could not even flee Rome with protection from previously loyal henchmen.
It was an anonymous Praetorian guard who would give the final hint to Nero: “Is it as awful as that, to die?” he asked. Nero awoke one morning to find that most of his bodyguards had abandoned their posts. James Romm describes what would have awaited him were he captured: “Nero would be held immobile with his neck in the fork of a tree, then beaten to death with stout rocks. His ravaged corpse would be flung from the Tarpeian Rock, in imitation of the death deserved for Rome’s worst criminals.”
Nero, who had so long ignored Seneca’s lessons on dying, and who had driven Thrasea to suicide and executed Plautus among countless others, now tested two daggers against his flesh. He hesitated and resheathed them, hoping to wait just a little longer. He took the time to ask his remaining companions to make sure that he not be decapitated after his death—a shameful hypocrisy from the man who had hoisted Plautus’s head up by the hair and mocked the dead man’s nose.
Then, steeling himself, Nero grabbed one of the knives and stabbed himself in the throat.
One of the conspirators against Nero in 65 AD had joked, when staring at the hastily dug grave Nero’s goons had prepared, “Not even this is up to code.” Nero’s malevolent incompetence extended to his own suicide: He had picked the most painful way to possibly do it . . . and failed anyway. Finally, Epaphroditus, a former slave and Nero’s aide, stepped forward and jiggled the dagger, which nicked the artery enough to begin the end of Nero’s reign. His second-to-last words, as blood filled his throat, were typical Nero nonsense. “This,” he burbled, “is loyalty.”
Just then, the soldiers returned, hoping to deliver the kind of public death sentence to which Nero had sentenced to so many others. As a centurion attempted to stop the bleeding, Nero laughed and said, “Too late.”
He was dead.
Many Stoic philosophers had gruesomely preceded him—Rubellius Plautus, Barea Soranus, Seneca, and of course Thrasea—to almost no point but Nero’s ephemeral satisfaction. Yet no one who heard of Nero’s death or saw him alive would have thought he got the better end of the deal.
Thrasea said that Nero had the power to kill but not harm, which was true, with one exception. Nero had harmed himself over and over again, and filled his thirty years with a kind of living death that stands to this day as an example of the worst kind of leadership.
Cato. Thrasea. Those two names are watchwords for courage, for wisdom, for moderation, and for justice.
Nero? A pejorative for excess, incompetence, delusion, and evil. Proof of William Blake’s line that the most potent poison ever known rests in a Caesar’s laurel crown.
HELVIDIUS PRISCUS
THE SENATOR
(Hel-VID-ee-us PRISS-cuss)
Origin: Cluviae
B. 25 AD
D. 75 AD
The story of the child who works their way from humble origins to the great body of government of their country is not a new one. The politician who comes from nothing, achieves great power, and uses it to reach back down and help the people they came from is the story of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Clay. It’s the story of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel. It’s the story of Helvidius Priscus too.
Helvidius was born the son of a soldier stationed in the southern Italian lands of the Caraceni tribe of the Samnium region, in the town of Cluviae. Helvidius Priscus would rise from these humble plebeian origins to be a major figure in Roman life, with a career that spanned the reigns of five emperors.
Given the dates of his first political office, we can be confident he was born in 25 AD or earlier, and must have, from a young age, been a dedicated and earnest student. Tacitus tells us that from his early days he “devoted his extraordinary talents to higher studies, not as most youths do to cloak a useless leisure with a pretentious name, but that he might enter public life better fortified against the chances of fortune.” From Tacitus we also learn that his early teachers were Stoics, who counted “only those things ‘good’ which are morally right and only those things ‘evil’ which are base, and who reckon power, high birth, and everything else that is beyond the control of the will as neither good nor bad.”