1Forty years after the lame teacher died in Nicopolis, Rome had an emperor who had never wanted to be one.
2His name was Marcus Aurelius. As a boy he had loved books and plain living, and had slept on the floor in a rough cloak until his mother made him stop. He would have liked to spend his life reading. He spent it at war.
3For in his time the empire's luck ran out. Soldiers came home from the east carrying a sickness that no physician had seen before, and it went through the cities like fire through a dry field. It emptied whole streets. It did not stop for fifteen years. And while Rome was burying its dead, the peoples of the north came over the great river Danube and broke into the empire for the first time in many lifetimes.
4So the emperor went north, to the frozen edge of things, and lived in a tent. The treasury was empty and he would not squeeze the provinces, which were already full of graves. He put the palace itself up for sale. Gold cups, silks and jewels were carried into the public square and sold to whoever would pay. The sale lasted two months. It bought him an army.
5There was in his camp a clerk named Philon, a Greek, who had been born a slave and freed. He was one of the secretaries who wrote the emperor's letters in the Greek tongue. He was thirty, careful, a little stout, and afraid of horses. He had a younger brother named Dion, whom he had raised after their mother died, and whom he loved more than anything in the world. Dion was a clerk too. He served on the staff of the governor of Syria.
6The governor of Syria was a general named Cassius. He was the best soldier in the empire and he knew it. He held all the lands from the mountains to Egypt in his hand, and his legions adored him.
7In the spring of a certain year, word came into Syria that the emperor had died on the northern river. It was false. He had been ill, as he often was. But Cassius believed it, or chose to. He had his soldiers hail him as emperor. Egypt went over to him, and Egypt was Rome's bread.
8The news reached the northern camp on a wet morning. Philon was in the tent when the dispatch was opened. He watched the emperor read it. He saw the tired face grow more tired, and that was all he saw.
9Then Philon thought of his brother. Dion was twenty-four and full of fire. Dion thought Cassius was a god. His last letter had been three pages about the general's horse.
10The emperor did what he had to do. He made peace in the north, on worse terms than he could have had, and turned the army toward the east. He spoke to the soldiers. Philon wrote the speech down as it was given. The emperor did not curse Cassius. He said he would have liked to settle the matter by talking, and that the worst of it was that he would be robbed of the chance to forgive a friend.
11It never came to a war. Three months and six days after he took the purple, Cassius was cut down on the road by one of his own officers. The officer rode north with the head in a sack, expecting a reward.
12The emperor would not look at it. He would not let the sack be opened in his sight. He ordered it buried decently, and he was seen to be grieved.
13And then a second thing came north from Syria, on a wagon, under guard. It was a chest of oak bound with iron. It was Cassius's own letter chest, sealed by the officers who had searched his quarters.
14In that chest was every letter that anyone had written to Cassius in the three months he had called himself emperor. There were letters from senators in Rome, from city councils, from commanders of legions, and from anyone on his own staff who had taken up a pen to cheer him on. Every one of them had a name at the bottom. Every one of those names was a death, if the emperor chose to read it.
15The chest was carried into the emperor's tent and set down beside the map table. Philon saw it there, squat and black, when he came to take the evening's letters.
16The generals gathered that night. Philon stood in his corner with his tablet, as a clerk does, a piece of furniture with ears.
17There was a legate there named Varro, a hard grey man who had held the river line for six years. He put his fist on the lid of the chest.
18"Here is the root of it," he said. "Cassius is dead, but Cassius was one man. In here are all the others. Every snake that put its head up. Read them, lord. Know who they are. But a ruler who does not know his enemies' names does not sleep."
19The others agreed. It was only sense.
20The emperor sat with his hand pressed under his ribs, where the pain was. He looked at the chest for some time. "It will be opened in the morning," he said. "Before the staff. Philon will break the seals and read. Most of them will be in Greek." He nodded toward the corner without turning his head. "Go to bed, gentlemen."
21Philon walked out into the dark with his knees like water.
22He would read. Tomorrow, standing in that tent, before those grey men, he would take out letter after letter and read each one aloud, and say the name at the end. And somewhere in that chest, as sure as sunrise, was a page in a round, eager hand that he had himself taught to make its letters. He would unroll it. He would know it before the first word. And he would have to open his mouth and read his brother's death aloud.
23He lay on his cot. He did not sleep. In the middle watch he got up, and put his penknife in his sleeve, and went back through the mud toward the emperor's tent.
24He had no real plan. A clerk of the household could pass the guards at any hour. The emperor would be asleep in the inner room. He would lift the wax seals with a warm blade, as every clerk knows how to do. He would find one letter. He would press the seals back. It was treason, and if he was seen, he would die on a cross. He found he did not care much.
25He lifted the flap. The outer room was not dark.
26The emperor was sitting at the map table in his old cloak, awake, with one small lamp. He had a little book of wax tablets before him and was writing in it, slowly. Beside his elbow lay a worn roll. Philon knew that roll. It was the notes of the lame teacher's talk, taken down by the young man from Bithynia. The emperor's old tutor had lent it to him from his own shelf thirty years ago, and he had read it ragged. The words of a slave went everywhere in the baggage of the master of the world.
27The chest sat at his feet with its seals whole.
