You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I write how anger may be soothed, and it seems to me not without reason that you have dreaded above all this passion, the foulest and most frenzied of them all. For in the rest there is some element of calm and quiet; this one is all violence and impulse, raging with a craving utterly inhuman for pain — for weapons, blood, punishments — careless of itself so long as it harms another, hurling itself upon the very blade and greedy for a vengeance that will drag the avenger down with it. Some of the wise, accordingly, have called anger a brief madness; for it is equally without command of itself, forgetful of decency, heedless of ties of kin, stubborn and intent upon whatever it has begun, closed to reason and counsel, stirred by empty causes, unfit to discern the just and the true — most like those falling ruins that break upon the very thing they have crushed. 3. And that you may know that those whom anger possesses are not sane, look at their very bearing; for as there are sure signs of the mad — a bold and threatening look, a clouded brow, a savage face, a hurried step, restless hands, a changed color, breath drawn thick and heaved more violently — so the same are the marks of the angry: 4. their eyes blaze and flash, a deep flush over the whole face as the blood boils up from the depths of the heart, their lips quiver, their teeth are clenched, their hair bristles and stands on end, their breath forced and hissing, the cracking of joints wrenching themselves, groaning and bellowing, speech broken off with words scarcely articulate, hands struck together again and again, feet stamping the ground, the whole body roused and brandishing anger’s great threats — a face foul and horrible to see, of men distorting and swelling themselves: you could not tell whether the vice is more to be detested or more deformed. The rest can be hidden and nursed in secret: anger thrusts itself forward and goes out into the face, and the greater it is, the more openly it boils over. Do you not see how, in all animals, the moment they rise to do harm, the signs run ahead, and their whole bodies depart from their usual quiet condition and sharpen their ferocity? 6. Boars foam at the mouth, their tusks whetted by rubbing; bulls’ horns are tossed at the empty air, and the sand is scattered by the stamp of their feet; lions roar, the necks of provoked serpents swell, mad dogs have a grim aspect: there is no animal so dreadful and so deadly by nature that, the moment anger has invaded it, there does not appear in it some access of new ferocity. 7. Nor am I unaware that the other passions too are scarcely concealed — that lust and fear and recklessness give signs of themselves and can be foreknown; for no more vehement disturbance enters that moves nothing in the face. What then is the difference? That the other passions are visible, this one stands out.

Now indeed, if you should wish to look at its effects and the harm it does, no plague has cost the human race more dear. You will see slaughter and poisonings, the mutual filth of defendants, the ruin of cities and the destruction of whole nations, the heads of leading men put up for sale beneath the auction-spear of civil war, torches set to roofs and fires not confined within the walls but vast tracts of country aglow with the enemy’s flame. 2. Look at the foundations, scarcely now to be made out, of the noblest cities: anger threw them down. Look at the wildernesses, deserted for many miles without an inhabitant: anger emptied them. Look at the many leaders handed down to memory as instances of an evil fate: anger stabbed one in his own bed, struck down another amid the sacred rights of the table, tore another to pieces within the laws and the spectacle of the crowded forum, bade another give his blood by a son’s parricide, another open a royal throat at a slave’s hand, another spread his limbs upon the cross. 3. And so far I tell only of individual punishments: what if it should please you, leaving aside those against whom anger has flared man by man, to look upon assemblies cut down by the sword, and the common people butchered by the soldiery let loose, and whole peoples condemned to death in indiscriminate destruction…? [The text is mutilated here. Two fragments of the lost passage survive in later writers.] Martin of Braga, On Anger 2 (fr. 1): Anger turns everything from its best and most just state into its opposite. Whomever it has gripped, it lets him remember no duty: give it to a father, he is an enemy; give it to a son, he is a parricide; give it to a mother, she is a stepmother; give it to a citizen, he is a public enemy; give it to a king, he is a tyrant. Lactantius, On the Anger of God 17.13 (fr. 2): Anger is the craving to avenge a wrong, or, as Posidonius says, the craving to punish one by whom you think yourself unjustly harmed. Some have defined it thus: anger is the rousing of the mind to harm him who has either done harm or wished to. … as though they were deserting our care or scorning our authority. What? Why does the crowd grow angry at gladiators, and so unjustly that it counts it a wrong that they do not die willingly? It judges itself scorned, and by look, by gesture, by passion turns from spectator into adversary. 5. Whatever is of this kind is not anger but a semblance of anger, like that of children who, when they have fallen, want the ground beaten, and often do not even know why they are angry — they are simply angry, without cause and without injury, yet not without some appearance of injury nor without some craving for punishment. So they are tricked by the pretense of blows and appeased by the feigned tears of those begging pardon, and a false grief is taken away by a false revenge.

"We are often angry," he says, "not at those who have hurt us, but at those who are about to — so that you may know anger does not arise from injury." It is true that we are angry at those who will hurt us; but by the very thought they hurt us, and the man who is going to do an injury already does it. 2. "That you may know," he says, "that anger is not the craving for punishment — the weakest are often angry at the most powerful, and do not crave a punishment they cannot hope for." First, we said it is the craving to exact punishment, not the power to exact it; and men crave even what they cannot have. Next, no one is so lowly that he cannot hope to punish even the highest of men: we are all powerful to do harm. 3. Aristotle’s definition is not far from ours; for he says anger is the craving to repay pain. To pursue what stands between his definition and ours would take long. Against both it is objected that wild beasts grow angry, neither provoked by injury nor for the sake of another’s punishment or pain; for even if they bring these about, they do not seek them. 4. But it must be said that beasts lack anger, and so does everything except man; for though anger is the enemy of reason, it is nowhere born except where there is room for reason. Beasts have impulses — rage, ferocity, attack — but anger no more than luxury; and in certain pleasures they are more intemperate than man. 5. There is no reason to believe the man who says: The boar remembers not to be angry, nor the deer to trust its running, nor bears to charge the sturdy herds. By "be angry" he means "be roused, be driven on"; for they no more know how to be angry than to forgive. 6. Dumb animals lack human passions, but have certain impulses like them; otherwise, if there were love and hatred in them, there would be friendship and feud, discord and concord — of which some traces do exist even in them, but for the rest, the goods and evils of human breasts are man’s own. 7. To none but man is granted prudence, foresight, diligence, reflection; and animals are barred not only from human virtues but from human vices. Their whole form, within as without, is unlike the human; the ruling and governing part is shaped otherwise. As they have a voice, but one not articulate and confused and ineffective in words; as they have a tongue, but one bound and not loosed into varied motions, so the ruling part itself is too little subtle, too little exact. It grasps, then, the sights and appearances of things by which it may be called forth to its impulses, but turbid and confused ones. 8. Hence their onsets and tumults are violent, but fears and anxieties and sadness and anger they have not — only certain things like these; and so they quickly fall and change into the opposite, and, when they have raged and trembled most fiercely, they fall to feeding, and from frenzied roaring and racing about, sleep and rest at once follow.

What anger is has been set out fully enough. How it differs from irascibility is plain: as the drunk man from the drunkard, the frightened from the timid. The angry man can fail to be irascible: the irascible man can sometimes fail to be angry. 2. The other kinds, which among the Greeks distinguish anger into species under many names, I shall pass over, since with us they have no words of their own — though we do say "bitter" and "harsh," and no less "splenetic," "rabid," "clamorous," "difficult," "rough," all of which are differences of angers; among these you may set "peevish," a dainty sort of irascibility. 3. For some angers are such as subside within shouting; some no less stubborn than frequent; some savage in hand but sparing of words; some poured out into the bitterness of words and curses; some that go no further than complaints and aversions; some deep and heavy and turned inward: there are a thousand other species of a manifold evil.

We have asked what anger is, whether it falls upon any animal other than man, how it differs from irascibility, how many its species are: now let us ask whether anger is according to nature, and whether it is useful and in any part to be kept. 2. Whether it is according to nature will be plain if we examine man. What is gentler than he, while his mind’s disposition is right? What is crueler than anger? What is more loving of others than man? What is more hostile than anger? Man is born for mutual aid, anger for destruction; the one wishes to gather, the other to scatter; the one to help, the other to harm; the one to succor even strangers, the other to attack even the dearest; the one is ready even to spend himself for others’ advantage, the other to go down into peril, provided it drags the other down. 3. Who, then, is more ignorant of the nature of things than he who assigns to its best and most faultless work this fierce and ruinous vice? Anger, as we said, is greedy for punishment, and that its craving should lodge in the most peaceable breast of man is least according to his nature. For human life is built on benefits and on concord, and is bound into a compact of mutual aid not by terror but by mutual love.

"What then? Is not chastisement sometimes necessary?" Of course; but this without anger, with reason; for it does not harm but heals under the appearance of harming. As we put warped shafts to the fire to straighten them and, by driving in wedges, press them out — not to break but to unbend them — so we correct characters made crooked by vice through pain of body and mind. 2. Surely the physician, in slight ailments, first tries not to depart much from the daily routine, to impose order on food, drink, exercise, and to strengthen health only by a changed arrangement of life. The next step is that measure should avail. If measure and order do not avail, he withdraws and cuts away something; if even to this it does not respond, he forbids food and unburdens the body by abstinence; if the milder measures have come to nothing, he opens a vein, and lays hands on the limbs if what clings does harm and spreads the disease; nor does any cure seem harsh whose effect is healing. 3. So it befits the guardian of the laws and the ruler of the state to treat characters, as long as he can, with words, and those the milder ones, that he may persuade what should be done and win minds to a craving for the honorable and the just, and make them hate the vices and prize the virtues; then let him pass to sterner speech, by which he still warns and reproaches; last of all let him resort to punishments, and these still light and revocable; let him set the ultimate penalties for the ultimate crimes, so that no one perishes except him whose perishing is even in the interest of the one who perishes. 4. In this one thing he will be unlike those who heal: that they grant an easy exit to those to whom they could not grant life; he drives the condemned from life with disgrace and public show — not because he takes delight in anyone’s punishment (for far from the sage is so inhuman a ferocity), but that they may be a lesson to all, and, since they would not be of use alive, the commonwealth may at least make use of their death. Nature, then, is not greedy for punishment in man; therefore neither is anger according to man’s nature, because it is greedy for punishment. 5. And I will bring forward Plato’s argument — for what harm is there in using another’s words in the part where they are ours? "A good man," he says, "does no harm." Punishment harms; therefore punishment does not befit the good man, and for that reason neither does anger, because punishment befits anger. If the good man does not rejoice in punishment, he will not rejoice in that passion either to which punishment is a pleasure; therefore anger is not natural.

Granted that anger is not natural — is it to be taken up because it has often been useful? It exalts the mind and rouses it, and without it courage achieves nothing magnificent in war, unless its flame is set beneath, unless this goad drives the bold on and sends them into danger. And so some think it best to temper anger, not to remove it, and, with what overflows drawn off, to force it to a wholesome measure, but to keep that without which action will grow slack and the force and vigor of the mind dissolve. 2. First, it is easier to shut out the destructive than to govern it, and not to admit than, once admitted, to moderate; for when they have set themselves in possession, they are stronger than their ruler and do not suffer themselves to be cut back or lessened. 3. Next, reason itself, to which the reins are handed, is powerful only so long as it is kept apart from the passions; if it has mingled with them and been defiled, it cannot hold back those it could have driven off. For the mind, once shaken and thrown off balance, is the slave of that by which it is impelled. 4. The beginnings of certain things are in our power; what comes after sweeps us along by its own force and leaves no way back. As bodies given over to the precipice have no control of themselves and, once cast down, cannot resist or delay, but the irrevocable plunge cuts off all counsel and repentance and it is not allowed not to arrive where it was allowed not to go — so the mind, if it has flung itself into anger, love, and the other passions, is not permitted to check its own impulse; its own weight and the downward nature of vices must sweep it and drive it to the bottom.

It is best to spurn at once the first incitement to anger, to fight against its very seeds, and to take pains not to fall into anger. For if it has begun to carry us off our course, the return to safety is hard, since there is nothing of reason left where passion has once been let in and granted some right of its own by our will: it will do thereafter as much as it pleases, not as much as you permit. 2. The enemy, I say, must be barred at the very frontier; for once he has entered and forced the gates, he takes no measure from his captives. The mind is not set apart, watching the passions from outside, to keep them from advancing further than they ought; it is itself changed into the passion, and so cannot recall that useful and wholesome force once it is betrayed and weakened. 3. For these things, as I said, do not have separate and distinct seats; passion and reason are the change of the mind for better and worse. How then shall reason, seized and oppressed by vices, rise again, when it has yielded to anger? Or how shall it free itself from a confusion in which the mixture of the worse has prevailed? 4. "But some," he says, "hold themselves in check when angry." So as to do none of the things anger dictates, or some? If they do none, it is plain anger is not necessary for the conduct of affairs — the anger you summoned as having something stronger than reason. 5. Finally I ask: is it stronger than reason or weaker? If stronger, how will reason be able to set a measure on it, when only the weaker are wont to obey? If weaker, reason suffices of itself for accomplishing things without it, and needs no help from the weaker. 6. "But some angry men are constant and hold themselves in." When? When the anger is already fading and departing of its own accord, not when it is at its very heat; for then it is the stronger. 7. "What then? Do they not sometimes, even in anger, let those they hate go unhurt and untouched and refrain from harming?" They do. When? When passion has beaten back passion and either fear or desire has gained something. Then it was not by the good office of reason that the anger rested, but by the faithless and evil peace of the passions.

Further, anger has nothing useful in it, nor does it whet the mind for the business of war; for virtue, sufficient to itself, never needs to be helped by vice. Whenever there is need of an onset, the mind does not grow angry but rises up and rouses or relaxes itself just so far as it has judged needful, no otherwise than the missiles flung from engines are in the power of the one who launches them, as to how far they are hurled. 2. "Anger," says Aristotle, "is necessary, and nothing can be stormed without it, unless it fills the mind and kindles the spirit; it must be used, however, not as a general but as a soldier." This is false; for if it hears reason and follows where it is led, it is no longer anger, whose mark is defiance; if, on the other hand, it resists and does not rest when bidden but is carried on by its own lust and ferocity, it is as useless a servant of the mind as the soldier who ignores the signal for retreat. 3. So if it suffers measure to be applied to it, it must be called by another name and cease to be anger, which I understand as unbridled and untamed; if it does not suffer it, it is destructive and not to be counted among our aids: thus either it is not anger, or it is useless. 4. For if a man exacts punishment not because he is greedy for the punishment itself but because it is fitting, he is not to be numbered among the angry. This will be the useful soldier, who knows how to obey counsel; the passions indeed are as bad servants as commanders.

Therefore reason will never take to its aid those improvident and violent impulses over which it has no authority, which it can never crush unless it sets against them their like and equal — against anger fear, against sloth anger, against fear desire. 2. Far from virtue be this evil, that reason should ever flee to the vices for refuge! The mind cannot take faithful rest; it must be shaken and tossed, if it is safe only through its own ills, if it cannot be brave unless it is angry, nor industrious unless it craves, nor quiet unless it fears: it must live under a tyranny, having come into the slavery of some passion. Is it not shameful to send the virtues down into the clientship of the vices? 3. Next, reason ceases to have any power if it can do nothing without passion, and begins to be its equal and its like. For what difference is there, if passion without reason is as rash a thing as reason without passion is ineffective? Both are equal, where the one cannot be without the other. But who could endure to set passion on a level with reason? 4. "So," he says, "passion is useful, if it is moderate." Rather, if it is useful by nature. But if it is impatient of command and reason, this much only will be gained by moderation: that the less it is, the less it harms; therefore a moderate passion is nothing but a moderate evil.

