Avidius Cassius was the general Marcus Aurelius trusted with Rome’s armies in the East. He had made his name in the war against Parthia, Marcus had since put every eastern legion under his command, and when Marcus spoke of him he called him “my dearest friend.” In the spring of 175, while Marcus was away fighting on the Danube, Cassius declared himself emperor. A false report had reached him that Marcus was dead, but when he learned the truth he carried on anyway.
Marcus did what an emperor had to do and gathered his army to march against him. The historian Cassius Dio records what he said to the soldiers before they set out, and it is a strange speech for a man in that position. He told them he felt more grief than anger. He also said that his one fear was that Cassius would kill himself, or be killed by someone else, before the two of them could meet, because that would take from him the only prize he wanted out of the war. The prize, he said, was “to forgive a man who has wronged one, to remain a friend to one who has transgressed friendship, to continue faithful to one who has broken faith.”
He never got the chance, because about three months into the revolt Cassius was killed by two of his own officers. They brought the head to Marcus, who would not look at it and ordered it buried. Soon afterwards Cassius’s letters were found, and they would have shown which senators and officers had taken his side. According to Dio, Marcus had them destroyed without reading any of them, and he put almost no one to death for the revolt.
What makes the story hard to take in is that Marcus did two things we assume cannot go together. He raised an army against the man, and he wanted to forgive him. We usually take forgiving to mean letting the matter drop, or saying it was not so bad, or having the person back, and he did none of those. I think he understood forgiveness better than we tend to, and that a good deal of the trouble people have with forgiving a betrayal comes from believing it asks for things it does not ask for.
A betrayal hurts differently from ordinary bad luck, because the person who let you down knew you and did it anyway. It also reaches backwards, into years you thought were settled. An illness or a theft takes something from the years ahead of you. A betrayal also takes the years behind you, because you can no longer be sure what any of them meant. People who have been through it often describe going back over old memories, a holiday or a kindness or an ordinary dinner, and finding that they no longer know how to read them. The other thing it takes is confidence in your own judgment. Having been wrong about one person for ten years, you start to wonder who else you are wrong about. I think that loss is the most expensive, because you need your judgment for everyone you will meet from now on.
Epictetus gave a whole lecture on friendship, and he begins it with puppies. They roll over each other and lick each other’s faces, and you would say nothing could be fonder. Then he says, “throw a bit of meat between them, and you will see.” He says the same of people. Put a piece of land between a father and his son, or a throne between two brothers, and you find out what the affection was resting on. His rule is that every living thing is pulled most strongly toward whatever it wants most for itself. People stay loyal for as long as being loyal does not cost them that thing. On the day it does, they go after what they want, and that is the day you call the betrayal.
The first thing I take from this is an answer to whether any of it was real. The puppies were not pretending. Their play was real, and it had simply never been tested against something either of them wanted more. The warmth you remember was probably very real too. What you learned later is that there was something they wanted more. That is a hard thing to learn, but it lets you keep most of your past, and you do not have to go back and relabel every good evening as a lie.
The same idea answers the doubt about your own judgment, because loyalty that has never been tested and loyalty that will hold look the same from the outside, sometimes for twenty years. Often there was nothing to see until the meat landed. Sometimes there was, though. The meat had landed before in small ways, and you saw how they behaved when something minor was at stake, and you explained it away because you wanted the friendship. If that is true it is worth admitting, and admitting it is different from blaming yourself. The fault for the betrayal stays with the person who did it. What you take away is a rule for next time, that the way someone handles a small temptation is the best preview you will get of how they handle a large one.
Explaining a betrayal this way does not excuse it, and Epictetus is not trying to excuse anyone. An explanation is useful to you in a way an excuse is not. If you decide the person was simply a monster, you have learned nothing you can use. If you can say that when it came to it they put money, or comfort, or someone else’s good opinion above you, then you know what happened, and you know what to look for in other people.
What a betrayed person often does next is stop trusting anyone, because it feels like the lesson. Seneca thought that was as big a mistake as trusting everyone. “It is equally faulty,” he wrote to Lucilius, “to trust everyone and to trust no one.” He adds that people who are always afraid of being deceived end up teaching others to deceive them. I read that as a warning about what suspicion does to the people around you. Treat an honest friend as a suspect for long enough and they will stop making the effort. If you go that way, the one who betrayed you has also cost you every friend you might have made afterwards, and those people did nothing to you.
