It was not long before the regime of Vespasian went down Nero’s path with regard to the Stoics. Delatores seeking the emperor’s favor again depicted the sect’s solemnity as a kind of sedition. Vespasian took drastic action in 71, banishing all Stoics and Cynics from the city of Rome; he even sent some of the more extreme agitators to the Pontine Islands. Helvidius, of course, he had killed. For the first time in the principate, Rome saw the systematic repression of an entire school of thought.
