Dio Chrysostom

Dio was born in Prusa, a prosperous city in Bithynia, and came to Rome as an orator and intellectual. The emperor Domitian exiled him — likely for opposing a court favorite — and for years Dio wandered the edges of the Roman world, living as a day laborer, picking up the talk of soldiers, farmers, and fishermen. The exile was his education. He returned after Domitian's death, befriended the emperor Trajan, and gave a series of speeches on kingship that rank among antiquity's most searching political philosophy: a true king rules not by fear but by service; power is not possession but responsibility. He also wrote a Stoic cosmology, a dialogue on Homer, and a fable about hunters cut off from civilization whose natural religion surpasses Rome's. He called himself a student of Musonius Rufus and bore that title with something approaching grace.