"But against enemies," he says, "anger is necessary." Nowhere less: where the onsets ought not to be unbridled but tempered and obedient. For what else is it that breaks the barbarians, so much stronger in body, so much more enduring of toil, but anger, most hostile to itself? Gladiators too are protected by skill, laid bare by anger. 2. Besides, what need of anger, when reason achieves the same? Do you suppose the hunter is angry at the beasts? Yet he both takes them as they come and pursues them as they flee, and reason does all that without anger. What destroyed the many thousands of Cimbri and Teutones poured over the Alps, so that no messenger but only rumor carried the news of so great a disaster to their own people, except that they had anger in the place of valor? And anger, as it sometimes drives down and lays low what it meets, so more often is its own ruin. 3. What is more spirited than the Germans? What keener in the charge? What more covetous of arms, among which they are born and bred, of which alone they take care, neglecting all else? What more hardened to every endurance, since for the most part no coverings for their bodies are provided them, no shelters against the unbroken harshness of their sky? 4. Yet these the Spaniards and Gauls and the soft soldiers of Asia and Syria cut down, before a legion comes in sight, fit for the slaughter by nothing but their irascibility. Come now, give to those bodies, those minds, ignorant of delights and luxury and wealth, give them reason, give them discipline: to say no more, we shall certainly need to recall the Roman character. 5. By what else did Fabius restore the broken strength of the empire than by knowing how to delay, to draw out, to wait — all of which the angry do not know? The empire, which then stood on the brink, would have perished if Fabius had dared as much as anger urged: he took public fortune into his counsel and, weighing the forces from which now nothing could perish without the whole perishing, set aside grief and vengeance, intent on the one thing useful and on his chances; he conquered anger before he conquered Hannibal. 6. What of Scipio? Did he not leave Hannibal and the Punic army and all that called for anger, and carry the war over into Africa — so slow that he gave the spiteful an impression of self-indulgence and sloth? 7. What of the other Scipio? Did he not sit much and long around Numantia, and bear this grief, his own and the state’s, with an even mind, that Numantia took longer to be conquered than Carthage? While he walled the enemy in and shut them up, he drove them to this, that they fell by their own swords. 8. Anger, therefore, is not useful, not even in battles or wars; for it is prone to rashness, and, while it wishes to bring on danger, it does not guard against it. The surest valor is that which has long and well looked about it and ruled itself and advanced out of deliberate purpose.

"What then?" he says. "Will the good man not be angry if he sees his father struck down, his mother carried off?" He will not be angry, but he will avenge, he will protect. But why do you fear that even without anger devotion will be too small a spur to him? Or say it in the same way: "What then? When the good man sees his father or his son cut down, will he not weep, will he not faint?" Things we see happen to women, whenever some slight suspicion of danger has struck them. 2. The good man will discharge his duties unshaken, undismayed; and he will do what is worthy of a good man so as to do nothing unworthy of a man. My father will be struck down: I will defend him; he has been struck down: I will avenge him, because it is fitting, not because it grieves me. 3. "Good men are angry at wrongs done to their own." When you say this, Theophrastus, you seek to bring odium on the braver precepts and, leaving the judge, you appeal to the gallery: because each man is angry in such a misfortune of his own, you suppose men will judge that to be right which they do; for each man generally judges a passion just which he recognizes in himself. 4. But they do the same if the hot water is not properly served, if a glass is broken, if a shoe is splashed with mud. It is not devotion that moves that anger but weakness — as in children, who will weep as much over lost parents as over lost nuts. 5. To be angry on behalf of one’s own belongs not to a devoted mind but a weak one: the fine and worthy thing is to come forward as a defender of parents, children, friends, fellow citizens, led by duty itself, willing, judging, foreseeing, not driven and rabid. For no passion is greedier for vengeance than anger, and for that very reason it is unfit for vengeance: too headlong and frantic, like nearly every craving, it stands in its own way to the thing it hurries toward. And so it has never been good in peace or in war; for it makes peace like war, and in arms forgets that Mars is shared by both sides, and comes into another’s power while it is not in its own. Next, vices are not to be taken into use because now and then they have accomplished something; for fevers too relieve certain kinds of ill health, and yet it is not on that account worse to have been wholly free of them: it is a loathsome kind of remedy to owe one’s health to disease. In the same way anger, even if now and then, like poison and a fall and shipwreck, it has helped against all expectation, is not for that reason to be judged wholesome; for poisons have often been a means of safety.

Again, the things worth having are the better and more desirable the greater they are. If justice is a good, no one will say it would be better if something were taken from it; if courage is a good, no one will wish it lessened in any part. 2. Therefore anger too, the greater the better; for who would refuse an increase of any good? But to be increased is harmful to it; therefore so is to exist: it is no good which becomes evil by growing. "Anger is useful," he says, "because it makes men more combative." By that reckoning, so does drunkenness; for it makes men insolent and bold, and many have been better at the sword for being the worse for drink; by that reckoning call frenzy and madness too necessary to strength, because raving often makes men more powerful. 4. What? Has not fear, by the opposite, sometimes made a man bold, and the dread of death roused even the most slothful to battle? But anger, drunkenness, fear, and other things of the kind are foul and unsteady goads, and they do not equip virtue, which has no need of vices, but lift a little a mind otherwise sluggish and cowardly. 5. No one is made braver by anger except the man who would not have been brave without it; so it does not come to virtue’s aid but in its stead. And what of this — that if anger were a good, it would attend the most perfect men? Yet the most irascible are infants and old men and the sick, and everything weak is by nature querulous.

"It cannot be," says Theophrastus, "that a good man should not be angry at bad men." By that reckoning, the better a man is, the more irascible he will be: see whether on the contrary he is not more placid and freed from the passions, and one who hates no one. 2. What reason has he to hate the erring, since it is error that drives them into such faults? And it is not the part of a prudent man to hate those who err; otherwise he will be an object of hatred to himself. Let him reflect how many things he does against good custom, how many of his own deeds stand in need of pardon: now he will be angry even at himself. For a fair judge does not give one verdict in his own cause and another in another’s. 3. No one, I say, will be found who can acquit himself, and each man calls himself innocent with an eye to a witness, not to his conscience. How much more humane to show toward sinners a gentle and fatherly mind, and not to hound them but to call them back! It is better to set a man wandering through the fields in ignorance of his road on the right path than to drive him off.

The sinner, then, must be corrected both by admonition and by force, both gently and harshly, and made better both for himself and for others not without chastisement, but without anger; for who is angry at the one he heals? But they cannot be corrected, and there is nothing in them mild or capable of good hope: then let them be removed from the company of mortals, since they will only make worse what they touch, and let them cease, in the one way they can, to be evil — but this without hatred. 2. For what reason have I to hate the man whom I most benefit at the very moment I rescue him from himself? Does anyone hate his own limbs when he cuts them off? That is not anger but a wretched cure. We knock mad dogs on the head; we kill the fierce and untamable ox; we put the knife to diseased flocks, lest they taint the herd; we destroy monstrous births, and we drown even our children if they are born weak and misshapen; it is not anger but reason that sets apart the harmful from the sound. 3. Nothing less becomes the man who punishes than anger, since the punishment avails the more for amendment if it is delivered by judgment. This is why Socrates says to his slave, "I would beat you, if I were not angry." He put off the slave’s correction to a saner moment; at that moment he corrected himself. Whose passion, in the end, will be tempered, when Socrates did not dare to entrust himself to anger?

Therefore, to restrain the erring and the wicked, there is no need of an angry chastiser; for since anger is a fault of the mind, it is not for the sinner to correct sins. "What then? Shall I not be angry at a robber? What then? Shall I not be angry at a poisoner?" No; for I am not angry at myself when I let blood. I apply every kind of punishment in the place of a remedy. 2. "You are still in the first stage of errors, and do not fall gravely but often: reproof, first private, then made public, will try to amend you. You have already gone too far to be healed by words: you will be held in check by disgrace. On you something stronger, something you will feel, must be branded: you will be sent into exile and to unknown places. Against you, harsher remedies are now wanted by your settled wickedness: public chains and the prison will be brought to bear. 3. Yours is an incurable mind, weaving crimes upon crimes, and now you are driven on not by motives — which will never be lacking to the bad — but to you, for sinning, the cause enough is to sin; you have drunk in wickedness through and through and so mixed it with your vitals that it cannot come out except with them; long since, you wretch, you have been seeking death: we shall deserve well of you, we shall take from you that madness by which, vexing others, you are yourself vexed, and to one who has wallowed in his own and others’ torments we shall hold out the one good left to you, death." Why should I be angry at the man whom I most benefit at that very moment? Sometimes the best kind of mercy is to kill. 4. If I had entered a hospital of an army, or the house of a rich man, I would not have prescribed the same to all who were ailing in different ways: I see varied vices in so many minds, and I have been brought in to heal the state; let the medicine be sought for each man’s disease — let modesty heal this one, travel that one, pain this one, want that one, the sword another. 5. And so, if the magistrate’s robe must be put on awry and the assembly summoned by the trumpet, I will go forth onto the tribunal not raving nor hostile but with the look of the law, and I will pronounce those solemn words in a voice gentle and grave rather than rabid, and bid the business proceed by law not in anger but in severity; and when I order the criminal’s neck struck off, when I sew up the parricides in the sack, when I send a man to the soldier’s punishment, when I set the traitor or public enemy on the Tarpeian Rock, I will be, without anger, of the same look and mind as when I strike serpents and venomous creatures. 6. "Irascibility is needed for punishing." What? Does the law seem to you to be angry at those it does not know, has not seen, hopes will never exist? Its temper, then, is what we must take on — the law, which does not grow angry but ordains. For if it befits the good man to be angry at evil deeds, it will also befit him to envy the prosperity of evil men. For what is more unworthy than that certain men should flourish and abuse the indulgence of fortune — men for whom no fortune bad enough can be found? But he will look on their advantages without envy as on their crimes without anger; the good judge condemns what is to be disapproved, he does not hate it. 7. "What then? When the sage has some such thing in hand, will his mind not be touched, and be more stirred than usual?" I grant it: he will feel a certain light and slight motion; for, as Zeno says, even in the sage’s mind, after the wound is healed, the scar remains. He will feel, then, certain suspicions and shadows of the passions, but the passions themselves he will be free of.

Aristotle says that certain passions, if a man uses them well, serve as arms. That would be true, if, like the instruments of war, they could be taken up and laid aside at the wearer’s discretion: these arms that Aristotle gives to virtue fight of themselves, do not wait for the hand, and possess without being possessed. 2. There is no need of other instruments; nature has equipped us well enough with reason. This she gave as a weapon, firm, lasting, obedient, neither double-edged nor able to be turned back upon its master. Reason is sufficient of itself not only for foresight but for the conduct of affairs; for what is more foolish than to seek protection from irascibility — a stable thing from an unsteady, a faithful from a faithless, a sound from a sick? 3. And what of this — that even for actions, in which alone the work of irascibility seems necessary, reason of itself is far stronger? For when it has judged that something must be done, it perseveres in it; for it will find nothing better than itself to change to; and so it stands by what is once resolved. 4. Mercy has often driven anger back; for anger has no solid strength but an empty swelling, and uses violent beginnings, no otherwise than the winds that rise from the ground and, conceived by rivers and marshes, are vehement without persistence: 5. it begins with great force, then flags before its time, worn out, and what had turned over nothing but cruelty and new kinds of punishment, when the moment for punishing comes, is already broken and mild. Passion falls quickly; reason is even. 6. But even where anger has persisted, sometimes, if there are several who have deserved to die, after the blood of two or three it ceases to kill. Its first blows are keen: so the venoms of serpents creeping from their lair do harm, but their teeth are harmless once frequent biting has drained them. 7. Therefore those who committed equal offenses do not suffer equally, and often the one who offended less suffers more, because he was thrown to a fresher anger. And altogether it is uneven: now it runs out beyond what it ought, now it stops short of its due; for it indulges itself, judges by lust, will not hear, leaves no room for a defense, clings to what it has seized, and will not suffer its own verdict, even when wrong, to be wrested from it.

Reason gives time to each side, then asks an adjournment for itself too, that it may have space to sift the truth: anger is in haste. Reason wishes to judge what is just: anger wishes what it has judged to seem just. 2. Reason looks at nothing but the matter at issue: anger is stirred by empty things hovering outside the case. A more confident look, a clearer voice, a freer speech, a finer dress, a more ambitious advocacy, the favor of the crowd — these enrage it; often, hostile to the advocate, it condemns the accused; even if the truth is thrust before its eyes, it loves and protects its error; it will not be refuted, and in things badly begun obstinacy seems to it more honorable than repentance. Gnaeus Piso was, within our memory, a man free of many vices, but warped, and one to whom rigidity passed for firmness. When in anger he had ordered the execution of a soldier who had returned from leave without his comrade — as though he had killed the man he did not produce — he gave no time to the one asking it for a search. The condemned man was led outside the rampart and was already stretching out his neck, when suddenly there appeared the very comrade who had seemed killed. 4. Then the centurion in charge of the execution bids the guardsman sheathe his sword and leads the condemned man back to Piso, to give Piso back his innocence; for fortune had given the soldier his. They are led off amid a great throng, the two comrades embracing each other, to the great joy of the camp. Piso mounts the tribunal in a fury and orders both to be led to death — the soldier who had not killed and the one who had not died. 5. What is more unworthy than this? Because one had been shown innocent, two were perishing. Piso added a third; for he ordered the very centurion who had brought back the condemned man to be led to death. Three were set up to perish in that same place on account of one man’s innocence. 6. O how clever is irascibility at inventing pretexts for its fury! "You," he says, "I order to death, because you have been condemned; you, because you were the cause of your comrade’s condemnation; you, because, bidden to kill, you did not obey your commander." He devised how to make three crimes, because he had found none.

Irascibility has this evil in it, I say: it will not be ruled. It is angry at the truth itself, if it has appeared against its will; with shouting and uproar and a tossing of the whole body it pursues those it has marked, with abuse and curses added. 2. Reason does not do this; but if there is need, in silence and quiet it razes whole houses to their foundations, and destroys families pestilent to the commonwealth together with their wives and children, pulls down the very roofs and levels them with the ground and roots out names hostile to liberty — and this not gnashing its teeth nor shaking its head nor doing anything unbecoming a judge, whose face ought to be most placid and composed at the very moment it pronounces great sentences. 3. "What need is there," says Hieronymus, "when you wish to strike someone, first to bite your own lips?" What if he had seen a proconsul leaping down from the tribunal and snatching the rods from the lictor and tearing his own clothes, because another’s were torn too slowly? 4. What need to overturn the table? to dash down the cups? to drive oneself against the columns? to tear one’s hair, to beat one’s thigh and breast? How great an anger do you think it is which, because it does not burst out on another as quickly as it wishes, turns back upon itself? They are held back, accordingly, by those nearest them and begged to be reconciled with themselves. None of which is done by anyone who, empty of anger, imposes on each the punishment he has earned. He often lets go the man whose offense he has caught: if repentance for the deed promises good hope, if he understands the wickedness does not come from the depths but, as they say, clings to the surface of the mind, he will grant an impunity that will harm neither the receiver nor the giver; 6. sometimes he will check great crimes more lightly than lesser ones, if the former were committed by a slip, not by cruelty, while in the latter there is a hidden, covered, inveterate cunning; he will not visit the same offense in two men with the same evil, if the one admitted it through carelessness, the other took care to be guilty. 7. This he will always observe in every chastisement: that he knows the one is applied to amend the bad, the other to remove them; in both he will look not to the past but to the future (for, as Plato says, no prudent man punishes because a sin has been committed, but that it may not be committed; for the past cannot be recalled, the future is forestalled); and those he wishes to make open examples of a wickedness that ends badly he will kill in public, not only that they may perish themselves, but that by perishing they may deter others. 8. You see how the man who must weigh and assess these things ought to come, free of all disturbance, to handle with the utmost diligence a matter that is the power of life and death: the sword is ill entrusted to an angry man.

