On Anger, Book Three

1 What you have wanted most, Novatus,¹ I shall now try to do: to cut anger out of our minds, or at least to rein it in and check its impulses. Sometimes this must be done openly and frankly, when the evil is mild enough to allow it; sometimes in secret, when it burns too hot and every obstacle only sharpens it and makes it grow. It matters how much strength it has and how fresh that strength is, whether it should be beaten back and driven to retreat, or whether we should give way to it while the first storm rages itself out, so that it does not sweep the remedies away with it. The plan will have to suit each person’s character. Some are won over by entreaties; some trample on those who submit and press all the harder; some we shall calm by frightening them. Rebuke has turned some from their course, confession others, shame others, delay others: a slow remedy for a headlong evil, and the one to fall back on last. The other passions allow postponement and can be treated more slowly; the violence of this one, roused and sweeping itself along, does not advance by degrees but is complete the moment it begins. Nor does it tempt the mind, as the other vices do; it carries it off, drives men who have lost control of themselves and are eager even for a disaster that falls on all alike, and it rages not only at what it aimed at but at whatever it meets on the way. The other vices push the mind; anger hurls it headlong. Even where we cannot resist our passions, the passions themselves can at least come to a halt; anger, no differently from lightning and storms and anything else that cannot be called back because it does not travel but falls, strains its force harder and harder. The other vices desert reason; this one deserts sanity. The others come on gently and grow without our noticing; into anger the mind plunges. So nothing drives on harder, so frantic and so reckless with its own strength, arrogant if it succeeds, insane if it is thwarted; not even when beaten back does it sink into weariness, but when Fortune has taken its adversary out of reach, it turns its teeth on itself. Nor does it matter how small the thing it rose from: from the slightest causes it grows to the greatest.

2 It passes over no age; it spares no race of men. Some nations, thanks to their poverty, have never known luxury; some, because they are active and roving, have escaped idleness; those whose ways are rough and whose life is rustic know nothing of sharp dealing and fraud and every evil born in the marketplace; but there is no nation that anger does not goad, as powerful among the Greeks as among the barbarians, no less ruinous to those who fear the laws than to those whose only rule of right is the measure of their strength. Then, too, the other passions seize individuals; this is the one passion that is sometimes caught by a whole people. Never has an entire people burned with love for a woman, nor has a whole city set its hopes on money or gain; ambition takes hold of men one by one; want of self-control is not a public evil; but often a people has marched into anger in a single column. Men and women, old men and boys, leaders and rabble have agreed, and the whole multitude, roused by a very few words, has outrun the man who roused it; they have rushed straight to arms and torches, declared wars on their neighbors or waged them against fellow citizens; whole houses have been burned with their entire families, and a man held in high honor a moment before for his popular eloquence has caught the anger of his own assembly; legions have hurled their javelins at their own general; the whole plebs has split from the senators; the senate, the state’s own council, without waiting for a levy or naming a general, has picked impromptu leaders for its anger, hunted down noble men through the houses of the city, and executed them with its own hands; embassies have been violated, the law of nations broken, and an unspeakable rage has swept a city away; no time has been given for the public swelling to go down, but fleets have been launched at once and loaded with soldiers scraped together in haste; without custom, without auspices, a people has marched out with its anger for a leader, carried whatever chance or plunder supplied for arms, and then paid for the rashness of its reckless anger with a great disaster. This is how it ends for barbarians who rush blindly into war: when the impression of having been wronged has struck their restless minds, they are driven at once, and wherever their resentment drags them they fall on the legions like a collapsing building, disordered, fearless, heedless, seeking out their own dangers; they rejoice to be struck, to press on against the sword, to drive the spears home with their bodies, and to perish by their own wounds.

3 “There is no doubt,” you say, “that this is a great and pestilent force; so show how it ought to be cured.” And yet, as I said in the earlier books, Aristotle stands up as the defender of anger and forbids us to cut it out: it is, he says, the spur of virtue; take it away, and the mind is left unarmed, sluggish and inert for great efforts. So it is necessary to expose its ugliness and fierceness and to set before our eyes what a monster a man is when he rages against a man, and with what an onrush he charges, ruinous but not without ruin to himself, sinking things that cannot sink unless they take the one who sinks them down too. What, then? Does anyone call this man sane, who, as if caught in a storm, does not walk but is driven, and is the slave of a raging evil; who does not delegate his revenge but exacts it himself, savage in mind and hand alike, the butcher of those dearest to him and of things he will soon weep for having lost? Does anyone give virtue this passion as its helper and companion, when it throws into confusion the counsels without which virtue does nothing? The strength that sickness and a fit of fever have roused in a sick man is fleeting and ill-omened, strong only for its own harm. So you need not think I am wasting time on superfluous things in denouncing anger as though men’s opinion of it were in doubt, when there is someone, and one of the illustrious philosophers at that, who assigns it duties and calls on it as useful, as supplying spirit for battle, for the conduct of affairs, for everything that must be done with some heat. So that no one may be deceived into thinking it will be useful at some time, in some place, we must show its unbridled and frantic rage and give it back its own equipment: the rack and the cords, the slave prisons and the crosses, the fires lit around bodies buried in the ground, the hook that drags even corpses, the various kinds of chains, the various kinds of punishments, the mangling of limbs, the branding of foreheads, and the cages of monstrous beasts. Among these instruments let anger be placed, hissing something dire and dreadful, fouler than all the means through which it rages.

4 Whatever may be said of the others, no passion, certainly, has a worse face. I described it in the earlier books: harsh and fierce, now pale as the blood is drawn back and put to flight, now flushed and like blood itself, all the heat and breath having rushed to the face, the veins swelling, the eyes now darting and starting out, now fixed and riveted in a single stare. Add the teeth gnashing against each other, as of men eager to devour someone, a sound no different from that of boars whetting their tusks by rubbing; add the cracking of the joints when the hands wring themselves, the chest beaten again and again, the rapid panting and the deep-drawn groans, the unsteady body, the broken words and sudden shouts, the trembling lips, sometimes pressed together and hissing out something dire. By Hercules, the face of wild beasts, whether hunger drives them or a spear fixed in their entrails, even when, half dead, they go for their hunter with a last bite, is less foul than that of a man ablaze with anger. Come, if you have the leisure to listen to their cries and threats, what words come from a mind on the rack!

Will not everyone want to call himself back from anger once he has understood that it begins with harm to himself? Do you not want me, then, to remind those who wield anger with supreme power, who think it a proof of their strength and count ready revenge among the great goods of great fortune, that a man who is the captive of his own anger cannot be called powerful, cannot even be called free? Do you not want me to remind them, so that each may be more careful and keep watch on himself, that while the other evils of the mind belong to the worst of men, irascibility (iracundia) creeps even into learned men, men sound in every other respect? So much so that some call irascibility a sign of an open nature, and it is commonly believed that the most good-natured people are most subject to it.

5 “What is the point of this?” you say. That no one may judge himself safe from it, since it calls even those gentle and placid by nature out into savagery and violence. As against the plague a strong body and careful attention to health are no help (for it attacks the weak and the robust indiscriminately), so anger is as much a danger to restless characters as to composed and easygoing ones, and in these it is the more shameful and dangerous the more it changes them. But since the first thing is not to get angry, the second to stop, the third to cure another’s anger as well, I shall speak first of how we may avoid falling into anger, then of how we may free ourselves from it, and last of how we may restrain an angry man, calm him, and bring him back to sanity.

