史記李斯列傳を讀む

Abstract

When Ssu'ma Ch'ien 司馬遷 wrote his Shih-chi, in addition to chronicles which had been passed down since antiquity, he made use of stories from the oral tradition which were told in public by men of the time. This biography appears in the lieh-chuan 列傅 section, but there are many instances in which Ssu-ma Ch'ien selected only the needed part of an established story for his purposes. However, by collecting the fragmentary historical materials from the records of the Han 漢 Dynasty, we can reconstruct the original form of the stories which Ssu-ma Ch'ien disassembled. Ssu-ma Ch'ien made use of two stories in writing the biography of Li Ssu. One was a story in which the main character was the eunuch Chao Kao 趙高who was a descendent of the king of the state of Chao 趙 which had been destroyed by the Ch'in 秦; and he successively took revenge on his enemies, Ch'in Shih-huang 秦始皇, Prime Minister Li Ssu, and General Meng Wu 蒙武. The other story concerns Hsiin-tzu 荀子 and his three disciples, Li Ssu, Han-fei-tzu 韓非子, and Pao-ch'iu-tzu 包丘子. Li Ssu who had a strong craving for power became prime minister of the Ch'in, but later lost his position and was killed. Han-fei-tzu won fame for his writings, but when he went and expressed his views to Ch'in Shih-huang, Li Ssu became jealous of him and had him killed under false pretenses. Pao-ch'iu-tzu became sincerely devoted to scholarship and was poor throughout his entire life； he died peacefully, and his scholarship was passed on to later generations. This is a didactic story which questions which of these three men's different life-styles is the very best. What we should pay attention to is that in these two stories Li Ssu does not play a main role, but only a supporting role. We can see that the weakness of Li Ssu's supporting role as described here was carried over without change into the biography of Li Ssu in the Shih-chi.