Nor even is this to be judged — that anger contributes anything to greatness of mind. For that is not greatness: it is a swelling; nor is the disease an increase to bodies stretched with a glut of corrupt humor, but a pestilent abundance. 2. All whom a frenzied mind lifts above human thoughts believe they breathe something lofty and sublime; but there is nothing solid beneath: what has grown without foundations is prone to ruin. Anger has nothing to stand on; it does not rise from the firm and lasting but is windy and empty, and is as far from greatness of mind as recklessness from courage, insolence from confidence, gloom from austerity, cruelty from severity. 3. There is a great difference, I say, between a lofty mind and a proud one. Irascibility attempts nothing ample or seemly; on the contrary, it seems to me the mark of a sluggish and unhappy mind, conscious of its own weakness, often to take offense — as ulcerated and ailing bodies groan at the lightest touch. So anger is most of all a womanish and childish vice. "But it falls upon men too." Yes, for men too have childish and womanish natures. 4. "What then? Are there not some utterances let fall by the angry that seem uttered with a great mind?" Yes, by those ignorant of true greatness, like that dire and accursed one, "Let them hate, provided they fear." You may know it was written in Sulla’s age. I do not know whether he wished worse for himself — to be hated or to be feared. "Let them hate." It occurs to him that they will curse him, plot against him, crush him: what did he add? May the gods curse him for it, so apt a remedy did he find for hatred! "Let them hate" — what? "provided they obey"? No. "provided they approve"? No. What then? "provided they fear." On those terms I should not even wish to be loved. 5. Do you think this said with a great spirit? You are mistaken; for that is not greatness but monstrousness. There is no reason to believe the words of the angry, whose noise is great and threatening, while within the mind is most cowardly. 6. Nor is there reason to think true what is said in that most eloquent man, Titus Livius: "a man of great rather than good genius." The two cannot be separated: either it will also be good, or it will not even be great, since I understand greatness of mind to be unshaken and solid within and uniform and firm from the bottom up — such as cannot be found in evil natures. 7. For they can be terrible and turbulent and ruinous: greatness, indeed, whose footing and strength is goodness, they will not have. 8. For the rest, by speech, by effort, and by all their outward show they will produce a belief in greatness; they will utter something you may think great-minded — as did Gaius Caesar, who, angry at the sky because it thundered through his pantomimes (whom he imitated more diligently than he watched) and because his banquet was frightened by lightning (and rather ill-aimed lightning at that), challenged Jupiter to a fight, and that without quarter, shouting out that Homeric line: Lift me, or I will lift you. How great a madness it was! He supposed either that he could not be harmed even by Jupiter, or that he could harm even Jupiter. I think this utterance of his added no slight weight toward inciting the minds of the conspirators; for it seemed the limit of endurance to bear the man who could not bear Jupiter.

Nothing in anger, therefore — not even when it seems vehement and contemptuous of gods and men — is great, nothing noble. Or if anger seems to anyone to produce a great mind, let luxury seem so too — it wants to be borne on ivory, clothed in purple, roofed with gold, to move lands about, to shut in seas, to hurl rivers down, to hang woods in the air; 2. let avarice seem great-minded too — it broods over heaps of gold and silver, farms estates that go by the names of provinces, and under single bailiffs holds broader bounds than the consuls drew by lot; 3. let lust seem great-minded — it swims across straits, gelds troops of boys, comes under a husband’s sword with death held in contempt; let ambition seem great-minded — it is not content with yearly honors, and, if it could, would seize the calendar with one name and set up its titles throughout the whole world. 4. All these things, no matter how far they advance and stretch themselves, are narrow, wretched, low; virtue alone is lofty and exalted, and nothing is great except what is at the same time calm.

The first book, Novatus, had the kinder subject matter; for the descent down the slope of vice is easy. Now we must come to finer points; for we ask whether anger begins by judgment or by impulse — that is, whether it is moved of its own accord, or like most things that arise within us without our knowing. 2. The discussion must lower itself to these questions that it may rise to the higher ones too; for in our body too the bones and sinews and joints, the supports of the whole and its vital parts, by no means handsome to see, are arranged first, and then those parts from which all the comeliness of face and aspect comes; after all these, last of all, the color that most catches the eye is shed over the now-finished body. That the appearance of an injury presented moves anger, there is no doubt; but we ask whether it follows the appearance itself at once and breaks out without the mind’s involvement, or whether it is moved with the mind assenting. 4. Our view is that it dares nothing by itself, but only with the mind approving; for to take in the appearance of an injury received, and to crave its revenge, and to join the two — that one ought not to have been harmed, and that one ought to be avenged — is not the work of an impulse roused without our will. That is simple; this is composite and contains several things: it has understood something, grown indignant, condemned, and takes vengeance; these cannot happen unless the mind has assented to the things by which it was touched.

"To what," you say, "does this question tend?" That we may know what anger is; for if it is born in us against our will, it will never yield to reason. For all motions that do not come about by our will are unconquerable and unavoidable — like the shudder when cold water is sprinkled on us, the recoil at certain touches; at bad news the hair stands up, a blush spreads at indecent words, and dizziness follows the man who looks over a precipice: because none of these is in our power, no reasoning persuades them not to happen. 2. Anger is put to flight by precepts; for it is a voluntary fault of the mind, not one of those things that happen by some condition of the human lot and therefore befall even the wisest — among which is to be placed that first jolt of the mind which stirs us after the impression of an injury. 3. This steals over us even amid the spectacles of the stage and the reading of things long past. Often we seem to grow angry at Clodius driving Cicero into exile, at Antony killing him. Who is not roused against the arms of Marius, against the proscription of Sulla? Who is not hostile to Theodotus and Achillas and the boy himself, who dared a deed not boyish? 4. Song sometimes goads us, and a quickened measure, and that martial sound of trumpets; a savage painting moves the mind, and the grim sight of the most just punishments. 5. Hence it is that we smile at those who smile, and a crowd of mourners saddens us, and we boil over at others’ contests. These are not angers, no more than it is sadness that knits the brow at the sight of a mimic shipwreck, no more than it is fear that runs through the minds of readers when Hannibal besieges the walls after Cannae — all these are motions of minds unwilling to be moved, not passions but the beginnings that rehearse for the passions. 6. So the trumpet rouses the ears of a soldier now in the midst of peace and wearing his toga, and the clash of arms makes the warhorses prick up. They say Alexander, when Xenophantus played, reached his hand to his arms.

None of these things that strike the mind by chance ought to be called a passion: such things the mind, so to speak, suffers rather than does. A passion, then, is not to be moved by the appearances of things presented, but to give oneself up to them and to follow up this chance motion. 2. For if anyone thinks that pallor, and falling tears, and the stirring of obscene fluid, or a deep sigh, and eyes suddenly keener, or anything like these is an indication of passion and a sign of the mind, he is mistaken and does not understand that these are impulses of the body. 3. And so even the bravest man often turns pale while he is arming, and at the signal for battle the knees of the fiercest soldier tremble a little, and the heart of a great general leaps before the lines clash, and the limbs of the most eloquent orator go stiff while he composes himself to speak. 4. Anger must not only be moved but break out; for it is an impulse; but an impulse is never without the assent of the mind, for it cannot be that a matter of vengeance and punishment is dealt with while the mind knows nothing of it. A man has thought himself hurt, has wished to avenge it, and, with some reason dissuading, has at once subsided: this I do not call anger — this motion of the mind obedient to reason; that is anger which leaps over reason, which sweeps it along. 5. Therefore that first agitation of the mind which the appearance of injury has struck is no more anger than is the appearance of injury itself; that following impulse, which not only received the appearance of injury but approved it, is anger — the rousing of the mind to vengeance, proceeding by will and judgment. There is never any doubt that fear involves flight, anger an onset; see, then, whether you think anything can be either sought or guarded against without the assent of the mind.

And that you may know how the passions begin or grow or are carried away: there is a first motion, not voluntary, a kind of preparation for the passion and a kind of threat; a second, with a will not stubborn — as though "I ought to be avenged, since I have been hurt," or "this man ought to pay, since he has done a crime"; the third motion is now beyond control, which wills to take vengeance not "if it is fitting" but at all costs, and has overthrown reason. 2. That first jolt of the mind we cannot escape by reason, just as we cannot escape those things we said happen to the body — that another’s yawn should not tempt us, that our eyes should not close at a sudden thrust of the fingers: these reason cannot conquer; habit, perhaps, and constant attention may weaken them. That other motion, which is born by judgment, is removed by judgment.

This too must still be asked: whether those who commonly rage and delight in human blood are angry when they kill men from whom they have received no injury and do not think they have — such as Apollodorus or Phalaris. 2. This is not anger, it is savagery; for it does not harm because it has received an injury, but is ready, while it harms, even to receive one, and the blows and lacerations it seeks are not for vengeance but for pleasure. 3. What then? The origin of this evil is from anger, which, when by frequent exercise and surfeit it comes to forget mercy and has cast every human bond from the mind, passes at last into cruelty; so such men laugh and rejoice and take great delight, and are very far from the face of the angry — savage at their leisure. 4. They say Hannibal, when he had seen a ditch full of human blood, said, "O what a beautiful sight!" How much fairer it would have seemed to him had he filled some river or lake! What wonder if this sight above all captivates you, born to blood and set to slaughter from infancy? Fortune will attend you, favorable to your cruelty for twenty years, and will give your eyes a welcome sight everywhere; you will see it both around Trasimene and around Cannae and at last around your own Carthage. 5. Volesus lately, proconsul of Asia under the deified Augustus, when he had beheaded three hundred men in one day, walking among the corpses with a proud face, as though he had done something magnificent and worth seeing, proclaimed in Greek, "O what a kingly deed!" What would this man have done as king? This was not anger but a greater and incurable evil.

"Virtue," he says, "as it is favorable to honorable things, so ought to be angry at base ones." What if he should say virtue ought to be both lowly and great? Yet that is what he says who wishes it both exalted and debased, since the joy over a right deed is bright and magnificent, while anger over another’s sin is sordid and the mark of a narrow breast. 2. And virtue will never commit the fault of imitating the vices while it checks them; it holds that anger itself must be chastised — anger which is no better, often even worse, than the faults it is angry at. To rejoice and be glad is proper and natural to virtue: to be angry is beneath its dignity, no more than to mourn; yet sadness is the companion of irascibility, and into this all anger rolls back, whether after repentance or after a rebuff. 3. And if it belongs to the wise man to be angry at sins, he will be angrier at the greater ones and will often be angry: it follows that the wise man will be not only angry but irascible. But if we believe that neither great nor frequent anger has a place in the wise man’s mind, why should we not free him from this passion altogether? 4. For there can be no measure, if he must be angry in proportion to each man’s deed; for either he will be unjust, if he is equally angry at unequal faults, or most irascible, if he flares up as often as crimes deserve anger.

And what is more unworthy than that the wise man’s feeling should hang on another’s wickedness? Will that Socrates of yours cease to be able to carry home the same face he had carried from home? But if the wise man must be angry at base deeds, and be roused and saddened over crimes, nothing is more wretched than the wise man: his whole life will pass in irascibility and grief. 2. For what moment will there be when he does not see things to be disapproved? Whenever he goes out of his house, he must walk among the wicked and the greedy and the prodigal and the shameless — and men happy because of these things; nowhere will his eyes turn but they find something to be indignant at. He will give out if he exacts anger of himself as often as the occasion demands it. 3. These many thousands hurrying to the forum at first light — what shameful suits, what far more shameful advocates they have! One attacks his father’s will, which it were better not to have deserved; another comes to law against his mother; another comes as an informer of the very crime of which he is the more manifest culprit; and a judge is chosen to condemn what he has done himself, and the crowd stands for a bad cause, corrupted by the fine voice of the advocate.

Why do I pursue particulars? When you have seen the forum packed with a multitude, and the enclosures full of the concourse of all the throng, and that circus where the people display the greatest part of itself, know this: there are as many vices there as men. 2. Among those you see in togas there is no peace: one is led to another’s destruction for a slight profit; no one makes gain except from another’s injury; they hate the fortunate, they despise the unfortunate; they are burdened by the greater man and burdensome to the lesser; they are goaded by opposite desires; they crave all things ruined for a slight pleasure and plunder. Life is no other than in a gladiatorial school, among those who live and fight as messmates. 3. It is a gathering of wild beasts, except that beasts are peaceable among themselves and refrain from biting their own kind, while these glut themselves with mutual mangling. In this one thing they differ from dumb animals: that the beasts grow gentle toward those who feed them, while the rage of these feeds on the very ones by whom it was nourished.

The wise man will never cease to be angry, if once he has begun: everything is full of crimes and vices; more is committed than can be healed by restraint; there is a vast contest of wickedness. Daily the desire to sin is greater, the shame less; with all regard for the better and fairer cast out, lust hurls itself wherever it pleases, and crimes are no longer furtive: they go before our eyes, and wickedness has been sent so far into the open and has gained such strength in the breasts of all, that innocence is not rare but nonexistent. 2. For is it single men or a few who have broken the law? On every side, as if at a given signal, they have risen up to confound right and wrong: No guest is safe from his host, no father-in-law from his son-in-law; even the favor between brothers is rare; the husband threatens the wife’s destruction, she the husband’s; lurid stepmothers mix their pale poisons; the son inquires before the day into his father’s years. And what fraction of crimes is that? The poet did not describe the camps drawn up on opposite sides, and the differing oaths of parents and children, the fire set to the fatherland by a citizen’s hand, and the bands of hostile cavalry circling to hunt out the hiding-places of the proscribed, and springs fouled with poison, and pestilence made by hand, and the ditch drawn before besieged parents, the crowded prisons and the fires consuming whole cities, deadly tyrannies and the secret plans of kingdoms and of public ruin, and the things counted as glory which, so long as they can be suppressed, are crimes — rapes and outrages, and not even the mouth spared from lust. 4. Add now the public perjuries of nations and broken treaties, and whatever did not resist carried off as plunder by the stronger, swindlings, thefts, frauds, repudiations, for which three forums are not enough. If you wish the wise man to be as angry as the foulness of crimes demands, he must not be angry but mad.

You will rather consider this: that one ought not to be angry at errors. For what if a man should be angry at those who set uncertain steps in the dark? What if at the deaf who do not hear his orders? What if at children, because they neglect the observance of their duties and look to play and the silly jokes of their fellows? What if you should wish to be angry at those who fall sick, grow old, grow weary? Among the other ills of mortality is this too: the fog of minds, and not only the necessity of erring but the love of errors. 2. That you may not be angry at individuals, all must be pardoned; pardon must be granted to the human race. If you are angry at the young and the old because they sin, be angry at infants too: they are going to sin. Does anyone grow angry at children, whose age does not yet know the distinctions of things? It is a greater and juster excuse to be a man than to be a boy. 3. On these terms we were born: living creatures liable to no fewer diseases of mind than of body — not dull or slow, indeed, but using our keenness ill, each one an example of vice to another. Whoever follows those before him, who have entered the road badly, why should he not have an excuse, since he went astray on the public highway? 4. Upon individuals the commander’s severity is drawn; but pardon is necessary where the whole army has deserted. What takes away the wise man’s anger? The crowd of sinners. He understands how both unjust and dangerous it is to be angry at a public vice. Heraclitus, as often as he had gone out and seen so many living ill about him — nay, perishing ill — wept, and pitied all who met him glad and happy: a gentle mind, but too weak; and he was himself among those to be lamented. Democritus, on the contrary, they say, was never in public without laughing; so little did anything that was done in earnest seem to him serious. Where in this is there room for anger? Either all things are to be laughed at or to be wept over. 6. The wise man will not be angry at sinners. Why? Because he knows that no one is born wise but becomes so, knows that the fewest emerge wise in any age, because he has the condition of human life thoroughly understood; and no one of sound mind is angry at nature. For what if he should wish to marvel that no fruit hangs on the wild thickets? What if he should marvel that brambles and briers are not filled with some useful crop? No one is angry where nature defends the fault. 7. And so the wise man, placid and fair toward errors, no enemy but a corrector of sinners, goes forth each day with this mind: "Many will meet me given to wine, many lustful, many ungrateful, many greedy, many driven by the furies of ambition." He will look on all these as kindly as a physician on his patients. 8. Does the man whose ship draws much water on every side, its joints loosened, grow angry at the sailors and the ship itself? He runs to it rather, and shuts out one wave, bails another, stops up the open holes, and with unceasing labor resists the hidden ones that secretly draw the bilge, nor does he stop because as much as is bailed out springs up again. Slow, steady aid is needed against evils continual and fertile — not that they may cease, but that they may not prevail.