We shall make sure we do not get angry if we keep setting all of anger’s vices before ourselves and take its true measure. It must be accused before our own tribunal and condemned; its evils must be searched out and dragged into the open; to show what it is, it must be compared with the worst. Avarice acquires and gathers, for someone better to use; anger spends, and few escape its cost. How many slaves an irascible master has driven to flight, how many to death! How much more he has lost by getting angry than the thing he was angry about! Anger has brought a father mourning, a husband divorce, a magistrate hatred, a candidate defeat. It is worse than luxury, since luxury enjoys its own pleasure, anger another’s pain. It outdoes spite and envy, for they want a man to become unhappy, anger wants to make him so; they delight in ills that come by chance, anger cannot wait for Fortune: it wants to harm the man it hates, not to see him harmed. Nothing is more grievous than feuds: anger brings them about. Nothing is more deadly than war: into war the anger of the powerful bursts out; and even the anger of the common man and the private citizen is a war, only unarmed and without forces. Besides, anger, to set aside what will follow presently, its losses, its plots, the endless anxiety of mutual quarrels, pays the penalty while it exacts one. It renounces human nature: nature urges us to love, anger to hate; nature bids us help, anger harm. Add that, though its indignation comes from too high a regard for itself, so that it seems spirited, it is small and narrow; for everyone is smaller than the man by whom he judges himself despised. But the truly great mind, the true judge of its own worth, does not avenge a wrong, because it does not feel it. As spears bounce back from something hard, and solid things hurt the one who strikes them, so no wrong makes a great mind feel it, since the wrong is frailer than what it attacks. How much finer it is to spit back every wrong and insult, as if no spear could pierce you! Revenge is a confession of pain. That is not a great mind which a wrong can bend. Whoever has hurt you was either stronger than you or weaker: if weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare yourself.

6 There is no surer proof of greatness than that nothing can happen to you that could provoke you. The higher part of the universe, better ordered and near the stars, is neither massed into cloud, nor driven into storm, nor whirled into a tempest; it is free of all turmoil: it is the lower regions that are struck by lightning. In the same way a lofty mind, always calm and set in a tranquil station, keeping beneath it everything from which anger gathers, is modest, worthy of respect, and well ordered; you will find none of this in an angry man. For who, given over to resentment and raging, has not first thrown off his sense of shame? Who, in a turbulent rush against someone, has not cast away whatever was worthy of respect in him? Whose sense of his duties, their number or their order, has held firm once he was roused? Who has held his tongue in check? Who has controlled any part of his body? Who, once let loose, has been able to govern himself? We shall profit from that wholesome precept of Democritus,² which teaches that tranquility comes if we do not undertake many things, or things beyond our strength, either in private or in public. For the man who rushes about among many affairs, no day ever passes so happily that some offense does not arise, from a person or a thing, to ready the mind for anger. Just as anyone hurrying through the crowded parts of the city must bump into many people, and is bound to slip in one place, be held back in another, be splashed in another, so in this scattered and wandering activity of life many hindrances, many grievances befall us: one man has disappointed our hope, another has put it off, another has snatched it away; our plans have not flowed as intended. Fortune is not so devoted to anyone that she answers him everywhere if he tries many things; it follows, then, that the man for whom some things have turned out contrary to what he proposed grows impatient with people and things, and on the slightest grounds gets angry now with a person, now with a business, now with a place, now with Fortune, now with himself. So, for the mind to be calm, it must not be tossed about, nor, as I said, wearied by doing many things, nor by great things sought beyond its strength. It is easy to fit light loads to the neck and shift them to one side or the other without slipping; but the loads that others’ hands have put on us, which we can hardly carry, overcome us and we throw them off at the next step; even while we stand under the pack, unequal to the load, we stagger.

7 You may be sure that the same happens in public and domestic affairs. Business that is easy and manageable follows the man who handles it; huge business, beyond the measure of the one who carries it on, does not yield easily, and once it is taken on, it weighs down and carries off the man in charge, and just when it seemed to be in hand, it falls and takes him with it. So it happens that a man’s will often comes to nothing when he does not take on what is easy but wants what he has taken on to be easy. Whenever you attempt something, measure yourself, and at the same time the thing you are preparing and the means you have prepared; for regret at unfinished work will make you harsh. It makes a difference whether a man is of a fiery temperament or of a cold and low one: in a spirited man defeat will squeeze out anger, in a languid and sluggish one, sorrow. So let our actions be neither petty nor bold and reckless; let our hope not range beyond what is near; let us attempt nothing that, even once we have achieved it, would amaze us by its success.

8 Let us take care not to receive wrongs, since we do not know how to bear them. We should live with the calmest and easiest of people, the least anxious and peevish; we take on the character of those we spend time with, and as certain diseases of the body leap to those who touch them, so the mind hands its evils on to those nearest it. The drunkard has drawn his companions into a love of wine; the company of the shameless has softened even a brave man, born of flint; avarice has passed its poison to those nearby. The same principle works the other way with the virtues: they soften everything they come into contact with; and a healthy region and a more wholesome climate have done less good to the body’s health than living in a better crowd has done to minds that are not very firm. You will understand how strong this is if you see that even wild beasts grow tame by living with us, and that no animal, however monstrous, keeps its violence if it has long endured the company of man: all its harshness is blunted and gradually unlearned among gentle things. Add to this that a man who lives with quiet people is made better not only by their example but because he finds no reasons for anger and does not exercise his vice. So he ought to avoid everyone he knows will provoke his irascibility. “Who are they?” you say. Many people, for various reasons, who will have the same effect: the proud man will offend you with his contempt, the wit with an insult, the insolent man with a wrong, the spiteful man with his malice, the quarrelsome man with his contentiousness, the windbag and the liar with his vanity; you will not bear being feared by the suspicious, beaten by the stubborn, scorned by the fastidious. Choose people who are simple, easy, and moderate, who will neither provoke your anger nor mind it; better still will be those who are yielding, humane, and sweet, though not to the point of flattery, for too much agreement offends the irascible. I had a friend, certainly a good man but quick to anger, whom it was no safer to flatter than to abuse. It is well known that Caelius the orator³ was extremely irascible. A client of rare patience, so they say, was dining with him in his bedroom, but it was hard for the man, once he was yoked in that pair, to escape a quarrel with the one he was tied to; he judged it best to agree with whatever Caelius said and to play the supporting part. Caelius could not stand the agreement and shouted, “Say something against me, so that there are two of us!” But even he, angry because the other would not be angry, soon stopped, having no opponent. If we are aware that we are irascible, then, let us choose, rather, even people of this sort, who follow our expression and our talk: they will spoil us, to be sure, and lead us into the bad habit of hearing nothing against our wishes, but it will do good to give our vice a pause and a rest. Even those who are difficult and untamed by nature will put up with a flatterer: nothing is harsh or grim to the hand that strokes it. Whenever an argument promises to be longer and more combative, let us resist at the very start, before it gathers strength: contention feeds itself and holds those who have sunk into it all the deeper; it is easier to keep out of a fight than to get out of one.

9 The irascible should also give up the more strenuous studies, or at least pursue them short of weariness; the mind should not be kept among hard things but handed over to pleasant arts: let the reading of poems soothe it and history hold it with its stories; let it be handled softly and delicately. Pythagoras used to calm the disturbances of his mind with the lyre; and who does not know that horns and trumpets rouse us, just as certain songs are soothing and relax the mind? Green things are good for troubled eyes, and weak sight rests on some colors while it is dazzled by the brilliance of others: so cheerful studies soothe sick minds. We ought to avoid the forum, pleading, and the courts, and everything that inflames the vice, and equally to beware of bodily weariness; for it uses up whatever is mild and gentle in us and stirs up what is sharp. This is why people who mistrust their stomachs temper their bile with food before they set out to do business of some importance; bile is stirred most by fatigue, either because fatigue drives the heat to the center of the body, harms the blood, and stops its flow as the veins labor, or because the thin and weak body weighs on the mind; certainly for the same reason those worn out by ill health or age are more irascible. Hunger and thirst, too, are to be avoided for the same reasons: they exasperate and inflame minds. There is an old saying that a tired man goes looking for a quarrel; so, equally, does a hungry man, a thirsty man, and any man chafed by something. For as sores hurt at a light touch, and later even at the suspicion of a touch, so a mind in a bad state is offended by the smallest things, so much so that a greeting, a letter, a speech, a question calls some people out to a quarrel: sore places are never touched without complaint.

