The Letters He Did Not Read
175 · Marcus Aurelius, as the letters of Avidius Cassius, the general who rebelled against him, arrive unopened
His best general heard a rumor that the emperor was dead and declared himself emperor instead. Half the eastern provinces went with him. Three months later the general's own officers killed him and sent the head, and the revolt was over before the emperor's army arrived.
What has arrived instead is a chest of correspondence: everything the general kept. Letters from governors, from senators, from men who wrote to see which way this was going and hedged in writing.
He has not opened it.
If he reads it, he will know exactly who was prepared to abandon him, and he will be entirely within his rights, and Rome will expect the executions to begin. That is what the last hundred years say happens next.
If he burns it unopened, several men he will keep working with for the rest of his life will have got away with treason, and will know it, and will know that he knows there is something to have got away with.
Burn them unopened
Read themOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Marcus Aurelius had the correspondence burned unread. He asked the Senate not to execute the senators involved, spared Avidius Cassius's family and left them their property, and is recorded as saying he regretted only that he had not been able to pardon the man himself; he had wanted him alive. He also wrote in the Meditations, at around this time, that the best revenge is not to become like the person who wronged you. The same emperor left the empire to his own son Commodus five years later, and the century of adoptive succession ended with him.
The philosophers weigh in
Burn them"He is trusting that men who hedged in writing will be reshaped by being forgiven. Some are. The ones who are not have now learned exactly how much a first betrayal costs."
Read them"A ruler who hunts through letters teaches every honest man around him to write nothing down. He did not spare them out of softness. He spared them so that the empire could still contain people who say what they think."