"Anger is useful," he says, "because it escapes contempt, because it frightens the bad." First, anger, if it has the power its threats promise, is hated for the very fact that it is terrible; but it is more dangerous to be feared than to be despised. If, on the other hand, it is without strength, it is the more exposed to contempt and does not escape derision; for what is colder than irascibility making a useless uproar? 2. Next, certain things are not preferable because they are more terrible, nor would I have it said to the wise man: "what the beast has is the wise man’s weapon too — to be feared." What? Is not the fever feared, the gout, the malignant ulcer? Is there on that account anything good in them? On the contrary, all these are despised and foul and base by the very thing for which they are feared. So anger is in itself deformed and least to be dreaded, yet it is feared by many, as the ugly mask is by children. 3. And what of this — that fear always recoils upon its authors, and no one is feared while himself secure? Let that line of Laberius occur to you here, which, spoken in the theatre in the midst of the civil war, turned the whole people upon itself, no otherwise than if the voice of the public feeling had been uttered: He must needs fear many whom many fear. So nature has ordained that whatever is great by another’s fear is not free of its own. How fearful are the hearts of lions at the slightest sounds! A shadow, a voice, an unfamiliar smell drives the fiercest beasts wild: whatever terrifies also trembles. There is no reason, then, why any wise man should crave to be feared, nor think anger a great thing because it is an object of dread, since even the most despicable things are feared — like poisons, and deadly bones, and the bite. 5. And it is no wonder, since the greatest herds of beasts are penned by a cord strung with feathers and driven into the snare — aptly named from the very emotion, "the scare"; for to empty things empty things are a terror. The motion of a chariot and the turning face of its wheels has driven lions back into the cage; a pig’s grunt frightens elephants. 6. So, then, anger is feared as the shadow is by children, as the red feather by beasts. It has nothing firm or strong in itself, but stirs only light minds.

"Wickedness," he says, "must be removed from the nature of things, if you wish to remove anger; but neither can be done." First, a man can keep from being cold although it is winter, and from being hot although the summer months are on — either he is kept safe against the year’s intemperance by the advantage of his place, or he has overcome the feeling of both by the body’s endurance. 2. Next, turn that about: you must first remove virtue from the mind before you take in irascibility, since vices do not consort with virtues, and no more can anyone be at the same time angry and a good man than sick and sound. 3. "It cannot be," he says, "that all anger be removed from the mind, nor does man’s nature suffer it." Yet there is nothing so hard and steep that the human mind does not conquer it and bring it into familiarity through constant practice, and there are no passions so wild and their own masters that they cannot be tamed by discipline. 4. Whatever the mind has commanded itself, it has obtained: some have achieved never to laugh; some have forbidden their bodies wine, others sex, some all liquid; another, content with brief sleep, has stretched out his wakefulness untiring; men have learned to run on the thinnest slanting ropes, and to carry burdens vast and scarcely bearable by human strength, and to dive into immeasurable depths and to endure the sea without any turn for breathing. There are a thousand other things in which persistence has surmounted every obstacle and shown that nothing is hard to which the mind itself has decreed its own endurance. 5. To those I mentioned just now there was either no reward for so persistent an effort, or none worthy of it — for what magnificent thing does he attain who has practiced to walk on stretched ropes, to set his neck under a vast load, not to let his eyes sink into sleep, to penetrate the depth of the sea? — and yet labor came to its work’s end for no great wage: 6. shall we not summon endurance, when so great a prize awaits us, the unshaken tranquility of a happy mind? How great a thing it is to escape the greatest evil, anger — and with it frenzy, savagery, cruelty, madness, and the other passions that attend it!

There is no reason for us to seek a defense for ourselves and an excused license, saying that it is either useful or unavoidable; for to what vice, after all, has an advocate ever been lacking? There is no reason to say it cannot be cut out: the ills we suffer are curable, and nature herself, having begotten us for the right, helps us if we are willing to be amended. Nor, as some have thought, is the road to the virtues steep and rough: they are come to on the level. 2. I come to you as the author of no vain thing. The road to the happy life is easy: only set out under good auspices and with the gods themselves kindly helping. It is far harder to do these things you do. What is more restful than the quiet of the mind, what more laborious than anger? What is more at ease than mercy, what more busied than cruelty? Chastity is at leisure, lust is the most occupied of all. In short, the keeping of all the virtues is easy, the vices are cultivated at great cost. 3. Anger ought to be removed — this even those who say it should be lessened admit in part: let it be wholly dismissed; it will do no good. Without it, crimes will be taken away more easily and rightly, the bad will be punished and brought over to the better. The wise man will accomplish all he ought without the service of any evil thing, and will mix in nothing whose measure he must anxiously watch.

Irascibility, then, is never to be admitted, sometimes to be feigned, if the sluggish minds of hearers must be roused — as we rouse horses slow to rise to the gallop with goads and brands set under them. Sometimes fear must be struck into those on whom reason has no effect: but to be angry is no more useful than to mourn or to fear. 2. "What then? Do there not arise occasions which provoke anger?" But it is then above all that hands must be set against it. Nor is it hard to conquer the mind, when even athletes, busied with the basest part of themselves, nevertheless endure blows and pains in order to drain the striker’s strength, and strike not when anger urges but when occasion offers. 3. Pyrrhus, the greatest teacher of the athletic contest, used, they say, to charge those he trained not to grow angry; for anger disturbs the art and looks only to where it may do harm. So often reason counsels endurance, anger vengeance, and we who could have got off with the first ills are rolled down into greater ones. 4. A single word’s insult, borne without an even mind, has flung some into exile, and those who would not bear a slight injury in silence have been crushed by the heaviest ills, and, indignant that something was taken from their fullest liberty, have drawn upon themselves the yoke of slavery.

"That you may know," he says, "anger has something noble in it, you will see that the free nations are the most irascible, like the Germans and Scythians." This happens because natures strong and solid are prone to anger before they are softened by discipline. For some qualities are born only in the better natures, as sturdy and flourishing trees spring even from neglected soil, and a deep wood grows on a fertile ground; 2. so natures strong by nature bear irascibility, and, being fiery and hot, take in nothing thin or slight; but their vigor is imperfect, as in all things that rise by nature’s own good alone without art, and, unless they are quickly tamed, what was apt for courage grows used to recklessness and rashness. 3. Again, are not the milder dispositions joined with gentler vices — pity and love and modesty? And so I will often show you a good disposition by its very faults; but they are not on that account not vices, because they are signs of a better nature. 4. Then too, all those nations free in their wildness, after the manner of lions and wolves, can no more serve than command; for they have not the force of a human disposition but of a fierce and intractable one; and no one can rule but he who can also be ruled. 5. And so empires have generally fallen to those peoples who enjoy a milder climate: those who incline toward the cold and the north have "untamed natures," as the poet says, most like their own sky.

"Those animals," he says, "are held the noblest in which there is much anger." He errs who brings forward as a model for man those creatures for which impulse stands in the place of reason: for man, reason stands in the place of impulse. But not even for all of them does the same thing profit: irascibility helps lions, panic deer, the swoop the hawk, flight the dove. 2. And what of this — that it is not even true that the best animals are the most irascible? I should think wild beasts, which get their food by prey, better the angrier they are; the patience of oxen and of horses obedient to the rein I should praise. But what reason is there to call man back to such wretched models, when you have the universe and god, whom alone of all creatures man, that he alone may imitate him, alone understands? 3. "The angry," he says, "are held the most open of all." For they are compared with the deceitful and crafty, and seem open because they are exposed. Such men I would call not open but unguarded: this name we give to the foolish, the self-indulgent, and the spendthrift, and to all the vices that are too little cunning.

"An orator," he says, "is sometimes better for being angry." No — for imitating the angry; for actors too move the people in their delivery not by being angry but by playing the angry man well; and so before judges, and in the assembly, and wherever other minds must be driven at our will, we will feign now anger, now fear, now pity, that we may strike them into others, and often the imitation of the passions has accomplished what the true passions could not. 2. "A mind that lacks anger," he says, "is feeble." True, if it has nothing stronger than anger. A man ought to be neither robber nor prey, neither merciful nor cruel: the one has too soft a mind, the other too hard; let the wise man be tempered, and for getting things done more vigorously let him apply not anger but force.

Since we have treated the questions about anger, let us come to its remedies. There are two, as I think: not to fall into anger, and not to do wrong in anger. As in the care of bodies some precepts are for guarding health, others for restoring it, so we ought to repel anger one way and to check it another. To avoid it, certain precepts pertaining to the whole of life will be given: these will be divided into the upbringing and the times that follow. The upbringing demands the greatest care, and one that will profit most; for it is easy to shape minds while still tender, hard to cut back the vices that have grown up with us.

A fervid nature of mind is the readiest for irascibility. For since the elements are four — fire, water, air, earth — there are powers equal to them: the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist; and so the mixture of the elements makes the varieties of places and of animals and of bodies and of characters, and dispositions incline more in one direction according as a greater force of some element has abounded. Hence we call certain regions moist and dry and hot and cold. 2. The same are the distinctions of animals and of men: it matters how much of the moist and the hot each contains; from whichever element’s portion prevails in him, thence will his character be. A fervid nature of mind will make men irascible; for fire is active and persistent: a mixture of the cold makes men timid, for cold is sluggish and contracted. 3. And so some of our school hold that anger is moved in the breast, the blood boiling about the heart; the reason this place above all is assigned to anger is none other than that the breast is the hottest part in the whole body. 4. In those who have more of the moist, their anger grows little by little, because the heat is not ready in them but is acquired by motion; so the angers of children and women are keen rather than heavy, and lighter while they begin. In the dry ages anger is vehement and robust, but without increase, adding little to itself, because cold follows the heat that is about to decline: old men are difficult and querulous, like the sick and the convalescent, and those whose heat is drained by weariness or loss of blood; 5. in the same case are those wasted by thirst and hunger, and those whose bodies are bloodless and meanly nourished and failing. Wine kindles angers, because it increases heat; according to each one’s nature some boil over drunk, some when merely flushed. Nor is there any other reason why the fair-haired and ruddy are the most irascible, than that their natural color is such as is wont to come over the rest in anger; for their blood is mobile and easily stirred.

But as nature makes some prone to anger, so many causes arise that can do the same as nature: disease or injury of the body has brought some to it, others toil, or continual sleeplessness and anxious nights, and longings and loves; whatever else has harmed either body or mind makes the ailing mind ready for complaints. 2. But all these are beginnings and causes: habit has the most power; if it is grave, it feeds the vice. To change one’s nature, indeed, is hard, nor is it permitted to alter the elements once mingled at birth; but it will help to have known this much — that wine be withheld from the hot-tempered, which Plato thinks should be denied to boys, forbidding fire to be roused by fire. Nor should they be filled with food; for the body will be distended and the mind will swell with the body. 3. Let labor exercise them short of weariness, that the heat may be lessened, not consumed, and that excessive fervor may foam itself off. Games too will be of use; for moderate pleasure relaxes and tempers the mind. 4. To the more moist and dry and cold there is no danger from anger, but the more sluggish vices are to be feared — panic and peevishness and despair and suspicions; such natures, therefore, must be softened and cherished and called out into gladness. And because some must be treated with remedies against anger, others against sadness, and these are to be cured not only with unlike but with contrary remedies, we shall always meet whatever has grown.

It will help most, I say, for boys to be at once wholesomely trained; but the management is hard, because we must take pains neither to nurse anger in them nor to blunt their natural bent. 2. The matter needs careful watching; for both — what is to be exalted and what to be repressed — are fed by like things, and like things easily deceive even the attentive. 3. The spirit grows by license, is diminished by servitude; it rises if praised and is brought to good hope of itself, but these same things breed insolence and irascibility: so he must be guided between the two, that we use now the rein, now the spur. 4. Let him suffer nothing lowly, nothing servile; let it never be necessary for him to ask as a suppliant, nor let asking profit him; let it rather be granted to his cause and to his past deeds and to his good promises for the future. 5. In contests with his fellows let us neither let him be beaten nor grow angry; let us take pains that he be friendly with those he is wont to contend with, that in the contest he grow used to wishing not to harm but to win; whenever he has overcome and done something worthy of praise, let us allow him to be lifted up but not to exult; for joy is followed by exultation, exultation by swelling and an excessive esteem of oneself. 6. We shall give him some relaxation, but we shall not loosen him into idleness and leisure, and we shall keep him far from the touch of delights; for nothing makes men irascible more than a soft and coddling upbringing. So the more an only child is indulged, the more a ward is allowed, the more corrupt his mind. He will not stand up to offenses to whom nothing has ever been denied, whose tears an anxious mother has always wiped away, for whom satisfaction has been exacted from the tutor. 7. Do you not see how a greater anger attends each greater fortune? It shows itself especially in the rich and the noble and the magistrates, when whatever was light and empty in the mind has been lifted up by the favoring breeze. Prosperity nurses irascibility, when a crowd of flatterers stands round the proud ears: "should that fellow answer you back? You do not measure yourself by your own height; you throw yourself away" — and other things scarcely withstood by minds sound and well-founded from the start. 8. Far, then, must childhood be removed from flattery: let it hear the truth. And let it sometimes fear, always revere, and rise before its elders. Let it obtain nothing by irascibility: let what was denied to weeping be offered to quiet. And let it have its parents’ wealth in sight, not in use. 9. Let its wrong deeds be reproached. It will bear on the matter to give boys placid teachers and tutors: everything tender clings to what is nearest and grows into its likeness; the characters of young men have soon reflected those of their nurses and tutors. 10. A boy brought up in Plato’s house, when he was brought back to his parents and saw his father shouting, said, "I never saw this at Plato’s." I do not doubt that he imitated his father sooner than Plato. 11. Let his fare above all be plain, his dress not costly, his style like that of his fellows: he will not be angry that someone is compared with him, whom from the start you have made the equal of many.

But these things pertain to our children; in us, indeed, the lot of birth and the upbringing leave room no longer for either vice or precept: the things that follow must be ordered. 2. We must fight, then, against the first causes; and the cause of irascibility is the belief that an injury has been done — which must not lightly be believed. We must not at once go along even with the open and manifest; for some false things wear the look of truth. Time must always be given: the day reveals the truth. 3. Let not our ears be easy to accusers; let this fault of human nature be suspected and known to us, that what we are unwilling to hear we readily believe, and grow angry before we judge. 4. And what of this — that we are driven not by accusations only but by suspicions, and, interpreting another’s look and laugh for the worse, grow angry at the innocent? And so the case of the absent must be pleaded against ourselves, and anger held in suspense; for a punishment deferred can still be exacted, one exacted cannot be recalled.

Famous is that tyrannicide who, seized with his work unfinished and tortured by Hippias to make him name his accomplices, named the friends of the tyrant standing about and those whose safety he knew was dearest to him. And when the tyrant had ordered them killed one by one as they were named, he asked whether anyone was left: "you alone," he said, "for I have left no other to whom you are dear." Anger brought it about that the tyrant lent his hands to the tyrannicide and cut down his own guards with his own sword. 2. How much more spirited was Alexander! who, when he had read his mother’s letter warning him to beware of poison from his doctor Philip, drank the draught he had received, undeterred: he trusted himself rather to his friend. He was worthy to have an innocent friend, worthy to make one. 3. This I praise in Alexander the more, because no one was so liable to anger; but the rarer self-command is in kings, the more it is to be praised. 4. This too did Gaius Caesar, who in the civil war used his victory most mercifully: when he had found chests of letters sent to Gnaeus Pompey by those who seemed to have been either on the other side or on neither, he burned them. Though he was wont to be angry with measure, he yet preferred not to be able to be; he thought the most welcome kind of pardon was not to know what each man had sinned.

Credulity does the most harm. Often we ought not even to listen, since in certain matters it is better to be deceived than to distrust. Suspicion and conjecture, the most deceptive of goads, must be removed from the mind: "that man greeted me too coolly; that one did not cling to my kiss; that one cut short a conversation just begun; that one did not ask me to dinner; that one’s face seemed more averse." 2. Argument will not be wanting to suspicion: there is need of simplicity and a kindly estimation of things. Let us believe nothing but what strikes our eyes and is manifest, and as often as our suspicion proves empty, let us chide our credulity; for this rebuke will form the habit of not easily believing.

