The governor who would not run: the order to arrest him reached his own commandery while he sat at his office, and he went to the prison-wagon of his own will.
I will not run. My guilt is that I held office and could not save the proscribed; if I make a flight of it too, that is a second crime, and it is mine.Du Mi's answer to those who urged him to flee, 169 CE; Hou Han shu, juan 67, Memoir of the Partisan Prohibitions — the memoir's moral arithmetic, put into his mouth in compressed form
Appears in
Relations
- Li Ying colleagues — Named with Ying at the head of the second list and dead with him in 169; the memoir keeps the two fates as one argument.
- Fan Pang colleagues — The age's paired lesson: the man carried from door to door at his hosts' risk, and the man at his desk who refused to put anyone to that risk.
- Zhang Rang enemies — The inner court invented the second prohibition, and his name and Li Ying's stood first on it.
Myth vs record
The story you may know
He went to his death because he had no way out.
What the sources say
He went because he had one. Zhang Jian's road was open to him and the men at his office came to urge him onto it; the record makes his self-arming a choice and puts it beside the fugitive as the other half of one code. What the histories are exact about is the price of that code: the release of 167 had already left him under a lifelong bar from office, and the case of 169 was manufactured to reach him anyway.