10 So the best thing is to treat oneself at the first sense of the evil, and then to give one’s words, too, as little freedom as possible and to check the impulse. It is easy to catch one’s passions as soon as they arise: the symptoms run ahead of the disease. As signs of storm and rain come before the storm itself, so anger, love, and all those tempests that harass minds have certain forewarnings. Those who are subject to epileptic fits know that the attack is coming if the heat leaves their extremities, their sight wavers, their sinews tremble, their memory slips, and their head spins; so they head off the illness as it begins with their usual remedies: whatever it is that unsettles the mind is driven off with smells and tastes, or they fight the cold and stiffness with warm compresses; or, if the medicine has done little good, they avoid the crowd and fall without a witness. It is useful to know your disease and to crush its strength before it spreads. Let us see what it is that provokes us most: one man is stirred by insults in words, another by insults in deeds; this one wants his noble birth spared, that one his looks; this one wants to be thought the most elegant, that one the most learned; this one cannot stand arrogance, that one stubbornness; one thinks his slaves not worth his anger, another is savage at home and mild outside; one judges it a wrong to be asked for something, another an insult not to be asked. Not everyone is struck on the same side; so you must know what is weak in you, in order to protect it most.

11 It does not pay to see everything, to hear everything. Let many wrongs pass us by; most of them are never received by the man who does not know of them. You do not want to be irascible? Do not be inquisitive. The man who asks what has been said about him, who digs up malicious talk even if it was held in private, disturbs his own peace. Interpretation brings some things to the point of looking like wrongs; so some must be put off, some laughed off, some forgiven. Anger must be hemmed in in many ways; let most things be turned into play and jest. They say that Socrates, when he was punched, said nothing more than that it was a nuisance that people did not know when they ought to go out wearing a helmet. What matters is not how a wrong was done but how it was borne; and I do not see why moderation should be difficult, since I know that even tyrants, their natures swollen by fortune and license, have held back the savagery that was habitual to them. It is recorded, at any rate, that Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, when a drunken guest at dinner had said much against his cruelty, and there was no lack of people ready to lend a hand against the man, and one from this side, another from that, kept fanning the flames, bore it calmly and answered those provoking him that he was no more angry with the man than if someone blindfolded had run into him.

12 A great many people have manufactured their grievances, either by suspecting what is false or by making much of what is trivial. Often anger comes to us; more often we go to it. It should never be sent for; even when it falls on us, let it be thrown back. No one says to himself, “What I am angry about I have either done myself or could have done”; no one weighs the mind of the doer, only the deed itself. Yet it is the doer who should be considered: whether he meant it or it happened by accident, whether he was forced or deceived, whether he was after hatred or reward, whether he was pleasing himself or lending his hand to another. The wrongdoer’s age counts for something, and so does his position, so that bearing and enduring it becomes either humane or useful. Let us put ourselves in the place of the man we are angry with: as it is, an unfair estimate of ourselves makes us irascible, and we are unwilling to suffer what we would be willing to do. No one puts himself off; and yet the greatest remedy for anger is delay, so that its first heat may die down and the darkness that weighs on the mind may either settle or thin. Some of the things that were sweeping you headlong will be softened by an hour, let alone a day; some will vanish entirely; if the adjournment you asked for achieves nothing, it will be clear that what is acting now is judgment, not anger. Whatever you want to know the true nature of, hand over to time: nothing is seen clearly in rough water. Plato could not win time from himself when he was angry with his slave; he ordered him at once to take off his tunic and bare his shoulders for the lash, meaning to beat him with his own hand. When he realized he was angry, he held his hand where he had raised it, in midair, and stood like a man about to strike; then, asked by a friend who happened to come in what he was doing, he said, “I am punishing an angry man.” As if stunned, he held that posture of savagery, unseemly in a wise man, having already forgotten the slave, since he had found another man whom he would rather punish. So he took away from himself his power over his own household, and once, when he was rather upset over some offense, he said, “Speusippus,⁴ you beat that slave; I am angry.” He did not strike him for the very reason that another man would have struck him. “I am angry,” he said; “I shall do more than I should, and I shall enjoy doing it; let this slave not be in the power of a man who is not in his own.” Does anyone want vengeance entrusted to an angry man, when Plato stripped himself of his own authority? Allow yourself nothing while you are angry. Why? Because you want to be allowed everything.

13 Fight with yourself: if you want to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you. You begin to conquer if it is hidden, if it is given no outlet. Let us bury its signs and keep it, as far as possible, concealed and secret. This will cost us a great deal of trouble (for it longs to leap out, to set the eyes ablaze, to change the face), but if it has been allowed to show outside us, it is above us. Let it be stored away in the deepest recess of the breast, and let it be carried, not carry us. Better still, let us turn all its signs to the opposite: let the face relax, the voice be gentler, the step slower; little by little the inner self takes its shape from the outer. In Socrates the sign of anger was a lowered voice and sparer speech; it was clear then that he was resisting himself. So his friends would catch him and charge him with it, and he did not mind being reproached for a hidden anger. Why should he not be glad that many understood his anger and no one felt it? But they would have felt it if he had not given his friends the right to rebuke him, as he himself had claimed it over his friends. How much more should we do this! Let us ask each of our closest friends to use his frankness toward us most when we are least able to bear it, and not to agree with our anger; against an evil that is powerful and stands in our good graces, let us call for help while we have our wits, while we are ourselves. Those who hold their wine badly and fear the rashness and insolence of their drunkenness instruct their people to carry them out of the dinner party; those who have learned their lack of self-control in sickness forbid others to obey them when they are ill. It is best to provide obstacles against known vices, and above all so to compose the mind that even when it is shaken by the heaviest and most sudden events it either does not feel anger, or, if anger has arisen from the size of an unexpected wrong, drives it back into the depths and does not let its resentment show. That this can be done will be clear if I bring out a few examples from an enormous crowd of them, from which we can learn both things: how much evil there is in anger when it uses the full power of men of supreme power, and how far it can command itself when it is held down by a greater fear.

14 King Cambyses was too much given to wine, and Praexaspes, one of his dearest friends, kept advising him to drink more sparingly, saying that drunkenness was shameful in a king, whom the eyes and ears of all men followed.⁵ To this the king said, “So that you may know that I never lose control of myself, I shall prove to you now that after wine my eyes and my hands do their duty.” Then he drank more freely than at other times, from larger cups, and when he was already heavy and sodden with wine he ordered his critic’s son to go out beyond the threshold and stand with his left hand raised above his head. Then he drew his bow and pierced the young man’s heart itself (for he had said that was what he was aiming at), had the chest cut open, showed the arrowhead stuck in the heart, and, looking back at the father, asked whether his hand was steady enough. The father said that Apollo could not have shot more surely. May the gods damn him, a slave more in spirit than in station! He praised a thing that it was too much even to have watched. He thought his son’s chest split in two and the heart quivering under the wound an occasion for flattery: he ought to have disputed the king’s glory and called for another shot, so that the king might have the pleasure of showing a still steadier hand on the father himself. What a bloodthirsty king! How he deserved to have all his people’s bows turned on him! But though we have cursed him for ending his banquets in executions and funerals, still that arrow was more wickedly praised than shot. We shall see how the father ought to have conducted himself, standing over his son’s corpse and that slaughter of which he was both witness and cause: what is now under discussion is plain, that anger can be suppressed. He did not curse the king; he let out not a word, not even of the kind a man in calamity lets out, though he saw his own heart pierced as surely as his son’s. He can rightly be said to have swallowed his words; for if he had said anything as an angry man, he could have done nothing as a father. He may seem, I say, to have behaved more wisely in that misfortune than when he was giving advice on how much to drink to a man who had better drink wine than blood, whose hands meant peace when they were busy with cups. So he joined the number of those who have shown, by great disasters, how dearly good advice costs the friends of kings.