From this, too, follows this: that we be not exasperated by the smallest and most sordid things. The slave is too slow, or the water for drinking too tepid, or the couch disordered, or the table laid carelessly: to be roused at these is madness. He is sick and of unhappy health whom a slight breeze chills; his eyes are afflicted whom a white garment dazzles; he is dissolved by delights whose side aches at another’s labor. 2. They say there was a Mindyrides of the city of the Sybarites who, when he had seen a man digging and lifting his mattock high, complained that he was made weary by the sight and forbade the man to do the work in his presence; the same man complained that he felt the worse because the rose-leaves he had lain on were folded double. 3. When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body together, nothing seems bearable — not because the things are hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For what reason is there why someone’s cough or sneeze, or a fly not carefully driven off, should drive a man to fury, or a dog that has crossed his path, or a key slipped from a careless slave’s hands? 4. Will that man bear with an even mind a public insult and the abuse heaped on him in the assembly or the senate house, whose ears are offended by the scrape of a dragged bench? Will this man endure hunger and the thirst of a summer campaign who flies into a rage at a boy who mixes his snow badly? Nothing, then, feeds irascibility more than intemperate and impatient luxury: the mind must be handled hard, so that it feels no blow but a heavy one.

We grow angry either at those from whom we could not even have received an injury, or at those from whom we could. 2. Of the former, some are without feeling, like a book written in too small letters, which we have often thrown down, and torn up when it was faulty, or like clothes which, because they displeased us, we have ripped: how foolish to be angry at these, which have neither deserved our anger nor feel it! 3. "But it is those who made them, of course, who offend us." First, often we grow angry before we draw this distinction in our minds. Next, perhaps the craftsmen themselves will bring just excuses: one could not make it better than he did, nor did he learn his trade too little to spite you; another did not do it in order to offend you. In the end, what is madder than to pour out on things the bile gathered against men? 4. But just as it is the part of a madman to be angry at things that lack soul, so is it to be angry at dumb animals, which do us no injury, because they cannot will it; for there is no injury except what proceeds from design. They can harm us, then, like iron or a stone, but do us injury they cannot. 5. Yet some think themselves despised when the same horses are obedient to one rider, defiant to another, as though by judgment, not by habit and the art of handling, some are more submissive to some. 6. But as it is foolish to be angry at these, so it is to be angry at children and at those not far removed from the prudence of children; for before a fair judge all these faults pass, in their thoughtlessness, for innocence.

There are certain things which cannot harm and have no power but a beneficent and wholesome one, like the immortal gods, who neither wish nor are able to hurt; for their nature is mild and placid, as far removed from another’s injury as from their own. 2. So the mad and the ignorant of truth charge them with the savagery of the sea, with immoderate rains, with the stubbornness of winter, when meanwhile none of these things that harm and help us is aimed properly at us. For we are not the reason the universe brings back winter and summer: these have their own laws, by which the divine is exercised; we think too much of ourselves if we seem worthy that such great things should be set in motion for our sake. None of these things, then, is done for our injury — on the contrary, none of them but tends to our welfare. 3. We have said that there are some things which cannot harm, some which will not. Among the latter will be good magistrates and parents and teachers and judges, whose chastisement is to be taken as the scalpel and abstinence and the other things that torment in order to profit. 4. We have been afflicted with a punishment: let it come to mind not only what we suffer but what we have done, and let us be summoned into council about our own life; if only we are willing to tell ourselves the truth, we shall set the higher value on our own case.

If we wish to be fair judges of all things, let us first persuade ourselves of this: that none of us is without fault. For hence the greatest indignation arises: "I have sinned in nothing" and "I have done nothing." Nay, you confess nothing. We are indignant at being chastised by some admonition or restraint, when at that very moment we sin, in that we add to our misdeeds arrogance and defiance. 2. Who is this man who professes himself innocent before all the laws? Granted it be so, how narrow an innocence it is to be good according to the law! How much more widely does the rule of duties extend than that of right! How many things piety, humanity, liberality, justice, good faith demand, all of which are outside the public statutes! 3. But not even to that narrowest formula of innocence can we make ourselves good: some things we have done, others thought, others wished, others favored; in some we are innocent because we did not succeed. 4. Thinking this, let us be fairer to offenders, let us believe those who rebuke us; and assuredly let us not be angry at the good (for at whom shall we not, if at the good too?), least of all at the gods; for it is not by their fault, but by the law of mortality, that we suffer whatever misfortune befalls. "But diseases and pains come on." Some end must be made, when one has drawn a crumbling dwelling for one’s lot. 5. Someone will be said to have spoken ill of you: consider whether you did so first, consider of how many you speak. Let us consider, I say, that some do not do an injury but return one, others act on our behalf, others under compulsion, others in ignorance, and that even those who act willingly and knowingly do not, out of our injury, seek the injury itself: one slipped through the sweetness of his wit, another did something not to harm us but because he could not attain his end unless he thrust us back; often flattery, while it fawns, offends. 6. Whoever recalls to himself how often he himself has fallen under a false suspicion, how often fortune has clothed his own good offices in the appearance of injury, how many he has begun to love after hating — he will be able not to grow angry at once, especially if he says to himself silently, at each thing by which he is offended, "this I too have committed." 7. But where will you find so fair a judge? He who covets every man’s wife and thinks it just cause enough for loving that she is another’s, the same man will not have his own wife looked at; and the keenest exactor of good faith is faithless, and the perjurer himself prosecutes lies, and the slanderer least of all endures a suit brought against him; he will not have the chastity of his slaves attempted who did not spare his own. 8. We have others’ vices before our eyes, our own at our back: hence it is that a father worse than his son chastises his son’s untimely revels, and that he forgives nothing to another’s luxury who denied nothing to his own, and the tyrant is angry at the murderer, and the sacrilegious man punishes thefts. A great part of mankind is angry not at the sins but at the sinners. Regard for ourselves will make us more moderate, if we consult ourselves: "have we ourselves committed something of the kind? Have we erred so? Does it profit us to condemn these things?"

The greatest remedy of anger is delay. Ask this of it at the start — not that it may pardon, but that it may judge: its first onsets are heavy; it will cease if it waits. Nor try to take it all away at once: it will be wholly conquered while it is plucked at piecemeal. 2. Of the things that offend us, some are reported to us, others we ourselves hear or see. Of those that have been told us, we ought not quickly to believe: many lie to deceive, many because they have been deceived; one catches favor by accusing and feigns an injury that he may seem to have grieved that it was done; there is the spiteful man who wishes to part close friendships; there is the suspicious sort who longs to watch the games and, from afar and in safety, look on at those he has set at odds. 3. If you were going to judge about a tiny sum, the matter would not be proved to you without a witness, the witness would not count without an oath, you would grant a hearing to each side, grant time, hear it more than once; for the truth shines out the more, the more often it comes to hand: do you condemn a friend on the spot? Before you hear, before you question, before he is allowed to know either his accuser or the charge, do you grow angry? Have you already heard, I ask, what was said on both sides? 4. The very man who reported it to you will cease to speak if he must prove it: "there is no reason," he says, "for you to drag me forward; if produced, I will deny it; otherwise I will never tell you anything." At one and the same time he both goads and withdraws himself from the contest and the fray. He who will not tell you anything except in secret tells you almost nothing: what is more unjust than to believe in secret, to be angry in the open?

Of some things we ourselves are witnesses: in these we shall examine the nature and the will of the doers. He is a child: let it be granted to his age, he does not know whether he sins. He is a father: either he has done so much good that he has even a right to do injury, or perhaps this very thing by which we are offended is a merit of his. She is a woman: she errs. He was ordered: who but the unjust is angry at necessity? He has been hurt: it is no injury to suffer what you did first. He is a judge: believe his sentence rather than your own. He is a king: if he punishes the guilty, yield to justice; if the innocent, yield to fortune. 2. It is a dumb animal, or like a dumb one: you imitate it if you grow angry. It is a disease or a calamity: it will pass more lightly over him who bears it. It is a god: you waste your effort being angry at him as much as when you pray him to be angry at another. He is a good man who did the injury: do not believe it. A bad one: do not wonder; he will pay to another the penalty he owes you, and already he has paid it to himself who has sinned.

There are two things, as I said, that rouse irascibility: first, if we seem to have received an injury — of this enough has been said; next, if we seem to have received it unjustly — of this we must speak. 2. Men judge certain things unjust because they ought not to have suffered them, others because they did not expect them. We think undeserved what is unforeseen; and so those things move us most that fall out against our hope and expectation, and there is no other reason why in our households the smallest things offend, while in friends we call negligence an injury. 3. "How then," he says, "do the injuries of enemies move us?" Because we did not expect them, or at least not so great. This is the work of excessive self-love: we judge that we ought to be inviolate even by our enemies; each man has within him the mind of a king, willing that license be granted to himself, not to others against himself. 4. Either ignorance, then, or insolence makes us irascible. What wonder is it that the bad do bad deeds? What new thing is it if an enemy harms, a friend offends, a son slips, a slave sins? Fabius used to say it was the most shameful excuse for a commander to say "I did not think"; I count it the most shameful for a man. Think all things, expect them: even in good characters something rougher will come up. 5. Human nature breeds treacherous minds, breeds ungrateful, breeds greedy, breeds impious ones. When you judge about the character of one, think of the public character. Where you most rejoice, you will most fear; where all seems calm to you, there the things that will harm are not lacking but at rest. Suppose always that something will arise to offend you: the helmsman never spread all his canvas so securely that he did not set his tackle ready for furling. Above all consider this: that the power to harm is foul and execrable, and most alien to man, by whose kindness even savage things grow tame. Look at the necks of elephants bowed to the yoke, and the backs of bulls trodden unharmed by boys and women alike leaping upon them, and the serpents gliding harmless among cups and bosoms, and the placid mouths of bears and lions within the house under the hands of those who handle them, and the wild beasts fawning on their master: it will shame you to have changed characters with the animals. 7. It is a crime to harm one’s fatherland; therefore a fellow citizen too, for he is a part of the fatherland — the parts are sacred if the whole is venerable; therefore a man too, for he is a citizen of yours in a greater city. What if the hands should wish to harm the feet, the eyes the hands? As all the members agree among themselves, because it is the interest of the whole that each be preserved, so men will spare individuals because they are born for fellowship, and society cannot be kept safe except by the guardianship and love of its parts. 8. We would not knock even vipers and water-snakes on the head, and whatever harms by bite or sting, if we could tame them for the future or make them no danger to us or others; therefore we shall not harm even a man because he has sinned, but that he may not sin, and the penalty will never be referred to the past but to the future; for it is not angry but cautious. For if everyone whose nature is crooked and harmful is to be punished, punishment will spare no one.

"But anger has some pleasure, and it is sweet to return pain." By no means; for it is not, as in benefits it is honorable to repay services with services, so honorable to repay injuries with injuries. There it is base to be outdone, here to outdo. "Revenge" is an inhuman word, and yet received as just, and so is "retaliation." It differs little, save in order, from the first blow: he who returns pain only sins with more excuse. 2. A certain man unknowingly struck Marcus Cato in the bath, unwitting; for who would do him an injury knowingly? Afterward, when the man was apologizing, Cato said, "I do not remember being struck." He thought it better not to acknowledge it than to avenge it. 3. "Did nothing bad," you say, "happen to that man after such insolence?" Nay, much good: he began to know Cato. It is the part of a great mind to despise injuries; the most insulting kind of revenge is not to have seemed worth taking revenge on. Many have driven slight injuries deeper into themselves by avenging them; but he is great and noble who, after the manner of a great beast, hears unmoved the barking of little dogs.

"We shall be the less despised," he says, "if we have avenged the injury." If we come to it as to a remedy, let us come without anger, not as though revenge were sweet, but as though it were useful; and often it has been better to dissemble than to avenge. The injuries of the more powerful must be borne not only patiently but with a cheerful face: they will do it again, if they believe they have done it. They have this worst quality, those whom great fortune has made insolent: they hate those whom they have harmed. 2. Most famous is the saying of the man who had grown old in the service of kings: when someone asked him how he had attained that rarest thing in a court, old age, "by receiving injuries," he said, "and giving thanks." So far is it often from being expedient to avenge an injury that it is not even expedient to confess it. 3. Gaius Caesar, when he had in custody the son of Pastor, a distinguished Roman knight, offended by his elegance and his too well-dressed hair, when the father begged that he grant him his son’s life, ordered the youth at once to be led to execution, as though reminded of his punishment; but, that he might not do everything inhumanely toward the father, he invited him to dinner that very day. 4. Pastor came, his face reproaching nothing. Caesar drank to him a half-pint and set a guard over him: the wretched man held out, no otherwise than if he were drinking his son’s blood. Caesar sent perfume and garlands and bade them watch whether he took them: he took them. On the very day he had buried his son — nay, had not buried him — he lay a guest, the hundredth, and the gouty old man drained draughts scarcely decent at children’s birthdays, while meanwhile he let fall no tear, suffered no grief to break out by any sign; he dined as though he had won his son’s reprieve. 5. You ask why? He had another. What of that Priam? Did he not dissemble his anger and clasp the king’s knees, and lift to his own mouth the deadly hand drenched with his son’s blood, and dine? But still without perfume, without garlands, and that most savage enemy urged him with many comforts to take food, not to drain huge cups with a guard set over his head. 6. I would have despised the Roman father if he had feared for himself: as it is, devotion checked his anger. He deserved to be allowed to withdraw from the banquet to gather his son’s bones; but not even this did that kindly and courteous youth meanwhile allow: he kept provoking the old man with frequent toasts, urging him to ease his care. Against this, the other showed himself glad and forgetful of what had been done that day: the other son would have perished, had the guest not pleased the executioner.

Therefore anger must be abstained from, whether the one to be provoked is an equal, or a superior, or an inferior. To contend with an equal is doubtful; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, sordid. It is the part of a petty and wretched man to bite back the biter: mice and ants, if you set a hand to them, turn their mouths; weak things think themselves hurt if they are touched. 2. It will make us gentler if we consider what the man we are angry at has at some time profited us, and the offense will be redeemed by his services. Let this too occur to us: how much commendation the reputation of mercy will bring us, how many friends pardon has made useful. 3. Let us not be angry at the children of our personal and our public enemies: among the examples of Sullan cruelty is this, that he removed the children of the proscribed from public life; nothing is more unjust than that anyone become the heir of his father’s hatred. 4. Let us consider, as often as we are hard to forgive, whether it is expedient for us that all be inexorable. How often has he who refused pardon sought it! How often has he fallen at the feet of one whom he drove from his own! What is more glorious than to change anger into friendship? What more faithful allies has the Roman people than those it had as its most stubborn enemies? What empire would there be today, had not wholesome foresight mingled the conquered with the conquerors? 5. Someone will be angry: provoke him, on the contrary, with kindnesses; the feud falls at once when deserted on one side; none fight but matched pairs. But suppose anger contend on both sides, and the clash come: he is the better who first drew back his foot; the conqueror is the conquered. He struck you: draw back; for by striking back you will give both occasion to strike more often, and an excuse; you will not be able to tear yourself free when you wish.