Epictetus ends his lecture with a test that works better than suspicion and can be applied to anyone. Do not ask whether two people are family, he says, or how long they have known each other. Ask only where they place their interest, in things outside themselves or in the kind of person they are trying to be. Someone whose good is their own character can afford to stay loyal when it costs them. So pay attention to what people do on the days when keeping their word is expensive, because one of those days tells you more than years of pleasant company. I wrote more about choosing whom to believe in How to Know Who to Trust.
That leaves forgiveness, and I think the word causes more trouble than the thing. We hear “forgive” and assume it means trusting the person again, as if nothing had happened. For someone who has been deeply betrayed, that may be impossible, or simply unwise. So they conclude that they are unable to forgive, and add it to the list of things that are wrong with them.
Think of it like a debt that the other person can never repay. When someone betrays you they take something they cannot give back, and from that day they owe you. You can spend years trying to collect. Collecting is called revenge when you are active about it and resentment when you are waiting, and both keep you in business with the one person you most want to be finished with. You know the forms it takes. You rehearse the speech you will give on the day they finally admit it. You check whether their life has gone badly since. You tell the story again to a new listener and hope that this one’s outrage will feel like payment. None of it works, because they cannot return the years or unsay what was said, and an apology, if one ever comes, is a small payment against a very large sum.
Forgiving, in this picture, is writing the debt off, which means that you stop expecting payment and stop arranging your days around getting it. A bank that writes off a bad loan has not decided the borrower was right to default, and it does not lend to him again. It has accepted that the money is gone and closed the file so that it can get on with its business. Forgiveness in this sense needs nothing from the other person. They do not have to apologize, or agree with you, or even know.
Seneca draws nearly the same line in On Clemency, where he explains why the Stoics were wary of pardon. He defines pardon as “the remitting of a deserved punishment,” and their objection was that it lets a person off as though the wrong did not count. What a wise person offers in its place, he says, is mercy. They go on holding that the act was wrong, and they choose their response by what will do some good. So you can write off the debt and still end the friendship. You can write it off and still tell the truth about what happened when someone asks. Whether you ever extend credit to that person again is a separate decision, and it should be made the way any lender would make it, on evidence of changed behavior over a long time.
This matters most when you cannot walk away, when the person is your brother at every family dinner or the father of your children. Writing off the debt is what lets you be civil to them without pretending. You deal with them on cash terms. You are polite, you keep the arrangements you have made, and you rely on nothing they promise until it has been delivered. That is neither a punishment nor a reconciliation, only an accurate picture of where things stand.
I do not think forgiveness can be hurried, and you do not need it in order to move forward. I argued in Don’t Allow Yourself to Become a Victim that you can get on with your life well before you have forgiven anyone, and I still think that is the right order. Psychologists who study forgiveness separate the decision from the feeling. The decision can be made on an ordinary Tuesday, and it amounts to resolving that you will not seek the other person’s harm. The feeling comes months or years later, in its own time, and on some days it goes backwards.
Seneca has one suggestion for the feeling. If we want to judge fairly, he says in On Anger, we should start by admitting that none of us is without fault. Epictetus’s rule about going after what you want most was a rule about every living thing, and that includes you. I am not suggesting you have done what was done to you. But a confidence repeated, or a promise let slide on the day it became expensive, belongs to the same family, and remembering your own makes it a little easier to see the other person as someone who failed a test instead of as a different kind of creature.
Marcus had every means of collecting what Cassius and his supporters owed him, since he was the emperor and the letters were in his hands. He chose not to find out who else was in his debt, and I think he understood what the knowledge would do to him. He would have looked at every senator for the rest of his life and wondered. So he wrote the debt off, and in the same act he refused to let one man’s betrayal turn him into someone who suspected everybody else. He had also raised an army against Cassius, which is the part we forget when we assume that forgiving means doing nothing.
It is easy to read the last part of what he told the soldiers, about continuing faithful to one who has broken faith, as loyalty to Cassius. I think he meant staying the kind of man who keeps faith, whatever Cassius had done. The person who betrayed you has shown you what they wanted most. You will not get the years back, and you may never get the apology. You can still come out of it as someone who keeps their word and is able to trust again, and they have no say in that.
Stay stoic,
SW
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What stayed with me is that the warmth was real and simply untested, so nothing looked wrong from the outside. The same can be true of a life you built yourself. Somewhere in those years the thing I had built had stopped matching what I was interested in, what I valued, and where I thought my life was going. It had not failed. It had not turned bad. It had become the property of a version of me who set it up and then kept going, because there was never a single day on which going was the wrong thing to do. Do you think writing off the debt works the same way when the one who broke faith is an earlier version of yourself?
Forgiveness isn't emotional grace; it's simply writing off a bad debt to protect your future execution speed.