15 I do not doubt that Harpagus, too, gave some such advice to his king, the king of the Persians, who, offended by it, served him his own children to eat and kept asking whether he liked the seasoning; then, when he saw that Harpagus was full enough of his own misfortunes, he ordered their heads brought in and asked how he had liked his entertainment.⁶ The wretched man did not lack words; his mouth did not lock shut: “At the king’s table,” he said, “every dinner is pleasant.” What did he gain by this flattery? Only that he was not invited to the leftovers. I do not forbid a father to condemn his king’s deed; I do not forbid him to seek a punishment worthy of so savage a monstrosity; but meanwhile I draw this conclusion: that even anger born of enormous evils can be hidden and forced into words that contradict it. This curbing of resentment is necessary, especially for those whose lot is this kind of life, who are called to the king’s table: that is how one eats among them, how one drinks, how one answers; one must smile at the deaths of one’s own. Whether life is worth so much we shall see; that is another question. We shall not console so grim a slave prison, we shall not urge men to bear the commands of butchers: we shall show that in every slavery the road to freedom lies open. A man who is free to end his miseries along with himself is sick in mind and wretched through his own fault. I will say both to the man who has fallen in with a king who shoots arrows at his friends’ hearts and to the man whose master feeds fathers on their children’s flesh: “Why do you groan, madman? Why are you waiting for some enemy to avenge you by destroying your nation, or for a powerful king to fly to you from far away? Wherever you look, there is an end to your ills. Do you see that precipice? That way is the descent to freedom. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Freedom sits there at the bottom. Do you see that tree, stunted, withered, barren? Freedom hangs from it. Do you see your throat, your neck, your heart? They are ways of escape from slavery. Are the ways out I show you too laborious, do they demand too much spirit and strength? Do you ask what the road to freedom is? Any vein in your body.”

16 As long, at least, as nothing seems to us so unbearable that it drives us out of life, let us put away anger, whatever our condition. It is ruinous to those who serve; for all indignation only adds to its own torment, and the more defiantly it suffers commands, the heavier it feels them. So a wild beast, by struggling, tightens the noose; so birds, fluttering to shake off the birdlime, smear it over all their feathers. No yoke is so tight that it chafes the one who goes along with it less than the one who fights it: the one relief for great ills is to endure and to submit to one’s necessities. But though restraint of the passions, and especially of this rabid and unbridled one, is useful to those who serve, it is more useful to kings: all is lost where fortune permits as much as anger urges, and a power that is exercised to the harm of many cannot stand long; for it is in danger when a common fear has united those who groan apart. So many kings have been slaughtered, sometimes by individuals, sometimes by whole peoples, when public resentment had driven them to pool their angers into one. And yet many have exercised anger as if it were a mark of royalty, like Darius, who was the first, after the power had been taken from the Magus, to rule the Persians and a large part of the East. For when he had declared war on the Scythians, who hem in the East, and Oeobazus, an old nobleman, asked him to leave one of his three sons behind as a comfort to his father and to make use of the services of the other two, Darius promised more than he was asked: he said he would release them all to him, and he threw them down dead before their parent’s eyes, as though he would have been cruel if he had taken them all away. But how much more obliging Xerxes was! When Pythius, the father of five sons, asked him to excuse one from service, Xerxes let him choose the one he wanted, then had the one he had chosen torn in two, set the halves on either side of the road, and purified his army with this victim.⁷ So he had the end he deserved: defeated, routed far and wide, seeing his ruin strewn everywhere, he walked among the corpses of his own men.

17 Such was the fierceness in anger of barbarian kings, whom no learning, no culture of letters had touched. I will give you one from Aristotle’s own lap, King Alexander, who at a banquet ran Clitus through, his dearest friend, raised with him, and did it with his own hand, because Clitus flattered too little and was slow to pass from being a Macedonian and a free man into Persian slavery. And Lysimachus, who was just as close to him, he threw to a lion. Was this Lysimachus, then, who by some good fortune escaped the lion’s teeth, any milder for that when he became king himself? For he mutilated his friend Telesphorus of Rhodes all over, cutting off his ears and nose, and kept him for a long time in a cage, feeding him like some new and unheard-of animal, since the deformity of his hacked and mutilated face had lost all human look;⁸ add to this hunger and filth and the squalor of a body left in its own excrement; besides, with his knees and hands calloused, since the narrowness of the place forced him to use them as feet, and his sides ulcerated from rubbing, his shape was no less foul than frightening to those who came to see him, and, made a monster by his punishment, he had lost even pity. Yet though the man who suffered these things was most unlike a human being, the man who did them was more unlike one.

18 If only that savagery had stayed among foreign examples, and the barbarity of punishments and angers had not passed into Roman ways along with other imported vices! Marcus Marius, to whom the people had set up statues in every street, to whom they made offerings of incense and wine, Lucius Sulla ordered to have his legs broken, his eyes gouged out, his tongue and hands cut off, and, as if he could kill him as many times as he wounded him, he tore him slowly, limb by limb.⁹ Who was the agent of this command? Who but Catiline, already training his hands for every crime? He cut him to pieces before the tomb of Quintus Catulus, an outrage to the ashes of that gentlest of men, above which a man of bad example, yet popular, and loved not so much undeservedly as too much, shed his blood drop by drop. Marius deserved to suffer it, Sulla to order it, Catiline to do it; but the commonwealth did not deserve to take into its body the swords of enemies and avengers alike. Why do I search out old history? Just recently Gaius Caesar¹⁰ had Sextus Papinius, whose father was a former consul, Betilienus Bassus, his own quaestor and the son of his own procurator, and others, both senators and Roman knights, flogged and tortured on a single day, not to get evidence but for his amusement. Then he was so unable to bear putting off his pleasure, a huge pleasure that his cruelty demanded without delay, that, walking with matrons and other senators on the terrace of his mother’s gardens (which separates the colonnade from the riverbank), he beheaded some of them by lamplight. What was the hurry? What danger, private or public, did a single night threaten? How little it would have cost to wait for daylight, at least, so as not to kill senators of the Roman people in his slippers!

19 How arrogant his cruelty was is relevant to know, though I may seem to some to wander and go off the road; but this itself will be part of an anger that rages beyond the usual. He had flogged senators: he himself made it possible to say, “It is often done.” He had tortured them with all the grimmest things in the world: the cords, the ankle-irons, the rack, fire, his own face. And here the answer will be: “A great matter, to be sure! A man who was planning to butcher the whole senate, who wished that the Roman people had a single neck so that he could gather his crimes, spread over so many places and times, into one blow and one day, parceled out three senators like worthless slaves between whips and flames!” What is so unheard of as an execution by night? Robberies are usually hidden in the dark, but punishments, the better known they are, do more good as an example and a correction. And here I will be answered: “What you so marvel at is everyday for that beast; for this he lives, for this he lies awake, for this he works by lamplight.” Certainly no one else will be found who ordered that all those he had sentenced to punishment should have their mouths shut with a sponge stuffed in, so that they could not utter a sound. Who about to die was ever not left the means to groan? He was afraid that their last agony would send out some too-free word, that he might hear something he did not want to; and he knew that there were countless things nobody would dare throw in his face except a man about to perish. When sponges could not be found, he ordered the poor wretches’ clothes torn and the rags stuffed into their mouths. What savagery is this? Let a man draw his last breath; give the departing soul a place to leave by; let it leave by some way other than a wound. It would take long to add that he also finished off the fathers of the men he had killed, that same night, sending centurions round to their houses; that is, being a man of pity, he freed them from mourning. For it is not my purpose to describe Gaius’s savagery but anger’s, which does not only rage man by man but tears whole nations apart, and lashes cities and rivers and things beyond all feeling of pain.

20 So the king of the Persians cut off the noses of a whole people in Syria, which is how the place got its name, Rhinocolura. Do you think he showed mercy because he did not cut off their whole heads? He enjoyed a new kind of punishment. Something of the same kind the Ethiopians would also have suffered, who are called Macrobians because of the great length of their lives.¹¹ Against them, because they had not held out their hands, palms up, to receive slavery, and had given free answers to the envoys sent to them, answers that kings call insolent, Cambyses raged, and without providing supplies, without scouting the routes, he dragged his whole crowd of fighting men through trackless, parched country. Within the first stage of the march they lacked necessities, and the region, barren, uncultivated, and unknown to human foot, supplied nothing. At first the tenderest leaves and the tops of trees staved off hunger, then hides softened by fire and whatever necessity had made into food; when, among the sands, even roots and grasses had given out and a wilderness empty even of animals appeared, they chose every tenth man by lot and had a food more savage than hunger. Anger still drove the king headlong, when he had lost part of his army and eaten part, until he was afraid that he too would be called to the lot: then at last he gave the signal to retreat. All the while those choice birds were being kept for him, and his dining equipment was carried on camels, while his soldiers drew lots for who should die miserably and who should live worse.