Would anyone wish to strike an enemy so heavily as to leave his hand in the wound and not be able to recall himself from the blow? Yet such a weapon is anger: it is scarcely drawn back. We look out for handy arms, a sword fit and easy to wield: shall we not avoid these impulses of the mind, heavy and cumbersome and irrevocable? 2. That swiftness alone pleases which, when bidden, halts its step and runs no further than its mark, and can be bent and brought back from its course to a walk; we know the sinews are sick when they move against our will; he is old or of an infirm body who runs when he wishes to walk: let us count those motions of the mind soundest and strongest which go at our discretion, are not carried by their own. 3. Yet nothing will be of equal profit as first to look at the deformity of the thing, then at its danger. There is no passion of a more disturbed face: it has fouled the fairest features, made the calmest faces grim; all comeliness leaves the angry, and whether their dress was arranged to rule, they will drag their garment and pour out all care of themselves, or whether the fashion of their hair, lying by nature or by art, was not unhandsome, it bristles with the mind; the veins swell; the breast is shaken with frequent breathing, a rabid bursting of the voice distends the neck; then the limbs tremble, the hands are restless, the whole body sways. 4. What do you suppose the mind is like within, whose image outside is so foul? How much more terrible is its face within the breast, how much keener its breath, how much more intent its onset, ready to burst itself unless it breaks out! 5. Such as is the look of enemies, or of beasts dripping with slaughter or going to it, such as the poets have feigned the monsters of the underworld, girt with serpents and breathing fire, such as the foulest goddesses of hell go forth to stir up wars and to scatter discord among peoples and to tear peace apart — such let us picture anger: its eyes burning with flame, hissing and bellowing and groaning and shrieking and with any voice more hateful than these, brandishing weapons in both hands (for it does not care to protect itself), grim and bloody and scarred and livid with its own blows, its gait frantic, wrapped in a thick fog, rushing about, wasting, putting to flight, laboring under the hatred of all, most of all of itself, longing, if it cannot harm otherwise, that earth, sea, and sky fall in ruin — at once hostile and hateful. 6. Or, if you please, let it be such as it is in our bards: Bellona, shaking in her right hand the bloody scourge, or Discord goes rejoicing in her rent robe, or any more dreadful face that can be devised for a dreadful passion.

Some men, as Sextius says, have profited by looking in a mirror when angry. So great a change in themselves disturbed them; brought, as it were, into the actual presence, they did not recognize themselves: and how little of the true deformity did that image reflected by the mirror give back! 2. The mind, if it could be shown and could shine through in any material, would confound the beholder — black and spotted and seething and distorted and swollen. Even now its deformity is so great as it flows out through the bones and flesh and so many hindrances: what if it were shown bare? 3. Yet you would not believe that anyone was frightened off anger by a mirror. What then? He who had come to the mirror to change himself had already changed: to the angry, indeed, no image is more beautiful than the savage and horrid, such as they even wish to seem. 4. We must rather look at this: how many anger has harmed of itself. Some, by too great fervor, have burst their veins, and a shout raised beyond their strength has brought up blood, and fluid driven too violently into the eyes has flooded the sight, and the sick have fallen back into their diseases. There is no quicker road to madness. Many, accordingly, have prolonged the frenzy of anger and never recovered the mind they had driven out: madness drove Ajax to death, anger to madness. They call down death on their children, want on themselves, ruin on their house, and deny that they are angry no less than the mad deny that they are mad. Enemies to their dearest friends and to be shunned by those most dear, mindful of the laws only where they harm, moved by the smallest things, accessible neither by speech nor by service, they do all things by force, ready both to fight with the sword and to fall upon it. 5. For the greatest of evils has seized them, and one surpassing all vices. Other vices enter little by little; the force of this one is sudden and entire. In short, it subjects all the other passions to itself: it conquers the most ardent love — men have run through the bodies they loved and lain in the embraces of those they had killed; avarice, that hardest and least flexible of evils, anger has trodden down, driving it to scatter its own wealth and to set fire to house and goods heaped together. Did not the ambitious man cast away the insignia he had prized highly and refuse the office offered him? There is no passion over which anger does not lord it.

What you most desired, Novatus, we shall now attempt to do: to cut anger out of the mind, or at least to rein it in and check its impulses. This must sometimes be done openly and plainly, where the lesser force of the evil allows; sometimes from concealment, where it burns too hot and is exasperated and grows at every hindrance; it matters how great and how unimpaired its strength is, whether it must be beaten back and driven backward, or whether we ought to yield to it while the first storm rages itself out, lest it carry off the remedies themselves with it. 2. Counsel must be taken according to each man’s character; for some are conquered by entreaties, while some insult and press the submissive; some we shall appease by frightening; rebuke has cast down some from their undertaking, confession others, shame others, delay others — a slow remedy for a headlong evil, to which we must descend last of all. 3. For the other passions admit of postponement and can be cured more slowly; the violence of this one, roused and sweeping itself along, does not advance little by little but is whole the moment it begins; nor, like the other vices, does it merely solicit minds, but carries them off and drives them on, powerless over themselves and craving even a common ruin, and rages not only at the objects it has marked but at whatever meets it by the way. 4. The other vices push the mind; anger hurls it headlong. Even if it is not permitted to resist one’s own passions, yet it is at least permitted to the passions themselves to stand still: this one, no otherwise than thunderbolts and storms and whatever else is irrevocable because it does not go but falls, strains its force more and more. 5. The other vices fall away from reason; this one from sanity. Others have gentle approaches and growths that deceive: into anger the mind plunges. And so nothing is more urgent — frantic and bent on its own strength, and whether it has succeeded, proud, or whether it is balked, mad; not even when repelled is it driven to weariness — when fortune has withdrawn the adversary, it turns its bites against itself. Nor does it matter how great the source from which it rose; for from the slightest things it issues into the greatest.

It passes by no age, it excepts no kind of men. Some nations, by the benefit of poverty, have not known luxury; some, because they are exercised and roving, have escaped sloth; those whose manner is rude and whose life is rustic know not chicanery and fraud and whatever evil is born in the forum: there is no nation which anger does not goad, as powerful among Greeks as among barbarians, no less ruinous to those who fear the laws than to those for whom the measure of their strength marks out their rights. 2. Finally, the other passions seize individuals; this alone is a passion that is sometimes conceived publicly. Never has a whole people burned with love for a woman, nor has a whole state set its hope on money or gain; ambition takes hold of single men one by one; want of self-control is no public evil: into anger there has often been a march in a single column. 3. Men, women, old men, children, princes and commons have agreed, and a whole multitude, roused by very few words, has outrun the very man who roused it; there has been a rush at once to arms and fire, and wars declared on neighbors or waged with fellow citizens; 4. whole houses with all their stock have been burned, and one held but now in great honor for his winning eloquence has met the anger of his own assembly; the legions have hurled their javelins at their own commander; the whole plebs has parted from the senate; the public council of the senate, without waiting for levies or naming a commander, has chosen on the spot leaders for its anger, and, hunting noble men through the roofs of the city, has taken vengeance with its own hand; 5. embassies have been violated, the law of nations broken, and an unspeakable madness has gripped the state, nor was time given for the public swelling to subside, but fleets were launched at once and loaded with hastily levied soldiers; without custom, without auspices, the people, going forth under the lead of its own anger, waged war with chance and snatched-up things for arms, then paid for the rashness of its bold anger with a great disaster. 6. This is the end for barbarians who rush rashly into war: when the appearance of injury has struck their mobile minds, they are driven at once, and where grief has dragged them they fall like an avalanche upon the legions — disordered, fearless, incautious, courting their own dangers; they rejoice to be struck and to press upon the steel and to drive the weapons in with their bodies and to go out through their own wounds.

"There is no doubt," you say, "that this force is great and pestilent: therefore show how it ought to be healed." And yet, as I said in the earlier books, Aristotle stands as anger’s defender and forbids us to cut it out: he says it is the spur of virtue, and that, this taken away, the mind is left unarmed and grows sluggish and slow for great endeavors. 2. It is necessary, then, to prove its foulness and ferocity, and to set before the eyes how great a monster a man is when he rages against a man, and with what violence he rushes on, ruinous not without his own ruin, dragging down things that cannot be sunk except with him who sinks them. 3. What then? Does anyone call sane this man who, as if caught up by a storm, does not go but is driven, and is the slave of a raging evil, and does not commit his vengeance to another but, the exactor of it himself, rages with mind and hand alike — the butcher of those dearest to him and of things he will soon weep to have lost? 4. Does anyone give this passion to virtue as a helper and companion, this thing that confounds the counsels without which virtue does nothing? Frail and unlucky and strong only to its own harm are the forces to which a disease and its onset have roused a sick man. 5. There is no reason, then, to think me spending time on superfluities, because I defame anger as though its repute among men were doubtful, when there is someone — and indeed one of the illustrious philosophers — who assigns it duties and summons it, as useful and supplying spirit, into battles, into the conduct of affairs, to everything that is to be done with any heat. 6. Lest it deceive anyone as though it would profit at some time, in some place, its frenzy must be shown unbridled and astonished, and its proper equipment given back to it — the racks and the cords and the workhouses and the crosses and the fires set round bodies buried alive, and the hook that drags even corpses, the varied kinds of chains, the varied kinds of punishments, the manglings of limbs, the brandings of the brow, and the cages of huge beasts: among these instruments let anger be placed, hissing something dire and horrid, fouler than all the things through which it rages.

Though it be doubtful of the rest, to no passion certainly belongs a worse face than anger’s, which we described in the earlier books: harsh and keen, now pale as the blood is drawn back and put to flight, now reddish and like to bloody, with all heat and breath turned into the face, the veins swelling, the eyes now restless and starting, now fixed and clinging in a single stare; 2. add the sound of teeth grinding against each other, as of men longing to be devouring something, no other sound than that of boars whetting their tusks by rubbing; add the cracking of the joints when the hands break themselves, and the breast beaten again and again, the frequent panting and the groans drawn from deep, the unsteady body, the broken words with sudden outcries, the trembling lips sometimes pressed together and hissing out something dire. 3. The look of wild beasts, by Hercules, whether hunger drives them or the steel fixed in their flesh, is less foul — even when, half-dead, they make for their hunter with a last bite — than that of a man blazing with anger. Come, if there were leisure to hear out its cries and threats, what words come from a soul on the rack! Will not each man wish to recall himself from anger, when he has understood that it begins first with his own harm? Will you not, then, have me admonish those who exercise anger at the height of power and count it a proof of strength and reckon ready vengeance among the great goods of great fortune — how far from powerful, nay, how far even from free, is the captive of his own anger? 5. Will you not have me admonish, that each man may be the more careful and look about himself, that the other evils of the mind belong to the very worst, but irascibility creeps in even upon learned men and those sound in other things? — so much so that some call irascibility a sign of openness, and the commonest sort is commonly believed the most liable to it.

"To what," you say, "does this tend?" That no one judge himself safe from it, since it calls out even the naturally gentle and placid into savagery and violence. As against a plague bodily firmness and careful health avail nothing (for it invades the weak and the robust alike), so from anger there is as much danger to restless characters as to composed and relaxed ones, in whom it is the more shameful and dangerous the more it changes in them. 2. But since the first thing is not to be angry, the second to leave off, the third to heal another’s anger too, I will say first how we may not fall into anger, then how we may free ourselves from it, last how we may restrain the angry man and appease him and bring him back to sanity. We shall ensure that we are not angry if we set before ourselves from time to time all the vices of anger and rightly appraise it. It must be accused before us, condemned; its evils must be searched out and dragged into the open; that its nature may appear, it must be compared with the worst. 4. Avarice acquires and gathers, that someone better may use it: anger spends, costs few nothing. How many slaves has an irascible master driven into flight, how many to death! How much more he lost by being angry than was the thing he was angry about! Anger has brought mourning to a father, divorce to a husband, hatred to a magistrate, defeat to a candidate. 5. It is worse than luxury, since luxury enjoys its own pleasure, anger another’s pain. It surpasses spite and envy; for these wish a man to become unhappy, anger wishes to make him so; these delight in chance evils, anger cannot wait for fortune: it wishes to harm the man it hates, not that he be harmed. 6. Nothing is heavier than feuds: these anger brings about. Nothing is more deadly than war: into this the anger of the powerful breaks out; moreover, even that plebeian and private anger is a war without arms and without strength. Besides, anger — to set aside what will soon follow, the losses, the plots, the perpetual anxiety from mutual contests — pays the penalty while it exacts it; it forswears the nature of man: that bids to love, this to hate; that bids to help, this to harm. 7. Add that, though its indignation comes from too high an opinion of itself, so as to seem spirited, it is petty and narrow; for no one but is the lesser for the man by whom he judges himself despised. But that great mind, the true appraiser of itself, does not avenge an injury, because it does not feel it. 8. As weapons rebound from what is hard, and solid things are struck to the pain of the striker, so no injury brings a great mind to the sense of itself, being more fragile than the thing it strikes at. How much fairer to reject all injuries and insults as though penetrable by no weapon! Revenge is the confession of a hurt; that is no great mind which an injury bends. Either a stronger or a weaker has hurt you: if a weaker, spare him; if a stronger, spare yourself.

There is no surer proof of greatness than that nothing can happen by which you are provoked. The higher and better-ordered part of the universe, near the stars, is neither massed into cloud nor driven into storm nor whirled into a vortex; it is free of all tumult: the lower regions are struck by lightning. In the same way a lofty mind, always quiet and set in a tranquil station, pressing down all beneath it by which anger is stirred, is modest and venerable and well-ordered; none of which you will find in the angry man. 2. For who, given over to grief and raging, has not cast off shame first? Who, turbid with impulse and rushing at someone, has not flung away whatever he had of reverence in himself? In whom, once driven on, has the number or order of duties held firm? Who has governed his tongue? Who has kept any part of his body still? Who has been able to rule himself once let loose? 3. That wholesome precept of Democritus will profit us, by which tranquility is shown — if we do not, privately or publicly, undertake many things, or things greater than our strength. The day never passes so happily for one running about among many affairs that there does not arise, either from a man or from a thing, an offense to make the mind ready for angers. 4. As one hurrying through the crowded places of the city must collide with many and must needs slip in one place, be held back in another, be splashed in another, so in this scattered and rambling course of life many hindrances, many causes of complaint befall: one has cheated our hope, another deferred it, another snatched it; things have not flowed as we had proposed. 5. To no one is fortune so devoted that she answers him everywhere when he attempts much; it follows, then, that he to whom some things have fallen out contrary to his plan is impatient of men and things, and grows angry from the slightest causes — now at a person, now at an affair, now at a place, now at fortune, now at himself. 6. And so, that the mind may be quiet, it must not be tossed about, nor, as I said, wearied by the conduct of many affairs, nor of great ones sought beyond its strength. It is easy to fit light things to the shoulders and to shift them to this side or that without a fall; but what others’ hands have laid upon us we bear with difficulty, and, overcome, pour out on the nearest person; even while we stand under the burden, unequal to the load, we totter.

Know that the same happens in civil and domestic affairs. Easy and manageable business follows its doer; vast undertakings beyond the measure of the doer do not yield easily, and, if begun, press and drag off the manager, and, just when they seem held, fall together with him: so it happens that the will of him who does not attempt what is easy, but wills that what he has attempted be easy, is often frustrated. 2. Whenever you will attempt anything, measure at once both yourself and the things you prepare and those for which you prepare them; for the regret of a work left unfinished will make you bitter. It matters whether a man is of a fervid temper or a cold and lowly one: a rebuff will wring anger from the generous, sadness from the languid and inert. Therefore let our actions be neither small nor bold and shameless; let hope go out only to what is near; let us attempt nothing such that, even when we have attained it, we are surprised to have succeeded.

Let us take pains not to receive an injury, since we do not know how to bear one. We must live with the most placid and easy and least anxious and peevish; characters are taken from those we keep company with, and as certain bodily diseases pass to those they touch, so the mind hands on its evils to those nearest: the drunkard has drawn his messmates into the love of unmixed wine, the company of the shameless has softened even a strong man born of flint, avarice has passed its venom into those next it. 2. The same reasoning, the other way, holds for the virtues, so that they soften all they keep with them; nor has a healthful region and a more wholesome climate so profited the body as it profits minds not firm enough to live among a better crowd. 3. How great the power of this is you will understand if you see that even wild beasts grow tame by living with us, and that its own ferocity does not stay even in the most savage brute if it has long endured a man’s company: all roughness is blunted, and little by little, among gentle things, it is unlearned. Add to this that he who lives with quiet men is made better not only by example, but because he does not find causes for anger nor exercise his vice. He will, therefore, have to flee all whom he knows will provoke his irascibility. "Who are these?" you say. 4. Many will do the same from various causes: the proud man will offend you by his contempt, the witty by his insult, the insolent by his injury, the spiteful by his malice, the quarrelsome by his contention, the windy liar by his vanity; you will not bear to be feared by the suspicious, conquered by the obstinate, scorned by the dainty. 5. Choose the simple, the easy, the moderate, who neither call out your anger nor bear it; still more profitable will be the submissive and humane and sweet, yet not to the point of flattery, for excessive assent offends the irascible: a friend of mine, certainly, was a good man but of a too-ready anger, whom it was no safer to flatter than to abuse. 6. That the orator Caelius was most irascible is well known. With him, they say, a client of choice forbearance was dining in his bedroom, but it was hard, thrown together into so close a couple, to escape a quarrel with the man he clung to; he judged it best to follow whatever Caelius said and to play second. Caelius could not bear his agreeing and cried out, "say something against me, that we may be two!" But he too, angry that he was not being made angry, soon left off, without an adversary. 7. Let us then choose, rather, even these, if we are conscious of irascibility in ourselves — men who will follow our face and speech: they will indeed make us dainty and lead us into the bad habit of hearing nothing against our will, but it will profit to give our vice an interval and a rest. Even the difficult and naturally untamed will bear one who soothes them: nothing is rough or grim to one who strokes it. 8. Whenever a discussion is longer and more combative, let us resist it at the outset, before it gains strength: a contest feeds itself and holds fast those who have sunk deep; it is easier to keep out of a fray than to be drawn off from it.

