9) “We could scheme for the empire!” (H1.182.t)

Why, oh why, did Han Xin pull Chen Xi aside in the courtyard and offer to rise up against Han (181b-182t) and then follow through with doomed plots and a treasonous edict (182m)?

When the empire still hung in the balance between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, Han Xin served his king brilliantly, winning territory through military might (Wei 168t, Zhao 160m-161, Qi 173b), innovative strategy (Art of War reinterpreted 170b-171t), and artful diplomacy (Yan 172b). Invited by Xiang Yu’s emissary Wu She to betray Han and win 1/3 of the empire (175m-b), he cited loyalty and gratitude and rejected temptation (176t). When the opportunist Kuai Tong coaxed him to claim 1/3 of the empire (176m, 177), the general again cited gratitude and loyalty and rejected temptation. Let us call his state of mind “grateful and loyal.”

Once more Han Xin rejected Kuai Tong’s temptation (179m), saying “he could not bear” to turn against Han and believing “he had won such merit that the king of Han would never take Qi from him.”  (179b) State of mind: pride (in earned merit) and loyalty, including some naivete, for the temptations came intertwined with warnings for his safety (same passages above). 

When Xiang Yu fell, Gaozu seized Han Xin’s army (180t) and in the fifth year of Han, his kingdom of Qi, returning him to his homeland as king of Chu (180t). When he crawled before Gaozu bearing his friend Zhongli Mo’s head as a peace offering (180b-181t) and was temporarily imprisoned and his rank reduced, his state of mind was ever deeper humiliation and acute awareness of inescapable danger, now that “the good dog” was no longer needed. (181t). 

He bore humiliation from the butcher of Huaiyin stoically when young (163b-164t) because “killing him would have brought me no fame. So I put up with it and got where I am today.” (180t) When his old mentor Xiao He (164m-165m) summoned him after the failed revolt, “Han Xin came,” (182b) seeking release from profound humiliation with no hope of fame in an imperial-level “suicide by cop.”

10) “You are no man of honor!” (H1.181t) to “A burial befitting a king” (H1.202t) 

In Sima Qian’s pages, we encounter much death. Take suicides. Some are compelled, obedience to an command like the deaths of Crown Prince Fusu and Meng Tian (Qin—need refs). Others are desperate escapes from capture, like Xiang Yu’s (47t), where, out of better options, he gave his head to a friend who might profit from it. Similarly, Zhongli Mo, on the run from the emperor, cursed his host and old friend Han Xi (181t) and angrily offered his head knowing it might be taken anyway (it was) given Han Xin’s need to save himself. (180m-181t). I count Han Xin’s doomed revolt as a “suicide by cop” to escape humiliation. Wang Ling’s mother kills herself rather than be used as a hostage to control her son (125t). 

One suicide seems different, though. Not an escape, not a “rage quit,” not despair, not an escape from an intolerable situation, not a sacrifice to save family or avoid pain, but rather a quiet and measured refusal to offend a worthy former enemy with one’s presence. An apology. A matter of honor. 

In a time of shifting alliances before Gaozu claimed the empire, Tian Heng had boiled alive Master Li Yiji, whose younger brother now served at court. (201t) When the emperor wished to move on from all the wars, forgive Tian Heng this and other offenses, and recall him to court, Tian Heng could not bring himself to obey, even after the emperor ordered Lord Shang to take no revenge for his brother’s death. (201m). Like Zhongli Mo and Xiang Yu, Tian Heng offered his head (to the emperor) but without the desperation and the anger of the other offers. In a chain reaction, his two loyal retainers joined him in death after delivering his head (202m), followed swiftly by 500 of his faithful soldiers (202m). 

Clearly the emperor and Sima Qian were moved by these extravagant voluntary deaths. The emperor wept for Tian Heng and honored him with “a burial befitting a king” (202t). Sima Qian agrees that “all were manifestly men of the highest worth” but wonders, with a faint whiff of sadness and regret, why there was “none who could think of a way to save the situation.” (202b) 

This suicide for honor seems something new, an exquisite courtesy or apology carried too far, a stylized form of the raw human passions that drove the other suicides in Sima Qian’s pages. Or were these suicides a delayed response, a very human revulsion to the horrors of years of war, the blood and gristle and boiled flesh found necessary in the heat of battle, contemplated during the peaceful times that came after, perhaps by the sea (201m)? We have names for this now, sterile medical terms like “PTSD," or “shell shock” a century ago. We still have the suicides, too.

 

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