21 This king was angry with a nation both unknown and undeserving, but at least able to feel it; Cyrus was angry with a river. When he was hurrying to war, intending to besiege Babylon, a war in which everything turns on opportunities, he tried to ford the Gyndes, a broad river, which is barely safe even when it has felt the summer and has sunk to its lowest. There one of the white horses that used to draw the royal chariot was swept away, and this greatly upset the king; so he swore that he would reduce that river, which carried off the king’s retinue, to such a state that even women could cross it on foot. Then he moved his whole war equipment there and kept at the work until he had cut the channel by one hundred and eighty trenches, scattered it into three hundred and sixty streams, and left it dry, the waters flowing off in different directions.¹² So he lost time, a great loss in great matters, and the soldiers’ ardor, which useless labor broke, and the chance of attacking the enemy unprepared, while he waged against a river the war he had declared on an enemy. This frenzy (for what else would you call it?) has touched Romans too. For Gaius Caesar destroyed a most beautiful villa near Herculaneum because his mother had once been held under guard there, and by this he made its fate famous; for while it stood we used to sail past it, and now people ask why it was destroyed.¹³

22 We should think, too, both of these examples, which you should avoid, and of those, on the other side, which you should follow: examples of moderation and mildness, in men who lacked neither cause for anger nor power to avenge. What would have been easier for Antigonus¹⁴ than to order two common soldiers led off, who, leaning against the king’s tent, were doing what men do both most dangerously and most gladly: speaking ill of their king? Antigonus had heard everything, since only a curtain stood between the speakers and the listener; he moved it gently and said, “Move farther off, or the king will hear you.” The same man, one night, when he overheard some of his soldiers calling down every curse on the king for leading them on that march and into hopeless mud, went up to those who were struggling most, and when he had pulled them out, without their knowing who was helping them, he said, “Now curse Antigonus, by whose fault you fell into these miseries, but wish well to the man who led you out of this swamp.” The same man bore the abuse of his enemies as mildly as that of his own citizens. So when some Greeks were besieged in a tiny fort and, trusting in their position, despised the enemy and made many jokes about Antigonus’s ugliness, mocking now his short stature, now his flattened nose, he said, “I am glad, and I hope for some good fortune, if I have Silenus in my camp.” When he had tamed these wits by hunger, he treated the captives this way: those useful for military service he assigned to his cohorts, the rest he put up for auction; and he said he would not have done so if it were not good for men with such bad tongues to have a master.

23 His grandson was Alexander, who used to hurl his spear at his guests, who, of the two friends I mentioned a little earlier, threw one to a wild beast and the other to himself. Of these two, however, the one who was thrown to the lion lived. Alexander did not have this vice from his grandfather, nor even from his father; for if Philip had any other virtue, he had also the endurance of insults, a great instrument for protecting a kingdom.¹⁵ Demochares, called Parrhesiastes, the Outspoken, for his excessive and impudent tongue, had come to him among other envoys of the Athenians. When Philip had heard the embassy kindly, he said, “Tell me what I can do that would please the Athenians.” Demochares broke in: “Hang yourself.” The bystanders were indignant at so inhuman an answer; Philip told them to be quiet and to send that Thersites away safe and unharmed. “But you,” he said, “you other envoys, tell the Athenians that those who say such things are much more arrogant than those who hear them said and let them go unpunished.”

The deified Augustus, too, did and said many things worth remembering, from which it is clear that anger did not rule him. Timagenes, the historian, had said certain things against him, certain things against his wife and his whole house, and his words had not been wasted; for reckless wit travels further and stays on people’s lips.¹⁶ The emperor often warned him to use his tongue more moderately; when he persisted, he barred him from his house. Afterward Timagenes grew old as a guest in the household of Asinius Pollio, and the whole city fought over him: the emperor’s house, closed to him, shut no other door. He gave public readings of the histories he had written afterward, and the books that contained the deeds of Caesar Augustus he threw into the fire; he carried on a feud with the emperor: no one feared his friendship, no one fled from him as from a man struck by lightning; someone was found to offer his lap to a man falling from so high. The emperor bore this, as I said, patiently, not even moved by the fact that Timagenes had laid hands on his praises and his achievements; he never complained to his enemy’s host. He said only this to Asinius Pollio: “You are keeping a wild beast.” Then, when Pollio began to make his excuses, he stopped him and said, “Enjoy him, my dear Pollio, enjoy him!” And when Pollio said, “If you order it, Caesar, I will bar him from my house at once,” he said, “Do you think I would do that, when it was I who reconciled you?” For Pollio had once been angry with Timagenes and had had no other reason for stopping than that the emperor had begun.

24 So let each man say to himself, whenever he is provoked: “Am I more powerful than Philip? Yet he was abused with impunity. Do I have more power in my own house than the deified Augustus had in the whole world? Yet he was content to withdraw from the man who abused him.” Why should I make my slave pay with the lash and the shackles for an answer too loud, a look too defiant, a muttering that does not even reach me? Who am I, that it should be a sin to offend my ears? Many have pardoned their enemies: shall I not pardon the lazy, the careless, the chatterers? Let age excuse a child, sex a woman, freedom a stranger, familiarity a member of the household. He is offending now for the first time: let us think how long he has pleased us. He has often offended at other times too: let us bear what we have long borne. He is a friend: he did what he did not mean to; an enemy: he did what he had to. Let us give way to the wiser man and excuse the more foolish; whoever it is, let us answer ourselves for him: that even the wisest men do much wrong; that no one is so circumspect that his care does not sometimes fail him; no one so mature that chance does not drive his gravity into some hotter act; no one so afraid of giving offense that he does not fall into it while trying to avoid it.

25 Just as a man of small account has found comfort in misfortune in seeing that the fortune of great men, too, totters, and as a man weeps for his son in his corner with a calmer mind once he has seen bitter funerals go out even from the palace, so a man bears it with a calmer mind to be hurt by someone, despised by someone, when it occurs to him that no power is so great that wrong does not run up against it. And if even the most prudent go wrong, whose error does not have a good excuse? Let us look back on how often in our youth we were not careful enough in our duties, not modest enough in our talk, not temperate enough with wine. If he is angry, let us give him time to see what he has done: he will punish himself. Finally, suppose he deserves punishment: there is no reason for us to get even with him. This will not be in doubt: whoever has looked down on those who provoke him has lifted himself out of the crowd and stands higher. It is the mark of true greatness not to feel a blow. So a huge wild beast turns slowly to look at barking dogs; so the wave dashes in vain against a great rock. The man who does not get angry has stood firm, unshaken by the wrong; the man who gets angry has been moved. But the man I have just placed above every misfortune holds the highest good in a kind of embrace, and answers not only man but Fortune herself: “Do whatever you like, you are too small to cloud my calm. Reason forbids it, and to reason I have given my life to govern. Anger will harm me more than the wrong. Why more? The wrong has a fixed limit; how far anger will carry me is uncertain.”