28The emperor looked up. He looked at his Greek secretary, standing in the door flap in the middle of the night, white as cheese. He looked at the way the man held his right sleeve.
29"You cannot sleep either," said the emperor. "Sit down, Philon. Not there. You are standing in a puddle."
30Philon sat. The penknife pressed against his wrist.
31"You have someone in Syria," said the emperor. It was not a question. "I have seen you watch the eastern post for three months. A son? No, you are too young. A brother."
32Philon tried to speak and could not. He nodded.
33"On Cassius's staff."
34He nodded again. Then it all came out of him at once, in a whisper. Dion was only a boy, he was a fool, he worshipped soldiers, he would have written something, he would have signed it, he had never done a wrong thing in his life except to be twenty-four.
35The emperor heard him out. Then he said, "Come with me. Bring the lamp."
36He went out of the tent, in the cloak, with no guard, and Philon followed. They crossed the sleeping camp to the wooden watchtower at the river's edge. The emperor climbed the ladder slowly, stopping twice for breath. Philon came behind with the lamp.
37At the top the wind was bitter. Below them lay the river, broad and black, with ice at its edges. On the near side were the fires of the legions, hundreds of them, in straight rows. On the far side, away in the forest, were other fires, scattered, the fires of the tribes. And over all of it were the stars, more than Philon had ever seen in a city.
38"I come up here most nights," said the emperor. "The physician would have a fit." He leaned on the rail. "Look down, Philon. Which fires are ours?"
39"The near ones, lord."
40"Yes. Now look up, and then look down again, quickly. Can you still tell?"
41Philon looked up into that great field of cold light. He looked down. For one breath the fires on both banks were only a handful of sparks on a dark ground, some here and some there, and the river between them was a scratch. Then they were camps again.
42"I try to stand a little higher each night," the emperor said. "I go up until I can see the whole empire, like a map. Then higher, until the empire is a patch around a pond. I go forward, too. A hundred years. Who will know then that Cassius rose against me, or that it frightened me? Not one person. That is the far end of it, and it is nearer than it looks."
43"That is a cold thought, lord."
44"I find it a clean one. It does not tell me that nothing matters. It tells me which things do." He turned from the rail. "Tomorrow, from up there, will it matter that I knew who wrote to Cassius? No. Will it matter what I did, once I knew? Yes. That will have been done to living men, and to their children, and it will go on from them."
45He was quiet a moment. "Varro thinks I am afraid to read the letters because I am soft. He is wrong. I am afraid to read them because I know myself. I am not a saint, Philon. I am a man with a bad stomach and a short temper, who has been kept from his bed for eight years. If I read that a friend betrayed me, I shall remember it. I shall see it in his face each time he bows. I shall say I have forgiven him, and I shall not have. One bad night, some year, I shall act on it."
46He started down the ladder. "I cannot govern what those men felt in the spring. That is done. I cannot even much govern what they will do next. What I can govern is whether I become a man who carries a list. I had better govern that while I still can."
47At sunrise the staff gathered before the tent. The chest had been carried outside. Varro was there, and a crowd of soldiers behind, for the whole camp knew what was in it.
48Philon stood beside the chest with the seal-knife in his hand.
49The emperor came out. He looked at the chest, and at the faces. "Bring a brazier," he said. "A large one."
50They brought the big iron fire basket that warmed the guard post, full of red coals. He had it set down beside the chest.
51"Philon. Break the seals. Open it."
52Philon cut the wax. He lifted the lid. It was full to the top, rolls and folded tablets and sheets tied in bundles, hundreds of them. On the very top lay a single sheet in a round, eager hand. He knew it before the first word. His sight went dark at the edges.
53"Do not read it," said the emperor, quite gently. "Do not read any of them. Put them in the fire."
54No one moved. Varro said, "Lord —"
55"All of them. Unread. Begin with the one in your hand, Philon."
56Philon laid his brother's letter on the coals. It curled and browned and was a flame, and then it was a black leaf, and then it was nothing. He put in the next, and the next, by handfuls. The smoke went straight up in the cold air. Men said afterward that the secretary wept the whole time he did it, and that they did not know why.
57"You have burned the names of your enemies," said Varro. His voice was thick.
58"I have burned a list," said the emperor. "The men are where they were. Last night they were all waiting to learn whether they would live. This morning they are simply governors and senators and clerks, who made a mistake in the spring, and who know that I do not know which of them made it. But I have a great many more friends this morning than I had last night, Varro, and it cost me a little charcoal."
59He wrote to the Senate that day, by Philon's hand. He asked that no senator be put to death for the rising, and that no blood be shed in his name. Then he went east, and passed through the cities that had gone over to Cassius, and punished them lightly or not at all.
60In Antioch a young clerk came pushing through the crowd and threw his arms around Philon's neck. He never knew how close it had been, or on which morning, or by whose hand his letter had burned. Philon never told him.
61The emperor went back to the northern river, since the war there was not done. He died on that frontier five years later, in a tent, of the sickness or of plain weariness. His son ruled after him, and ruled badly. A throne can be handed down from a father, and the fire in him cannot.
62Among his things they found the little books of notes. He had written them for no one. They were only a tired man talking to himself at night, reminding himself how to be decent tomorrow. Someone kept them. They are still read.
63But Philon, who lived to be old, always said that the best thing that emperor ever wrote was the page he chose not to read.