Musonius Rufus: The Stoic Nero Exiled to Gyaros Who Taught Epictetus

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Gaius Musonius Rufus was born around 20 to 30 AD in Volsinii in Etruria, the son of a Roman knight, one rung below the senatorial class. Under Nero he became a famous teacher of Stoicism in Rome and was tied to the circle historians call the Stoic Opposition, aristocrats who refused to flatter the emperor. Around 60 AD, when Nero banished his associate Rubellius Plautus to Asia as a possible rival, Musonius voluntarily followed him into exile and stayed until Plautus was executed, returning to Rome in 62 AD. After the Pisonian Conspiracy of 65 AD he was convicted on a charge of taking part and banished to Gyaros, a barren rock in the Aegean.

Musonius treated exile as an advantage that stripped away distraction, and a small community of philosophers gathered around him on the island. After Nero died in 68 AD he returned, and in the civil war of 69 AD he walked out to lecture Vespasian's advancing soldiers on peace, until companions pulled him away from their threats. He later prosecuted Publius Egnatius Celer, a fellow Stoic whose false testimony had condemned Barea Soranus, and won a conviction. When Vespasian banished philosophers in 71 AD, Musonius was the one exception, though he was later exiled too. His most famous student was Epictetus, and he died around or before 101 AD.

• He argued that men and women have the same capacity for virtue, so daughters must receive the same philosophical education as sons.
• He condemned the Roman custom of exposing unwanted infants as unnatural and a violation of human duty.
• He was a strict vegetarian who preferred simple, uncooked food over elaborate cooking.
• He defended long hair and beards as a covering given by nature, calling constant shaving vanity.
• He likely never wrote anything for publication; his lectures survive because students named Lucius and Pollio recorded them.