We don’t know much about Paconius Agrippinus besides the fact that his father was executed by the emperor Tiberius, the successor of Augustus, on trumped-up charges of treason. We don’t know what Agrippinus wrote, or where he was born—or even when he was born and when he died.

We know that he lived in the age of Tiberius’s successors, two corrupt and violent emperors, Claudius and Nero, but where he went to school, or how he entered government service, remains a mystery to us.

Yet for all the unknowns about Agrippinus, he leaps out from the historical record as a kind of swashbuckling and distinctive figure, one who stood out even among the bravest and best-known Stoics of his time.

This was no accident. Because in a Roman Empire that had by the time of Claudius and Nero given itself over fully to avarice and corruption, anyone who truly lived by the Stoic principles—as Agrippinus did—would stand out.

According to Agrippinus, we are all threads in a garment—which means that most people are indistinguishable from each other, one thread among countless others. Most people were happy conforming, being anonymous, handling their own tiny, unsung role in the fabric. Who can blame them? Under a tyrant, the best strategy is usually to keep a low profile, to blend in so one does not catch the attention of the capricious and cruel ruler who holds the power of life and death.

But to Agrippinus, even having lost his father under such circumstances, this kind of compromise was inconceivable. “I want to be the red,” he said, “that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful. . . . ‘Be like the majority of people?’ And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?”

Years later there would be a song by Alice in Chains, which would say in a nutshell what Agrippinus believed in his heart: “If I can’t be my own, I’d feel better dead.”

Individuality and autonomy, these are things many people pay lip service to—in fact, it’s almost become a new form of conformity. We talk about being our unique selves, about letting our colors shine, but deep down we know this is just talk. Under pressure, when it really counts, we want the same things as everyone else. We do the same things as everyone else.

Not Agrippinus. He was willing to stand out—to be bright red—even if it meant being beheaded or exiled.

Nor was this desire driven by ego or a love of attention, as it unfortunately is even among those rare men and women who reject convention.

“It right to praise Agrippinus,” Epictetus tells us, “because, although he was a man of the very highest worth, he never praised himself, but used to blush even if someone else praised him.” It was standing on principle that brought fame to Agrippinus, and yet if he could have taken his stands in private, without attracting attention, he would have.

What he drew his fame from was his able service as the governor of Crete and Cyrene, surprising many with his dedication as an administrator, while others were using the same positions to line their pockets. Tacitus tells us that Agrippinus had inherited his “father’s hatred towards emperors” after the injustice he had seen done to his “guiltless” father. It was an injustice indeed—for not only was his father likely innocent, his actual death sentence was finally executed after the highly sensitive emperor was teased by a palace dwarf for having waffled on the issue. It’s remarkable this absurd mockery of the courts did nothing to diminish Agrippinus’s commitment to the law and to applying it fairly and earnestly when the duty later fell to him.

“When Agrippinus was governor,” Epictetus would recount admiringly, “he used to try to persuade the persons whom he sentenced that it was proper for them to be sentenced. ‘For,’ he would say, ‘it is not as an enemy or as a brigand that I record my vote against them, but as a curator and guardian; just as also the physician encourages the man upon whom he is operating, and persuades him to submit to the operation.’”

This commitment was increasingly unusual in an empire where avarice was rewarded and principles were baggage. It does not seem to have occurred to Agrippinus, however, to be anything other than pure and committed and clear-eyed.

In a famous exchange, which is preserved to us by Epictetus, Agrippinus was approached by a philosopher who was wrestling with whether he should attend and perform at some banquet thrown by Nero, one that we can imagine Seneca had prepared a speech for. Agrippinus told the man he should go. But why, the man asked? Because you were even thinking about it. For me, Agrippinus said, it’s not even a question.

To Agrippinus, there should be no hemming and hawing about the right thing. There should be no weighing of options. “He who once sets himself about such considerations,” Epictetus said about Agrippinus, “and goes to calculating the worth of external things, approaches very near to those who forget their own character.” Character is fate, is how Heraclitus—one of the Stoics’ favorite influences—put it. That was true for Agrippinus, as it had been for Aristo long ago and Cato too. He believed that only character decided difficult matters, and did so clearly and cleanly. No calculating, no consideration was necessary. The right thing was obvious.

When Agrippinus was eventually accused of conspiracy against Nero, he found himself brought up on charges just like his father. “I hope it may turn out well,” he said to a friend as his trial began, and then, noting the hour, reminded him that it was time for their daily exercise. As the Senate decided his fate, as his life hung in the balance, Agrippinus worked out and then relaxed in a cold bath. Just as Cato had enjoyed one final dinner before his demise, so Agrippinus took a nice steam before news was brought to him: You have been condemned.

A normal person might have fallen on their knees or cursed the injustice. Agrippinus betrayed neither anxiety nor fear about his fate. He had only practical questions. Banishment or death? Exile, his friends said. Did they confiscate my property? No, thank god, they told him. “Very well,” he said, “we shall take our lunch in Aricia.”

Aricia was the first stop on the road out of Rome. Meaning: We might as well get this exile show under way. No use bemoaning or weeping about it. Hey, is anyone else hungry?

Certainly many people—including his fellow Stoics—have responded to better circumstances with worse. But that’s who Agrippinus was—he was different. “I am not a hindrance to myself,” Epictetus quotes him as saying. He did not add to his troubles by bemoaning them. He would not compromise his dignity or his composure for matters big or small, whether it was a meaningless party or a cruel miscarriage of justice. “His character was such,” said Epictetus, “that when any hardship befell him he would compose a eulogy upon it; on fever, if he had a fever; on disrepute, if he suffered from disrepute; on exile, if he went into exile.”

He saw life for what it was, exile for what it was, the cruelty of emperors for what it was, accepted it, and moved on.

And for what was Agrippinus sent packing? What crime had he committed and on what evidence was he convicted? Tacitus comes up empty, but provides a clue when he explains that at the same time, Nero had also driven from Rome a young, viceless, and venomless poet simply because he had been too talented. So it was the same for Agrippinus. He had dared to be different. He had been the bright red in an empire where Nero deemed himself the only one worthy of standing out.

Because that’s the other expression that Agrippinus had either missed or decided he refused to be intimidated by: Yes, the beauty of the garment is made by the threads that stand out, but it’s equally true that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

To a man like Agrippinus—and his father before him—this was a cost worth paying. Indeed, they did not even consider the alternative.