3 Things A Stoic Does After A BETRAYAL.

The year was 175.

Marcus Aurelius had spent years on the Danube frontier, fighting the Germanic tribes, far from Rome, ill and exhausted.

The empire was vast, and one man couldn't be everywhere.

That's why he needed people he could trust.

And in the east, the richest and most delicate region of the empire, he had placed a man he trusted more than almost anyone.

Avidius Cassius.

To understand what came next, you first need to know who this man was.

Avidius Cassius had been born in Syrus, a city in Syria.

His father, Heliodorus, had been an orator who rose to become prefect of Egypt, one of the most important posts in the empire.

So Cassius grew up surrounded by power and ambition, in a family that knew what it meant to climb up from the bottom.

His big moment came with the war against the Parthians, Rome's rival empire in the east.

Early in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Parthians invaded Armenia and wiped out an entire Roman legion.

It was a humiliation, and Cassius was one of the generals charged with striking back.

He did it with brutal efficiency.

He crossed the Euphrates, drove into the heart of enemy territory, and took Seleucia and Ctesiphon, the great cities of the Parthians.

Ctesiphon was their capital, and Cassius burned its royal palace.

He came home a hero.

The soldiers respected him for his iron discipline.

Rome celebrated him as the man who had avenged the defeat.

And Cassius Dio himself, the historian who has left us much of this story and who shares nothing with him but the name, admits that he was a man of real worth, the kind anyone would have been glad to see at the head of the empire.

Years later, when a dangerous revolt broke out in Egypt, Marcus Aurelius trusted him again.

And once again Cassius delivered.

He didn't throw himself into an open battle against the rebels, who were many and desperate.

He did something cleverer.

He sowed division among them, set them against one another, and the revolt fell apart on its own.