Lecture 12

I missed last lecture - this seems to start after Augustus Caesar's rule into Tiberius's rule.

Stoic opposition

Patterson (p.264) identified two strains in Roman stoicism: reactionary and reformist.

• Patrician Stoicism, a reaction to contemporary politics
  • More influential under the Principate than the Republic
  • Tool for survival under the Principate
  • "Philosophy of consolation, life sucks under Nero"
  • Seneca, Epictetus
• Reformist Stoicism, which could be a radical interpretation.
  • Reforms of society at large

Manifested principally in writing and in the actions of a few individuals.

• Cato the Younger (see below)
• Brutus and Cassius were also heroized by the Stoics
• Thrasea Paetus below, opposed Nero (primary figure in stoic opposition)

Wirszubski Ch. 5

• Principate & libertas were once considered contradictory but later were mixed.
• Stoic Opposition was not attempting to restore the Republic, but rather wanted the emperor to be more like Augustus, not Nero.
  • See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoic_Opposition
• Socrates took his own life as he wouldn't admit he'd committed any crime - intellectual opposition to tyranny.
• Cato the Younger takes his own life while reading Plato's Phaedo
  • Posterchild for later Stoics - model of opposition to tyranny
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Younger#Final_campaign_and_death
  • "Caesar is said to have responded to his death by lamenting that Cato's death meant Caesar could not pardon him."
  • "After righting the city's financial accounts and disbursing the remaining monies to the city's inhabitants, Cato discussed with his friends at dinner the Stoic belief that a truly free man would never become a slave."
    • Wow. He seems a good man.

Libertas Senatus

• "Freedom of the Senate" became important in the imperial period (perhaps as a counterpoint to Imperial power?)
• Last institutional link to the Roman Republic, became important / representative of the better elements of the old Republic
• Roman people never (generally) rebelled against the emperors
• Opposition to 'despotism' was confined to the senatorial class
• Thrasea Paetus (important to Tacitus/Wirszubski) senator who constantly opposed Nero in dramatic ways

Exitus literature

Exitus literature: biographies of famous men that focus on their deaths ('exitus', generally by suicide), often Stoics, which were popular among the Stoic opposition.

• Several biographies of Cato the Younger were in circulation for instance
• Tacitus' Agricola is one surviving text notably influenced by this genre
  • Tacitus himself never killed himself (though lived through 'bad emperor' Domitian's reign)
  • Agricola was father-in-law who was governor of Britain in 77 AD by Domitian, who later persecuted him out of paranoia
  • Agricola never took his own life despite imperial prosecution - Tacitus cited him as 'a great man under a bad emperor' (though Tacitus himself is of course biased).

Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD)

Roman emperor, last of the Five Good Emperors

• Wrote Meditations, private reflections not intended for general publication.
  • Written in Greek (not Latin!), though contextually appropriate as Meditations covered a lot of originally Greek philosophy.
  • Reflections: who knows why he wrote them, but in my mind I wonder if they weren't written as reminders. Here are things that are important for myself to remember in the future.
• Wrote about how he had learned much from many of the Stoic Opposition figures (Dr. Bringman: interesting particularly given that he himself was an emperor, the very figures many of the Stoic Opposition folks tended to oppose).