26 “I cannot bear it,” you say; “it is hard to put up with a wrong.” You are lying; for who cannot bear a wrong who can bear anger? Add now that what you are doing is bearing both anger and the wrong. Why do you bear a sick man’s rage, a madman’s words, children’s impudent hands? Because, of course, they seem not to know what they are doing. What difference does it make which flaw makes a person unwise? Lack of wisdom is an equal defense for all. “What, then?” you say. “Will he get away with it?” Suppose you wanted him to: still he would not; for the greatest punishment for doing a wrong is to have done it, and no one is more heavily punished than the man handed over to the torture of remorse. Next, we must look to the condition of human affairs, so as to be fair judges of everything that happens; and he is unfair who blames individuals for a vice common to all. An Ethiopian’s color does not mark him out among his own people, nor among the Germans does red hair gathered into a knot disgrace a man: you will judge nothing remarkable or ugly in one man that is common to his nation. And the things I have mentioned are defended by the custom of one region, one corner of the world: see now how much more justly pardon is given in things spread through the whole human race. We are all thoughtless and improvident, all unreliable, querulous, ambitious—why do I hide the public sore with gentler words?—we are all bad. So whatever is blamed in another, each of us will find in his own breast. Why do you remark on this man’s pallor, that man’s leanness? It is a plague. So let us be gentler with one another: we are bad men living among bad men. One thing can make us calm: a pact of mutual forbearance. “He has already harmed me; I have not yet harmed him.” But perhaps you have already hurt someone; you will hurt someone. Do not judge by this hour or this day; look at the whole disposition of your mind: even if you have done no wrong, you are capable of it.

27 How much better it is to heal a wrong than to avenge it! Revenge takes up a great deal of time; it exposes itself to many wrongs while it smarts over one; we all stay angry longer than we are hurt. How much better to go the other way and not set vices against vices! Would anyone seem quite in his right mind if he kicked back at a mule and bit a dog? “But those,” you say, “do not know they are doing wrong.” First, how unfair is the man in whose eyes being human hurts someone’s chance of pardon! Next, if other animals are exempt from your anger because they lack judgment, put anyone who lacks judgment in the same place; for what does it matter that he has other qualities unlike dumb animals, if he has the one that excuses dumb animals in every wrong they do, the darkness of the mind? He has done wrong: is this the first time? Is this the last? There is no reason to believe him even if he says, “I will not do it again”: he will do wrong, and someone else will wrong him, and his whole life will be tossed about among errors. What is ungentle must be handled gently. What is usually said to most effect in mourning will be said in anger too: will you stop some day, or never? If some day, how much better to leave anger than to be left by it! Or will this agitation last forever? Do you see what an unpeaceful life you are sentencing yourself to? For what will it be like for a man always swelling with rage? Add now that, when you have worked yourself up thoroughly and kept renewing the causes that goad you, anger will leave of its own accord, and time will drain its strength: how much better that it should be conquered by you than by itself!

28 You are angry with this man, then with that one; with slaves, then with freedmen; with parents, then with children; with acquaintances, then with strangers; for there are always causes enough everywhere unless a mind comes forward to plead for mercy. Frenzy will sweep you from here to there, from there somewhere else, and as new provocations keep arising, the rage will never break off. Come, unhappy man, will you ever love? Oh, what good time you are wasting on a bad thing! How much better it would be now to win friends, soften enemies, serve the state, give your effort to your household affairs, than to look around for what harm you can do to someone, what wound you can inflict on his rank or his estate or his body, when you cannot manage that without struggle and danger, even if you clash with an inferior! Suppose you get him in chains, exposed to your will and to every kind of suffering: often the excessive force of the striker has put a joint out, or left a sinew stuck in the teeth it broke; irascibility has crippled many, disabled many, even when it found material that could not fight back. Add now that nothing is born so weak that it dies without danger to the one who crushes it: sometimes pain, sometimes chance makes the weak equal to the strongest. What of the fact that most of the things we are angry about offend us more than they harm us? Yet there is a great difference between someone’s thwarting my will and his failing to support it, between his snatching something away and his not giving it. And yet we rate it the same whether someone takes away or refuses, whether he cuts off our hope or delays it, whether he acts against us or for himself, out of love for another or hatred of us. Some, indeed, have reasons for standing against us that are not only just but honorable: one is protecting a father, another a brother, another his country, another a friend; yet we do not forgive them for doing what we would condemn them for not doing; indeed, and this is incredible, we often think well of the deed and badly of the doer. But by Hercules, a great and just man looks up to the bravest of his enemies, the most stubborn for the freedom and safety of his country, and wishes that such a citizen, such a soldier, could be his.

29 It is shameful to hate the man you praise; but how much more shameful to hate someone for the very thing that makes him deserve pity: if a captive, suddenly thrust down into slavery, holds on to the remnants of his freedom and does not run nimbly to mean and toilsome services; if, sluggish from idleness, he cannot keep pace on foot with his master’s horse and carriage; if sleep has overcome him, worn out by night watch after night watch; if he refuses work on the farm, or does not take it on vigorously, having been moved from the holiday slavery of the city to hard labor! Let us distinguish whether someone cannot or will not: we shall acquit many if we begin to judge before we get angry. As it is, we follow the first impulse, and then, however empty the things that roused us, we persist, so as not to seem to have begun without cause; and, what is most unjust of all, the injustice of our anger makes us more stubborn; for we hold on to it and increase it, as if being fiercely angry proved that we were justly angry.

30 How much better to look closely at the beginnings themselves, how trivial they are, how harmless! What you see happen in dumb animals you will catch in man as well: we are disturbed by trifles and empty things. A red color excites a bull, an asp rears up at a shadow, a cloth provokes bears and lions; everything that is fierce and rabid by nature is thrown into a panic by empty things. The same happens to restless and stupid natures: they are struck by mere suspicions, so much so that sometimes they call modest benefits wrongs; and in these lies the most frequent, certainly the bitterest, material for irascibility. For we are angry with those dearest to us because they have done less for us than we imagined, and less than others received, though there is a ready remedy for both. He has favored someone else more: let us enjoy our own without comparing; no one will ever be fortunate who is tormented by someone more fortunate. I have less than I hoped: but perhaps I hoped for more than I should have. This is the part most to be feared; from here the most ruinous angers are born, angers that will attack everything most sacred. The deified Julius was killed by more friends than enemies, friends whose insatiable hopes he had not satisfied. He wanted to, certainly (for no one ever used a victory more generously; from it he claimed nothing for himself but the power to give away), but how could he satisfy such shameless desires, when every one of them coveted as much as only one man could have? So he saw his fellow soldiers with swords drawn around his chair: Tillius Cimber, a little earlier the keenest defender of his party, and others who became Pompeians only after Pompey was dead. It is this that has turned kings’ own weapons against them and driven their most loyal men to plot the death of those for whom and before whom they had vowed to die.

31 No one who looks at what others have is pleased with his own: that is why we are angry even with the gods, because someone is ahead of us, forgetting how many people are behind us, and how great a mass of envy follows at the back of the man who envies a few. Yet such is men’s insatiability that, however much they have received, it counts as a wrong that they could have received more. “He gave me the praetorship, but I had hoped for the consulship; he gave me the twelve fasces, but did not make me an ordinary consul; he was willing to have the year dated by my name, but I still lack a priesthood; I was co-opted into a college, but why only one? He crowned my career, but contributed nothing to my estate; he gave me what he had to give to somebody; out of his own pocket he gave nothing.”¹⁷ Rather, give thanks for what you have received; wait for the rest and be glad you are not yet full: it is one of life’s pleasures that something remains to hope for. You have outstripped everyone: rejoice that you are first in your friend’s mind. Many outstrip you: consider how many more you are ahead of than behind. You ask what your greatest fault is? You keep false accounts: you value what you have given highly, what you have received low.

32 Let different considerations deter us in different cases: with some people let us be afraid to get angry, with some ashamed, with some too proud. A great thing, no doubt, we shall have done if we send some poor wretch of a slave to the slave prison! Why are we in such a hurry to flog him at once, to break his legs on the spot? That power will not perish if it is put off. Let the time come when we are the ones giving the orders: now we would be speaking at anger’s command; when it has gone, then we shall see what that dispute is worth. For this is where we go wrong most: we come to the sword, to capital punishment, and we avenge with chains, prison, and hunger a thing that should be corrected with lighter lashes. “So,” you say, “you are telling us to see how petty, pitiful, and childish all the things are by which we think ourselves hurt!” I would indeed advise nothing more strongly than to take on a mighty spirit and to see how low and abject these things are for which we go to law, run about, and pant, things that no one whose thoughts are on anything lofty or magnificent should even glance back at.