Heavier studies, too, must be given up by the irascible, or at least practiced short of weariness, and the mind must not be kept among hard things but handed over to pleasant arts: let the reading of poems soothe it, and history detain it with its tales; let it be handled more softly and delicately. 2. Pythagoras used to compose the disturbances of his mind with the lyre; and who does not know that war-trumpets and bugles are incitements, just as certain songs are charms by which the mind is relaxed? Green things benefit confused eyes, and weak sight rests in certain colors, while it is dazzled by the brightness of others: so glad pursuits soothe ailing minds. 3. We ought to flee the forum, advocacies, trials, and everything that exasperates the vice, and equally to beware bodily weariness; for it consumes whatever in us is mild and placid and rouses what is sharp. 4. Therefore those whose stomach is suspect, when about to set about affairs of greater business, temper their bile with food — the bile that weariness most of all stirs, whether because it drives the heat into the center and harms the blood and stops its course in the laboring veins, or because the body, thinned and weak, weighs upon the mind; certainly for the same reason those worn by ill health or age are more irascible. Hunger too and thirst are to be avoided for the same causes: they exasperate and inflame the mind. 5. It is an old saying that a quarrel is sought by the weary; and equally by the hungry and the thirsty and by every man whom anything frets. For as ulcers ache at a light touch, then even at the suspicion of a touch, so a mind affected is offended by the smallest things, so that with some a greeting and a letter and a speech and a question call out a lawsuit: sick things are never touched without complaint.

The best thing, therefore, is to treat oneself at the first sense of the evil, then to give one’s very words the least liberty and to check the impulse. 2. It is easy to catch our passions just as they arise: the signs of diseases run ahead. As the marks of a storm and of rain come before the things themselves, so there are certain heralds of anger, of love, and of all those tempests that vex the mind. 3. Those who are wont to be seized by the falling sickness understand that the malady is approaching if heat deserts the extremities and the light is uncertain and the sinews tremble, if memory slips and the head swims; and so they forestall the beginning cause with their accustomed remedies, and by smell and taste they drive off whatever it is that estranges the mind, or fight against the cold and stiffness with hot applications; or, if medicine has profited too little, they have shunned the crowd and fallen without a witness. 4. It profits to know one’s disease and to crush its strength before it spreads. Let us see what it is that most provokes us: one is moved by insults of words, another by insults of deeds; this man wishes his nobility spared, that one his beauty; this longs to be held most elegant, that most learned; this is impatient of pride, that of obstinacy; that man does not think his slaves worthy of his anger, this is savage at home, mild abroad; that judges it an injury to be asked a favor, this an insult not to be asked. Not all are struck on the same side; you must know, therefore, what is weak in you, that you may protect it most.

It is not expedient to see everything, to hear everything. Let many injuries pass us by, most of which he does not receive who does not know them. Do you not wish to be irascible? Do not be inquisitive. He who inquires what was said against him, who digs out malicious talk even if it was held in secret, troubles himself. A certain interpretation brings it to the point where things seem injuries; so some must be deferred, some laughed at, some forgiven. 2. Anger must be circumscribed in many ways; let most things be turned into sport and jest. They say Socrates, struck a box on the ear, said nothing more than that it was a nuisance men did not know when they ought to go out wearing a helmet. 3. It matters not how an injury is done, but how it is borne; nor do I see why self-command should be hard, when I know that even the swollen tempers of tyrants, puffed up by fortune and license, have repressed the savagery familiar to them. 4. Pisistratus, certainly, the tyrant of the Athenians, it is recorded, when a drunken guest had said much against his cruelty, and there were not lacking those who wished to lend him their hands, and one from this side and one from that offered to set torches to him, bore it with a placid mind and answered those who incited him that he was no more angry at the man than if someone with bandaged eyes had run into him.

A great part of men make their own complaints, either by suspecting falsely or by aggravating trifles. Often anger comes to us, more often we to it. It must never be summoned: even when it falls upon us, let it be cast off. 2. No one says to himself, "this thing for which I am angry I either did, or could have done"; no one weighs the mind of the doer but the deed itself: yet the doer must be looked at — whether he willed it or stumbled into it, whether he was compelled or deceived, whether he followed hatred or reward, whether he indulged himself or lent his hand to another. The age of the offender counts for something, his fortune for something, so that to bear and endure is either humane or useful. 3. Let us set ourselves in the place where he is at whom we are angry: as it is, an unfair estimate of ourselves makes us irascible, and we are unwilling to suffer what we would be willing to do. 4. No one puts himself off; yet the greatest remedy of anger is delay, that its first fervor may grow languid and the fog that presses the mind may settle or be less dense. Some of the things that were carrying you headlong an hour, not only a day, will soften; some will vanish wholly; if the requested adjournment has achieved nothing, it will be plain that there is now judgment, not anger. Whatever you would wish to know the nature of, hand over to time: nothing is discerned with care in a flood. 5. Plato could not obtain time from himself when he was angry at his slave, but bade him at once put off his tunic and offer his shoulders to the lashes, meaning to beat him with his own hand; after he understood that he was angry, he held his hand back, raised as it was, and stood like one about to strike; then, asked by a friend who happened to come up what he was doing, "I am exacting punishment," he said, "from an angry man." 6. As if stunned, he kept that posture of one about to be savage — unseemly in a wise man — now forgetting the slave, because he had found another whom he would rather chastise. And so he took from himself authority over his own household, and, somewhat moved over a certain fault, "you," he said, "Speusippus, chide that little slave with the lashes; for I am angry." 7. For this reason he did not strike, for the very reason another would have struck. "I am angry," he said; "I shall do more than I ought, I shall do it too gladly: let not that slave be in the power of one who is not in his own." Does anyone wish vengeance entrusted to an angry man, when Plato took the command from himself? Let nothing be permitted you while you are angry. Why? Because you wish everything to be permitted.

Fight with yourself: if you wish to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you. You begin to conquer it if it is hidden, if no outlet is given it. Let us suppress its signs and keep it, as far as may be, hidden and secret. 2. This will be done with great trouble to ourselves (for it longs to leap out and kindle the eyes and change the face); but if it is allowed to project beyond us, it is above us. Let it be hidden away in the inmost recess of the breast, and let it be carried, not carry. Nay, let us turn all its symptoms to the contrary: let the face be relaxed, the voice gentler, the step slower; little by little the inner is shaped to match the outer. 3. In Socrates a sign of anger was to lower his voice, to speak more sparingly; it was plain then that he was resisting himself. He was therefore caught out by his intimates and convicted, nor was the reproach of his lurking anger unwelcome to him. Why should he not rejoice that many perceived his anger and no one felt it? But they would have felt it, had he not given his friends the right to rebuke him, as he himself had taken it over his friends. 4. How much more must we do this! Let us beg each of our closest friends to use freedom against us most of all when we shall least be able to bear it, and not to assent to our anger; against a powerful evil and one in favor with us, while we are in our senses, while we are our own, let us call them in. 5. Those who bear wine badly and fear the rashness and insolence of their drunkenness charge their people to take them away from the feast; having found their own intemperance in sickness, they forbid themselves to be obeyed in ill health. 6. It is best to foresee hindrances for known vices, and above all so to compose the mind that, struck even by the gravest and most sudden things, it either does not feel anger, or, when it has arisen from the magnitude of an unforeseen injury, drives it back into the depths and does not confess its own pain. 7. That this can be done will appear if I bring forward a few examples out of a vast number, from which one may learn both how much evil anger has when it uses the whole power of supremely powerful men, and how much it can command itself when crushed by a greater fear.

King Cambyses, too much given to wine, Praexaspes, one of his dearest, warned to drink more sparingly, saying that drunkenness was shameful in a king, on whom all eyes and ears attended. To this the king said, "that you may know how I never lose command of myself, I will prove that even after wine my eyes and hands are at their duty." 2. He then drank more freely than at other times, from larger cups, and now heavy and wine-soaked, bade the son of his rebuker go forth beyond the threshold and stand with his left hand raised above his head. Then he bent his bow and pierced the very heart of the youth (for that, he had said, was his mark), and, cutting open the breast, showed the arrowhead clinging in the very heart, and, looking back at the father, asked whether he had a steady enough hand. But the father denied that Apollo could have shot more surely. 3. May the gods destroy him, a slave in mind more than in condition! He was the praiser of a thing of which it was too much even to have been a spectator. He thought his son’s breast, split in two, and the heart throbbing under the wound, an occasion for flattery: he ought to have raised a dispute with the king about the glory and called for the shot to be made again, that it might please the king to show a surer hand on the father himself. 4. O bloody king! O one worthy that the bows of all his people should be turned against him! Though we have execrated him for dissolving banquets into punishments and funerals, yet that weapon was more wickedly praised than shot. We shall see how the father ought to have borne himself, standing over the corpse of his son and over that slaughter of which he was both witness and cause: the point now at issue is plain — that anger can be suppressed. 5. He did not speak ill of the king, he let fall no word even of a stricken man, though he saw his own heart as much pierced as his son’s. He may be said to have rightly swallowed his words; for if he had said anything as an angry man, he could have done nothing as a father. 6. He may, I say, seem to have borne himself more wisely in that misfortune than when he gave precepts on the measure of drinking to one for whom it were better to drink wine than blood, whose hands occupied with cups meant peace. So he was added to the number of those who have shown, by great disasters, how much good counsel costs the friends of kings.

I do not doubt that Harpagus, too, gave his king of the Persians some such advice, offended at which the king set Harpagus’ own children before him to feast upon, and kept asking whether the seasoning pleased him; then, when he saw him full enough of his own woes, he ordered their heads to be brought and asked how he had been entertained. The wretched man was not at a loss for words, his mouth did not close: "at the king’s table," he said, "every dinner is delightful." What did he gain by this flattery? Not to be invited to the leavings. 2. 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 portent, but meanwhile I gather this: that anger born even of huge evils can be hidden and forced to words contrary to itself. 3. This reining-in of grief is necessary, especially for those who have drawn this kind of life by lot and been admitted to a royal table: so they eat among such men, so they drink, so they answer; one must smile at one’s own funerals. Whether life be worth so much we shall see: that is another question. We shall not console so sad a workhouse, we shall not exhort men to bear the commands of executioners: we shall show that in every slavery the road to liberty lies open. He is sick in mind and wretched by his own fault who is free to end his miseries with himself. 4. I will say both to him who has fallen in with a king who aims his arrows at the breasts of friends, and to him whose master gluts fathers with the flesh of their children: "why do you groan, madman? Why do you wait for some enemy to avenge you through the destruction of your people, or for a king mighty from afar to come flying? Wherever you look, there is the end of evils. Do you see that steep place? Down there one descends to liberty. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Liberty sits there, at the bottom. Do you see that low, stunted, unhappy tree? From it hangs liberty. Do you see your own throat, your gullet, your heart? They are escapes from slavery." These exits I show are too laborious and demand much spirit and strength: do you ask what is the road to liberty? Any vein in your body.

So long, indeed, as nothing seems to us so unbearable as to drive us out of life, let us put anger away, whatever our condition. It is ruinous to those who serve; for all resentment works toward its own torment, and feels its bondage the heavier the more stubbornly it endures. So a wild beast, thrashing at the snares, draws them tight; so birds, struggling to shake off the lime, smear it over all their feathers. No yoke is so close-fitting that it does not hurt the one who pulls against it more than the one who draws it: there is one relief for great evils — to endure, and to obey one’s own necessities. 2. But while command over the passions, and over this raging, unbridled one above all, is useful to those who serve, it is more useful to kings: all is lost where fortune permits as much as anger urges, and power exercised to the hurt of many cannot stand for long; for it is in peril the moment a common fear joins those who groan apart. And so very many have been butchered, now by single men, now by whole peoples, when public grief had forced them to gather their angers into one. 3. And yet most have wielded anger as though it were a badge of royalty, like Darius, who first, after the empire was taken from the Magus, held the Persians and a great part of the East. For when he had declared war on the Scythians who ring the East, and was begged by Oeobazus, a nobleman in years, to leave one of his three sons as a comfort to the father and use the service of the other two, he promised more than was asked — said he would discharge them all — and flung them down slain before their father’s eyes, on the ground that he would have been cruel to carry them all off. 4. But how much more obliging Xerxes! who, when Pythius, father of five sons, begged exemption for one, to be chosen as he pleased, granted it — then took the one he had chosen, tore him into two parts, set them on either side of the road, and with this victim purified his army. He had therefore the end he deserved: defeated and scattered far and wide, and seeing his own ruin strewn everywhere, he marched amid the corpses of his own men.

This savagery in anger belonged to barbarian kings, whom no learning, no cultivation of letters had steeped: I will give you, from Aristotle’s own bosom, King Alexander, who ran Clitus through at a banquet — Clitus, dearest to him and reared at his side — with his own hand, for flattering too little and passing too slowly from a free Macedonian into Persian servility. 2. For Lysimachus, equally intimate with him, he threw to a lion. Did this Lysimachus, then, having slipped by some luck from the lion’s teeth, prove the gentler for it when he was king himself? 3. No — Telesphorus of Rhodes, his own friend, he docked on every side: when he had cut off his ears and his nose, he fed him long in a cage like some new and unheard-of animal, once the deformity of his lopped and mutilated face had lost its human look; and there was added hunger and squalor and the filth of a body left to lie in its own dung; 4. on top of this, his knees and hands calloused — for the cramped space forced him to use them for feet — his sides ulcerated with chafing, his shape was no less foul than terrible to those who looked, and, made a monster by his own punishment, he had forfeited pity too. Yet, unlike a man as was the one who suffered these things, more unlike still was the one who did them.

Would that this savagery had stayed within foreign instances and had not crossed into Roman ways — along with our other imported vices — this barbarism of punishments and of angers! To Marcus Marius, for whom the people had set up statues street by street, to whom they made offering with incense and wine, Lucius Sulla ordered the legs broken, the eyes gouged out, the tongue and hands cut off, and — as though he killed him as often as he wounded him — mangled him bit by bit, limb by limb. 2. Who was the minister of this command? Who but Catiline, already training his hands for every crime? He hacked the man before the tomb of Quintus Catulus — a grievous burden on the ashes of that most gentle man — above which one of evil example, yet popular, and loved not so much undeservedly as too much, gave up his blood drop by drop. Marius deserved to suffer such things, Sulla to order them, Catiline to do them, but the Republic did not deserve to take into its own body the swords of enemies and avengers alike. 3. Why do I rummage through old history? Lately Gaius Caesar, in a single day, flogged and tortured Sextus Papinius, whose father was of consular rank, Betilienus Bassus his own quaestor, the son of his own procurator, and others, both senators and Roman knights — not for inquiry but for temper’s sake; 4. then he was so impatient of any delay to the gratification that his cruelty, vast as it was, demanded without postponement, that, strolling on the terrace of his mother’s gardens — which divides the colonnade from the riverbank — he beheaded some of them, together with married women and other senators, by lamplight. What pressed so hard? What danger, private or public, did a single night threaten? How little it would have cost, at the last, to wait for daylight, rather than kill senators of the Roman people in his slippers!

