Imperial Rome

Imperial Rome is the distant setting through which the novel brings Stoic thought into Conrad Hensley’s present. In the book he reads at Santa Rita, Roman stories of slavery, public humiliation, threatened execution, and exile make the ancient world more than historical background: they offer Conrad a vocabulary for distinguishing what power can take from what a person may still refuse to surrender.

The ancient world in a prison book

Conrad encounters Imperial Rome while trying to read in his cell, amid the ordinary clamor of the jail. The commissary cart has arrived without Bugler tobacco, setting off complaints and threats from inmates; above them, Conrad sits on his bunk beneath the lizard screen and tries to concentrate. The book is not the entertaining The Stoics’ Game he expected, but The Stoics, a damaged volume of ancient writings. A deputy has left it in limp, unbound pages. Its physical condition and mistaken title make the discovery feel less like a carefully chosen lesson than an accident of confinement.

The introduction identifies Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, C. Musonius Rufus, and Zeno as philosophers from nearly two thousand years earlier, in the days of Imperial Rome. Conrad initially finds the introductory prose tedious. His attention changes when he learns that Epictetus had himself spent time in prison, had been tortured and crippled, and nevertheless became a major Roman philosopher. The period’s force in the scene comes from this unexpected connection: Conrad is not simply reading about distant rulers and customs but encountering an account of a thinker who knew imprisonment from within.

Nero and the spectacle of obedience

The stories Conrad reads show Roman authority acting directly upon bodies and public identities. Epictetus recounts how Nero summoned the historian Florus to take part in one of the emperor’s spectacles. Famous and noble Romans were made to wear costumes and perform degrading roles in tragedies Nero devised. Refusal could mean death; acceptance meant humiliation before Rome. Faced with that choice, Florus asks his Stoic friend Agrippinus what to do. Agrippinus reveals that Nero has summoned him too, but tells Florus to appear in the tragedy.

The exchange does not present resistance as a simple rule that everyone must follow. Florus has considered his predicament, and Agrippinus’s answer leaves him to perform the role. The coercive spectacle makes the limits of outward choice unmistakable: Nero controls the summons and the threat, while the philosophers must decide how to meet circumstances they did not choose. In the account Conrad encounters, the question is not whether the ruler has power, but what that power can settle about the person compelled to answer it.

Character tested under threat

A second example sharpens the distinction between survival and preserving character. An Olympic athlete is threatened with death unless he submits to castration so that he can serve as a statuesque eunuch, a human ornament in Nero’s seraglio. His philosopher brother asks whether they are to let the knife do its work. The athlete refuses and is executed. Epictetus describes him not merely by his athletic victory but as a man whose life in the arena had made him more than someone displaying himself in a gymnasium.

The episode sets bodily destruction against a choice that remains the athlete’s own. He cannot control Nero’s threat or prevent his execution; he can refuse the demanded submission. The account makes that refusal costly rather than triumphant: his death confirms the danger of preserving character under absolute pressure, not an escape from its consequences. For Conrad, reading under guard, this story makes the Roman past speak in the immediate terms of imprisonment and vulnerability without equating his circumstances with the athlete’s.

Domitian, exile, and the meaning of refusal

The final example comes from Epictetus’s own life. After Nero, Domitian orders the philosophers of Rome into exile, while those willing to shave their beards—publicly signaling that they are no longer philosophers—may remain and live in peace. Epictetus refuses that compromise. When told he may be beheaded, he accepts that the authorities can kill him while insisting that his own task is to die without quailing; when they choose exile, he says that going without groaning is his part. He is sent away.

The episode turns the period’s political power into a division of responsibilities. Domitian’s authority determines whether Epictetus stays or goes, and can threaten his life; it does not determine whether he treats exile as a reason to groan or gives up the identity his beard signifies. The beard matters because the demand is not only for a bodily alteration but for a visible performance of submission. Refusal preserves a distinction between the emperor’s command and the philosopher’s assent, even though it cannot prevent exile.

The past as Conrad’s present test

Imperial Rome therefore enters the novel through a layered act of reading: Epictetus’s remembered examples, presented in a damaged book, reach a prisoner surrounded by noise and control. The Roman stories move from Florus’s constrained compliance to the athlete’s fatal refusal and Epictetus’s acceptance of exile. Their differing outcomes prevent them from collapsing into a single heroic instruction. They instead make Conrad attend to the choices each person faces and to the cost of treating character as something worth keeping.

The period’s significance is consequently both historical and immediate. Nero’s spectacles and Domitian’s order belong to the ancient world as the book presents it, but their tests—humiliation, bodily threat, and the pressure to surrender an identity—give Conrad’s reading its urgency. Imperial Rome becomes the setting for a philosophical argument about the boundary between external power and inward choice, encountered not in a school or public forum but on a prison bunk, in pages that have themselves been torn apart.