33 Over money there is the most shouting: money wears out the courts, sets fathers and sons at odds, mixes poisons, hands swords to assassins and legions alike; it is smeared with our blood; because of it the nights of wives and husbands ring with quarrels, crowds press around the tribunals of magistrates, kings rage and plunder and overturn cities built by the long labor of centuries, to search for gold and silver in the ashes of cities. It is worth looking at the money chests lying in a corner: these are what eyes are shouted out of their sockets for, what makes the basilicas ring with the din of lawsuits, why judges are summoned from distant regions to sit and decide whose avarice is the more just. What if it is not even for a chest of money but for a handful of copper or a denarius charged to his account by a slave that an old man, about to die without an heir, bursts with rage? What if, for interest of a tenth of a percent, a sickly moneylender with twisted feet and hands no longer fit for counting shouts and, through summonses to court, claims his coppers in the very fits of his disease? If you were to bring me all the money from all the mines we are sinking deepest right now, if you threw into the open whatever treasure lies hidden, as avarice puts back under the earth what it had wickedly dug out, I would not think that whole heap worth the frown of a good man. With how much laughter we should follow the things that draw tears from us!

34 Come now, go through the rest: food and drink and the elegances prepared for them out of vanity, insulting words, gestures not respectful enough, stubborn beasts of burden and lazy slaves, suspicions and malicious readings of other people’s words, by which the gift of speech to man comes to be counted among nature’s wrongs: believe me, the things over which we blaze up so far from lightly are light, the sort of things that drive children to brawls and squabbles. None of the things we do so gloomily is serious, none is great; that, I say, is the source of your anger and madness: you rate small things highly. This man wanted to take an inheritance from me; this one slandered me to a man I had long courted in hope of a legacy; this one coveted my mistress: what ought to have been a bond of love, wanting the same thing, becomes a cause of strife and hatred. A narrow road causes fights among those passing through; a broad, wide-open road does not bring even whole peoples into collision: the things you strive for, because they are small and cannot pass to one man unless snatched from another, stir up fights and quarrels among those who want the same things.

35 You are indignant that your slave has answered back, and your freedman, your wife, your client; and then you, the same man, complain that freedom has been taken from the state, when you have taken it away at home. Again, if he kept silent when questioned, you call it defiance. Let him speak, and keep silent, and laugh! “In front of his master?” you say. No: in front of the father of the household. Why do you shout? Why do you bellow? Why do you call for the whip in the middle of dinner because the slaves are talking, because, where there is a crowd as big as a public meeting, there is not the silence of a wilderness? You have ears for this purpose, that they should take in not only what is tuneful and soft, sweetly drawn out and well composed: you must hear laughter as well as weeping, flattery as well as quarrels, good news as well as bad, the voices of men as well as the roaring and barking of animals. Why, poor wretch, do you start in terror at the shout of a slave, at the clang of bronze or the banging of a door? Delicate as you are, you will have to hear thunder. Apply what has been said about the ears to the eyes, which suffer no less from fastidiousness if they have been badly trained: they are offended by a stain and by dirt, by silver not bright enough, by a pool not clear to the bottom. These same eyes, of course, which can bear only marble that is variegated and gleaming with fresh polish, only a table marked with close-set veins, which at home want to tread on nothing less precious than gold, look with perfect calm, out of doors, on rough and muddy lanes, on most of the people they meet unwashed, on the walls of tenements eaten away, cracked, and crooked. What else is it, then, that keeps these things from offending them in public but lets them upset them at home, than an opinion that is fair and patient out there and peevish and querulous at home?

36 All the senses must be brought to firmness; they are by nature able to endure, if the mind stops corrupting them, and the mind must be called every day to render its account. Sextius¹⁸ used to do this: at the end of the day, when he had retired for the night’s rest, he would question his mind: “What evil of yours have you healed today? What vice have you resisted? In what part are you better?” Anger will cease, or grow more moderate, when it knows that every day it must come before a judge. Is anything finer, then, than this habit of sifting through the whole day? What sleep follows this review of oneself, how calm, how deep and free, when the mind has been either praised or admonished, and, as its own secret observer and censor, has examined its own conduct! I use this power and every day plead my case before myself. When the light has been taken away and my wife, who knows my habit by now, has fallen silent, I search through my whole day and go back over what I did and said; I hide nothing from myself, I pass over nothing. For why should I fear any of my mistakes, when I can say: “See that you do not do that again; this time I forgive you. In that discussion you spoke too combatively: from now on, do not argue with the ignorant; those who have never learned do not want to learn. You admonished that man more freely than you should have, and so you did not correct him but offended him: in the future, see not only whether what you say is true, but whether the man you say it to can bear the truth. A good man is glad to be admonished; the worse a man is, the more bitterly he takes correction.

37 “At a dinner party certain people’s jokes and words aimed to hurt you touched you: remember to avoid common company; license is looser after wine, because not even the sober have any shame. You saw your friend angry with the doorkeeper of some lawyer or rich man because he had turned him away as he was coming in, and you yourself got angry on his behalf with the lowest of slaves: are you going to be angry, then, with a chained dog? He too, when he has barked a lot, grows tame when food is thrown to him. Stand farther back and laugh! Now that fellow thinks he is somebody because he guards a threshold besieged by a crowd of litigants; now the man who lies inside is fortunate and lucky, and thinks a door hard to get through is the sign of a happy and powerful man: he does not know that the hardest door is the prison’s. Settle it in your mind in advance that you will have to endure many things: is anyone surprised to be cold in winter, seasick at sea, jolted on the road? The mind is strong against what it comes prepared for. Given a less honorable place at table, you began to be angry with your host, with the slave who gave out the invitations, with the man himself who was put above you: madman, what does it matter what part of the couch you lie on? Can a cushion make you more honorable or more disgraceful? You looked at someone unkindly because he spoke ill of your talent: do you accept this law? Then Ennius, whom you do not enjoy, would hate you, and Hortensius would declare feuds against you, and Cicero, if you laughed at his poems, would be your enemy. Are you willing, as a candidate, to accept the votes calmly?”

38 Someone has insulted you: surely not more grossly than Diogenes the Stoic philosopher was insulted, when, just as he was lecturing on anger, an impudent young man spat on him? He bore it gently and wisely: “I am not angry,” he said, “but I am not sure, all the same, that I ought not to be.” How much better our Cato! He was pleading a case when Lentulus, that factious and uncontrolled man of our fathers’ time, worked up as much thick spittle as he could and spat it right in the middle of his forehead; Cato wiped his face and said, “I will assure everyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong when they say you have no mouth (os).”¹⁹

39 We have now succeeded, Novatus, in settling the mind well: either it does not feel irascibility or it is above it. Let us see how we may soothe another’s anger; for we want not only to be healthy ourselves but to heal.

Anger in its first stage we shall not dare to soothe with speech: it is deaf and out of its mind; we shall give it room. Remedies do good when the illness abates; we do not touch eyes while they are swollen, for moving them would only provoke the stiff inflammation, nor other ills while they are at their height: the beginnings of diseases are cured by rest. “How little good your remedy does,” you say, “if it calms an anger that is stopping of its own accord!” First, it makes it stop sooner; next, it keeps watch so that it does not relapse; and the very onrush it does not dare to soothe, it will outwit: the healer will remove all the instruments of revenge, will pretend to be angry, so that, as a helper and companion in resentment, he may carry more weight in counsel; he will contrive delays and, while he looks for a greater punishment, put off the present one. By every art he will give the frenzy rest: if the anger is more violent, he will strike into it a shame or a fear it cannot resist; if weaker, he will bring in conversation that is either pleasant or new and draw it off with curiosity. They say that a doctor, when he had to treat a king’s daughter and could not do it without the knife, slipped in a scalpel hidden in a sponge while he was gently bathing her swollen breast: the girl would have fought the remedy if it had been applied openly; because she did not expect it, she bore the pain. Some things are cured only by deception.

