Page "Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus" Paragraph 13

When the news was brought to Thrasea at his suburban villa, where he was entertaining a number of friends and sympathisers, he retired to a bedroom, and had the veins of both his arms opened.

Calling to witness the quaestor who had brought the death sentence, he identified the shedding of his blood as a libation to Iuppiter Liberator-Jupiter who gives freedom.

The surviving text of Tacitus breaks off at the moment when Thrasea was about to address Demetrius, the Cynic philosopher, with whom he had previously that day held a conversation on the nature of the soul.

His death, though painful and protracted, contained allusions to the deaths of Socrates and Cato, and was evidently presented by his biographer Arulenus Rusticus, and probably constructed by himself, as a model of a dignified, calm and humane end.