soled? Will you not stretch out your neck as Lateranus [1] did at Rome when Nero ordered him to be beheaded? For when he had stretched out his neck, and received a feeble blow, which made him draw it in for a moment, he stretched it out again. And a little before, when he was visited by Epaphroditus,[2] Nero's freedman, who asked him about the cause of offence which he had given, he said, “If I choose to tell anything, I will tell your master.”
What then should a man have in readiness in such circumstances? What else than this? What is mine, and what is not mine; and what is permitted to me, and what is not permitted to me. I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment? Tell me the secret which you possess. I will not, for this is in my power. But I will put you in chains. [3] Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg, but my will[4] not even Zeus himself can overpower. I will throw you into prison. My poor body, you mean. I will cut your head off. When then have I told you that my head alone cannot be cut off? These are the things which philosophers should meditate on, which they should write daily, in which they should exercise themselves. Thrasea[5] used to say, I would rather be killed to-day
- ↑ Plautius Lateranus, consul-elect, was charged with being engaged in Piso's conspiracy against Nero. He was hurried to execution without being allowed to see his children; and though the tribune who executed him was privy to the plot, Lateranus said nothing. (Tacit. Ann. xv. 49, 60.)
- ↑ Epaphroditus was a freedman of Nero, and once the master of Epictetus. He was Nero's secretary. One good act is recorded of him: he helped Nero to kill himself, and for this act he was killed by Domitian (Suetonius, Domitian, c. 14).
- ↑ This is an imitation of a passage in the Bacchae of Euripides (v. 492, &c.), which is also imitated by Horace (Epp. i. 16).
- ↑ ήπροαίρεσίς. It is sometimes rendered by the Latin prop situm or by voluntas, the will.
- ↑ Thrasea Paetus, a Stoic philosopher, who was ordered in Nero's time to put himself to death (Tacit. Ann. xvi. 21-35). He was the husband of Arria, whose mother Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus,