40 To one man you will say, “Take care that your irascibility does not give your enemies pleasure”; to another, “Take care that your greatness of mind and the strength most people credit you with do not collapse. I am indignant myself, by Hercules, and can find no limit to my resentment, but we must wait for the right time; he will pay for it. Keep it in your mind: when you can, you will pay him back for the delay as well.” But to rebuke a man who is angry, and to get angry with him in turn, is to incite him: you will approach him in various ways and gently, unless perhaps you are so great a person that you can crush the anger, as the deified Augustus did when he was dining with Vedius Pollio.²⁰ One of Vedius’s slaves had broken a crystal cup; Vedius ordered him seized, to die not even an ordinary death: he was to be thrown to the moray eels, huge ones, which he kept in a fishpond. Who would not think he did this out of luxury? It was savagery. The boy slipped out of their hands and fled to the emperor’s feet, meaning to ask for nothing except to die some other way and not become food. The emperor was moved by the novelty of the cruelty and ordered him let go, and all the crystal cups broken before his eyes, and the fishpond filled in. That is how the emperor had to rebuke a friend; he used his power well: “Do you order men snatched from a banquet and torn apart with new kinds of punishment? If your cup has been broken, are a man’s entrails to be pulled apart? Do you think so highly of yourself that you would order a man led off to his death where the emperor is?” So whoever has power enough to attack anger from a higher place may handle it roughly, but only anger of the kind I have just described: fierce, monstrous, bloodthirsty, which can no longer be cured unless it has come to fear something greater.

41 Let us give the mind the peace that constant meditation on wholesome precepts will give it, and good actions, and an intellect intent on the desire for the honorable alone. Let conscience be satisfied; let us not toil at all for reputation; let even a bad one follow, so long as we deserve well. “But the crowd admires spirited men, and the bold are held in honor, while the calm are taken for sluggish.” At first sight, perhaps; but as soon as the evenness of a life has made people believe that this is not sluggishness of mind but peace, the same public reveres them and honors them. So this foul and hostile passion has nothing useful in it, but on the contrary every evil: sword and fire. Trampling on shame, it has stained its hands with slaughter, scattered the limbs of children, left nothing free from crime, mindful of no glory, afraid of no infamy, past correction once it has hardened from anger into hatred.

42 Let us be free of this evil, cleanse the mind of it, and tear out by the roots what will grow again, however slight, wherever it has clung; and let us not moderate anger but remove it entirely—for what moderation can there be of a bad thing? And we can do it, if only we make the effort. Nor will anything help more than the thought of our mortality. Let each man say to himself and to another: “What good is it to declare feuds as though we were born to live forever, and squander the briefest span? What good is it to turn days that could be spent on honorable pleasure into someone’s pain and torment? Our days do not allow for waste, and we have no time to lose. Why do we rush into battle? Why do we bring fights on ourselves? Why, forgetting our weakness, do we take up huge hatreds, and, fragile ourselves, rise up to break others? Soon a fever or some other ill of the body will forbid these feuds that we carry on with implacable minds; soon death will step between the fiercest pair and part them. Why do we make a commotion and throw our lives into disorder with our quarrels? Fate stands over our heads, reckons up the days as they perish, and comes nearer and nearer; the time you are setting aside for someone else’s death is perhaps close to your own.

43 “Why not rather gather up your short life and make it peaceful for yourself and for everyone else? Why not rather make yourself loved by all while you live, and missed when you have gone? Why do you want to bring down that man who treats you too loftily? Why do you try with all your strength to crush that man who barks at you, a low and despised fellow, but sharp and troublesome to his betters? Why are you angry with your slave, your master, your king, your client? Wait a little: look, death is coming, which will make you equals. We often see, among the morning shows in the arena, a fight between a bull and a bear tied together; when they have mauled each other, the man who will finish them off is waiting. We do the same: we provoke someone tied to us, when the end, and an early one, hangs over victor and vanquished alike. Let us rather spend whatever little remains in quiet and peace; let no one hate our corpse as it lies there. Often a shout of fire in the neighborhood breaks up a brawl, and the arrival of a wild beast parts the robber and the traveler: there is no time to wrestle with lesser evils when a greater fear has appeared. What have we to do with fighting and plots? Surely you do not wish the man you are angry with anything more than death? He will die even if you do nothing. You are wasting your effort if you want to do what is going to happen anyway. ‘I do not necessarily want to kill him,’ you say, ‘but to punish him with exile, with disgrace, with loss.’ I am more ready to forgive a man who wants to wound his enemy than one who wants to give him a blister; for that man’s mind is not only bad but petty. Whether you are thinking of the ultimate punishments or of lighter ones, how short is the time in which either he may be tormented by his punishment or you may take a wicked joy in another’s pain! Soon we shall spit out this breath. Meanwhile, while we draw it, while we are among men, let us cultivate humanity; let us be a cause of fear to no one, of danger to no one; let us despise losses, wrongs, abuse, and taunts, and bear brief annoyances with a great spirit: while we look back, as they say, and turn around, death will be upon us.”

Notes

1. 1. Novatus: Seneca’s elder brother, Lucius Annaeus Novatus, later known by his adoptive name Gallio; as proconsul of Achaea he appears in Acts 18.

2. 2. Democritus of Abdera (fifth century BC), the atomist philosopher, wrote a treatise on contentment (euthymia).

3. 3. Marcus Caelius Rufus (82–48 BC), orator and politician, pupil and friend of Cicero, who defended him in the speech For Caelius.

4. 4. Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, succeeded him as head of the Academy.

5. 5. Cambyses, king of Persia (530–522 BC), son of Cyrus. The story of Praexaspes is told by Herodotus (3.34–35).

6. 6. The king was Astyages, king of the Medes (Seneca says “of the Persians”), who punished Harpagus for sparing the infant Cyrus; Herodotus 1.117–119.

7. 7. Both stories are in Herodotus: Darius and Oeobazus (4.84), Xerxes and Pythius the Lydian (7.38–39). The Magus is the impostor who seized the Persian throne in 522 BC, posing as Cambyses’ brother.

8. 8. Clitus, who had saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus, was killed at Maracanda in 328 BC. Lysimachus, one of Alexander’s officers, later became king of Thrace and Macedonia; the story of the lion is probably legend.

9. 9. Marcus Marius Gratidianus, nephew of the great Marius, popular for a currency reform; he was killed in Sulla’s proscriptions in 82 BC, at the tomb of Quintus Lutatius Catulus, whom the great Marius had driven to suicide in 87 BC.

10. 10. Gaius Caesar: the emperor known as Caligula (reigned AD 37–41).

11. 11. Rhinocolura (Greek, “cut-nose”) lay on the border between Egypt and Syria. Macrobians is Greek for “long-lived”; Cambyses’ failed expedition against them is told by Herodotus (3.17–25).

12. 12. The Gyndes is a tributary of the Tigris; the story is in Herodotus (1.189).

13. 13. Gaius’s mother was Agrippina the Elder, whom Tiberius held under guard and later exiled.

14. 14. Antigonus “the One-Eyed” (c. 382–301 BC), one of Alexander’s generals and later king. Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, was pictured as squat and snub-nosed.

15. 15. Seneca’s slip: Alexander was not Antigonus’s grandson; his father was Philip II of Macedon. Demochares was the nephew of Demosthenes; Thersites is the loud-mouthed railer of Homer’s Iliad.

16. 16. Timagenes of Alexandria, a historian brought to Rome as a captive in 55 BC. Gaius Asinius Pollio (76 BC–AD 4) was a consul, historian, and patron of letters. Augustus’s remark is in Greek in the original.

17. 17. The twelve fasces were the insignia of a consul. The ordinary consuls took office on January 1 and gave their names to the year; replacement consuls served later in the year.

18. 18. Quintus Sextius, a Roman philosopher of the age of Augustus, whose school mixed Stoic and Pythagorean teaching.

19. 19. Diogenes of Babylon (second century BC), head of the Stoic school. Cato is Cato the Younger; Lentulus is probably Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, executed in 63 BC as a Catilinarian. Os means both “mouth” and “face,” and so also “impudence” or “eloquence.”

20. 20. Publius Vedius Pollio (d. 15 BC), a rich Roman knight and friend of Augustus.