How arrogant his cruelty was, it is worth knowing — though to some we may seem to wander off and stray into a byway; but this very thing will be a part of anger raging beyond its wont. He had flogged senators: he himself brought it about that one could say, "it is the custom." He had tortured them by everything most dreadful in the nature of things — by cords, by racks, by the horse, by fire, by his own face. 2. And here it will be answered: "A great matter! that a man who was plotting the slaughter of the whole Senate, who wished the Roman people had a single neck so that he might compress his crimes — spread over so many places and times — into one stroke and one day, should have divided three senators amid the lash and the flames like worthless slaves." What is so unheard-of as a punishment by night? Whereas robberies are wont to be hidden by darkness, executions, the more public they are, profit the more as example and correction. 3. And here it will be answered to me: "what you marvel at so greatly is, to that brute, an everyday thing; for this he lives, for this he keeps watch, for this he burns the midnight oil." Certainly no one else will be found who ordered that all those he bade be punished should have a sponge thrust into the mouth and shut in, so that they should not have the means of uttering a sound. To what dying man was it ever not left to groan? He feared the last agony might send out some too-free word, that he might hear something he did not wish; and he knew there were countless things that none but a man about to die would dare cast in his teeth. 4. When sponges were not to be found, he ordered the wretches’ clothes torn up and the rags crammed into their mouths. What savagery is this? Let them draw the last breath; give room to the departing soul; let it not be forced out through a wound. 5. To add to these — it would take long — that he finished off the fathers too of the slain that same night, sending centurions through their houses: that is, a merciful man, he freed them from grief. For it is not Gaius’ savagery but anger’s bent that I set out to describe — anger, which rages not only man by man but mangles whole nations, which lashes cities and rivers and things safe from all sense of pain.

So the king of the Persians cut off the noses of a whole people in Syria — from which the place takes its name, Rhinocolura. Do you judge he spared them because he did not lop off their whole heads? He took delight in a new kind of punishment. 2. The Ethiopians too would have suffered some such thing — those who, for the great length of their lives, are called the Macrobii; for against these, because they had not received slavery with upturned palms but, when envoys were sent, had given back free answers — which kings call insolent — Cambyses raged, and with provisions unprovided and routes unscouted dragged his whole host fit for war through trackless, parched country. Within the first stage of the march the necessaries failed him, and the barren, untilled region, unknown to any human footprint, supplied nothing; 3. at first they staved off hunger with the tenderest leaves and tree-tops, then with hides softened by fire and whatever necessity had made into food; afterward, when even roots and grasses had failed among the sands and the waste appeared destitute even of animals, they drew lots for every tenth man and had a nourishment crueler than hunger. 4. Anger still drove the king headlong, until — having lost part of his army and eaten part — he feared that he too might be called to the lot: then at last he gave the signal for retreat. All the while those noble birds of his were kept safe, and the apparatus of his feasts was carried on camels, while his soldiers drew lots which should die foully, which should live more foully still.

This man was angry at a people both unknown and undeserving, yet able to feel it: Cyrus was angry at a river. For when, about to lay siege to Babylon, he was hurrying to a war whose greatest issues hang on seizing the moment, he attempted to ford the Gyndes, a river spread broad — which is scarcely safe to cross even when it has felt the summer and been drawn down to its least. 2. There one of those white horses that were wont to draw the royal chariot was swept away and violently stirred the king; and so he swore that he would reduce that river, which was carrying off the king’s escort, to such a state that it could be crossed and trodden even by women. 3. To this he then transferred his whole apparatus of war, and sat at the task so long that he split the channel into a hundred and eighty cuttings, dispersed it into three hundred and sixty streams, and left it dry, the waters flowing off in different directions. 4. And so there perished both time — a great loss in great affairs — and the soldiers’ ardor, which the useless labor broke, and the chance of attacking the enemy unprepared, while he wages against a river a war he had declared on a foe. 5. This madness — for what else would you call it? — touched Romans too. For Gaius Caesar demolished a most beautiful villa in the territory of Herculaneum, because his mother had once been kept prisoner in it, and by this very thing made her fortune notable; for while it stood we used to sail past it, but now men ask the reason it was pulled down.

These too are instances to be pondered, that you may shun them — and, on the contrary, those you should follow: moderate, gentle ones, where neither cause for anger was lacking nor the power to avenge. 2. For what was easier for Antigonus than to order two common soldiers led off — men who, leaning against the king’s tent, were doing what men do both most dangerously and most gladly, thinking ill of their king? Antigonus had heard it all, since only a curtain stood between the speakers and the listener; he stirred it lightly and said, "Move further off, lest the king hear you." 3. The same man, on a certain night, when he had overheard some of his soldiers calling down every curse upon the king who had led them into that road and that inextricable mire, went up to those laboring hardest and, when he had hauled them out — they not knowing by whom they were helped — said, "Now curse Antigonus, by whose fault you fell into these miseries; but wish well to him who has led you out of this slough." 4. The same man bore the slanders of his enemies as mildly as those of his own people. And so when some Greeks were being besieged in a small fort and, trusting in the place and despising the enemy, made many jokes at Antigonus’ ugliness — now laughing at his low stature, now at his crushed nose — he said, "I am glad, and hope for some good, if I have a Silenus in my camp." 5. When he had subdued these wits by hunger, he used his captives thus: those fit for service he enrolled in the cohorts, the rest he put up to the auctioneer’s crier, and said he would not have done even this had it not been to their advantage to have a master — men who had so bad a tongue.

His grandson was Alexander, who used to hurl a lance at his own guests, who, of the two friends I mentioned a little before, threw one to a wild beast and one to himself. Of these two, however, the one thrown to the lion survived. 2. He did not have this vice from his grandfather, nor even from his father; for if Philip had any other virtue, he had also endurance of insults, a vast instrument for the safekeeping of a kingdom. Demochares — surnamed Parrhesiastes, the Outspoken, for his excessive and brazen tongue — had come among the other envoys of the Athenians. When the embassy had been kindly heard, Philip said, "Tell me what I can do that would be welcome to the Athenians." Demochares took him up: "Hang yourself," he said. 3. Indignation had broken out among the bystanders at so brutal an answer; but Philip bade them be silent and let that Thersites go safe and unharmed. "But you," he said, "the rest of the envoys, report to the Athenians that those who say such things are far more arrogant than the man who hears them said and goes unpunished." 4. The deified Augustus too did and said many things worthy of memory, from which it is plain that anger had no command over him. Timagenes, a writer of histories, had said certain things against him, certain things against his wife and against his whole house, and the sayings had not been lost; for reckless wit travels the further and is on men’s lips. 5. Caesar often warned him to use his tongue more moderately; when he persisted, he barred him from his house. Afterward Timagenes grew old in the household of Asinius Pollio and was courted by the whole city: the closing of Caesar’s house took no threshold from him. 6. The histories he had written afterward he recited, and the books containing the deeds of Caesar Augustus he laid upon the fire; he carried on a feud with Caesar: no one feared his friendship, no one fled him as a man struck by lightning, there was one to offer a bosom to him falling from so high. 7. Caesar bore this, as I said, patiently, not even moved that he had laid hands on his own praises and exploits; he never complained to the host of his enemy. 8. He said only this to Asinius Pollio: "You keep wild beasts." Then, when Pollio was preparing an excuse, he stopped him and said, "Enjoy him, my Pollio, enjoy him!" And when Pollio said, "If you command, Caesar, I will at once bar him from my house," he said, "Do you think I would do that, when it was I who brought you two back into friendship?" For Pollio had once been angry with Timagenes, and had had no other cause for ceasing than that Caesar had begun.

So let each man say to himself, whenever he is provoked: "Am I more powerful than Philip? Yet he was reviled and let it go unpunished. Have I more power in my own house than the deified Augustus had over the whole round world? Yet he was content to withdraw from the man who abused him." 2. Why should I make my slave atone with whips and shackles for a too-clear retort, a too-defiant look, a muttering that does not even reach me? Who am I, that it should be a sin for my ears to be hurt? Many have pardoned enemies: shall I not pardon the lazy, the careless, the talkative? 3. Let his age excuse the boy, her sex the woman, his independence the stranger, his familiarity the member of the household. He has offended now for the first time: let us think how long he has pleased; he has offended often and 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 ought. 4. Let us trust the wiser, pardon the more foolish; and on behalf of anyone at all let us answer ourselves this: that even the wisest men do many wrong things, that no one is so circumspect that his very diligence does not sometimes slip from him, no one so ripe that chance does not dash his gravity against some hotter deed, no one so fearful of giving offense that he does not, while avoiding offenses, fall into them.

As it has been a comfort to a small man, in his troubles, that the fortune even of great men totters — and as he weeps for his son in a corner more evenly when he has seen bitter funerals led out even from a palace — so a man bears more evenly to be hurt by one, despised by another, when it comes into his mind that no power is so great that injury does not reach it. 2. But if even the most prudent go wrong, whose error does not have a good case? Let us look back at how often, in our youth, we were too little careful in our duty, too little modest in speech, too little temperate in wine. If he is angry, let us give him space in which to see what he has done: he will chastise himself. Granted he should pay the penalty: there is no reason for us to settle the score with him. 3. This much will not be brought into doubt — that whoever has looked down on those who provoke him has lifted himself out of the crowd and stood the higher: it is the property of true greatness not to feel the blow. So the huge beast looks back, unmoved, at the barking of dogs; so the wave dashes in vain against a great rock. He who is not angry has stood unshaken by the injury; he who is angry has been moved. 4. But the man whom I just now set higher than every misfortune holds the highest good in a kind of embrace, and answers not man only but Fortune herself: "Do all you can, you are too small to draw a cloud across my serenity. Reason forbids it, to whom I have given my life to govern. Anger will hurt me more than the injury. Why not more? The injury’s measure is fixed; how far anger would carry me is in doubt."

"I cannot endure it," you say; "it is hard to bear an injury." You lie; for who that can bear anger cannot bear an injury? Add, besides, that you are contriving to bear both the anger and the injury. Why do you put up with the raving of a sick man, the words of a delirious one, the saucy hands of children? Surely because they seem not to know what they do. What does it matter by what fault each is made irresponsible? Irresponsibility is an equal plea for all. 2. "What then?" you say; "shall he go unpunished?" Suppose you wished it — still he shall not; for the greatest penalty for an injury done is to have done it, and no one is more grievously afflicted than he who is handed over to the torment of repentance for his punishment. 3. Next, we must look to the condition of human affairs, that we may be fair judges of all that befalls; and he is unfair who charges upon individuals a common fault. The Ethiopian’s color is not remarkable among his own, nor does red hair gathered in a knot disgrace a man among the Germans: you will judge nothing in one man notable or foul that is general to his people. And these instances I have cited are defended by the custom of a single region and corner: see now how much juster pardon is for the things spread through the whole human race. 4. We are all thoughtless and improvident, all uncertain, querulous, ambitious — why do I hide with gentler words a sore that is public? — we are all bad. Whatever, therefore, is blamed in another, each will find in his own breast. Why do you mark this man’s pallor, that man’s leanness? It is a plague. So let us be gentler with one another: we live, bad men among the bad. One thing can make us quiet — a compact of mutual indulgence. 5. "That man has already hurt me, and I have not yet hurt him." But perhaps you have already harmed someone — or you will. Do not weigh this hour or this day; look at the whole bent of your mind: even if you have done no evil, you can do it.

How much better it is to heal an injury than to avenge it! Vengeance takes up much time, exposes itself to many injuries while it smarts at one; we are all angry longer than we are hurt. How much better to go off in the opposite direction, and not set vices against vices! Would anyone seem to himself quite of sound mind if he kicked back at a mule or bit a dog? 2. "These creatures," you say, "do not know they are doing wrong." First, how unjust is the man in whose court a creature’s being human is a bar to obtaining pardon! Next, if want of counsel withdraws the rest of the animals from your anger, let everyone who lacks counsel stand in the same place with you; for what does it matter whether he has other things unlike the dumb beasts, if he has, in common with them, the one thing that defends a beast in every wrong — a darkness of mind? 3. He has done wrong: is this the first time? is it the last? You have no reason to believe him, even if he says, "I will not do it again": both this man will go wrong, and another against him, and the whole of life will roll among errors. The unkind must be handled kindly. 4. What is said most effectively in grief will be said in anger too: will you ever stop, or never? If ever, how much better to leave anger than to be left by anger! Or will this agitation last forever? Do you see what an unquiet life you proclaim for yourself? for what will the life of one forever swollen be like? 5. Add, too, that when you have well kindled yourself and have again and again renewed the causes that goad you, anger will depart of its own accord, and the days will draw off its strength: how much better that it be conquered by you than by itself!

You are angry at this man, then at that; at slaves, then at freedmen; at parents, then at children; at acquaintances, then at strangers: for everywhere causes abound, unless the mind has come in to plead for mercy. From here madness will hurry you to one quarter, from there to another, and, with fresh provocations forever arising, your raging will be unbroken: come, you wretch, when will you ever love? Oh, what good time you waste on a bad thing! 2. How much better it were now to make friends, to soften enemies, to administer the commonwealth, to turn your effort to the affairs of the household, than to look about for what harm you can do to someone — what wound you may inflict on his standing, his estate, or his body — when this cannot fall to you without struggle and danger, even if you clash with one beneath you! 3. Grant that you receive him bound and laid open to your will, to every endurance: often the excessive force of the striker has either put a joint out of place or lodged a sinew in the teeth he had broken; anger has made many men maimed, many crippled, even where it has found material that endures. Add, too, that nothing has been born so weak that it perishes without danger to the one who crushes it: pain at one time, chance at another, makes the weak equal to the strongest. 4. And what of the fact that most of the things for which we grow angry offend us rather than harm us? But there is a great difference whether someone stands in the way of my wish or merely fails it, snatches a thing away or does not give it. Yet we set it as equal whether someone takes away or refuses, whether he cuts off our hope or defers it, whether he acts against us or for himself, out of love for another or hatred of us. 5. Some indeed have not only just but even honorable causes for standing against us: one guards his father, another his brother, another his country, another his friend; yet these we do not pardon for doing what, if they did not do it, we should condemn — nay, what is incredible, we often think well of the deed and ill of the doer. 6. But, by Hercules, a great and just man looks up to each bravest of his enemies, each most stubborn for the liberty and safety of his country, and prays that such a citizen, such a soldier, may fall to his own lot.

It is shameful to hate one whom you would praise; but how much more shameful to hate someone for the very thing that makes him worthy of pity — if a captive, suddenly sunk into slavery, keeps some remnants of liberty and is not nimble to run at sordid and toilsome services; if, slow from his former leisure, he does not keep pace at a run with his master’s horse and carriage; if, weary amid the daily watchings, sleep has overcome him; if he refuses farm labor, or does not bravely set to the hard work to which he has been carried over from a city slavery and its holidays! 2. Let us distinguish whether a man cannot or will not: we shall acquit many, if we begin to judge before we grow angry. But as it is, we follow the first impulse, then, though empty things have stirred us, we persist, lest we seem to have begun without cause, and — what is most unjust — the injustice of our anger makes us the more stubborn; for we hold on to it and swell it, as though it were proof of one justly angry to be angry heavily.

How much better to look the beginnings themselves through and through — how slight they are, how harmless! What you see happen in dumb animals you will catch in man too: we are troubled by trifles and empty things. The red color rouses the bull, the asp rears up at a shadow, a cloth provokes bears and lions: all things that are by nature fierce and savage are thrown into panic by mere nothings. 2. The same befalls restless and stupid natures: they are struck by a suspicion of things, so much so that sometimes they call moderate kindnesses injuries — and in these lies the most frequent, certainly the most bitter, material of anger. For we are angry at our dearest because they have rendered us less than we had conceived in our minds, and less than others have received, though there is a ready remedy for both. 3. He has indulged the other more: let our own goods delight us without comparison; he will never be happy whom a happier man will torment. I have less than I hoped: but perhaps I hoped more than I ought. This is the part most to be feared; from here are born the most ruinous angers, ready to assault all that is most sacred. 4. The deified Julius was finished off by more friends than enemies — friends whose insatiable hopes he had not filled. He wished to, indeed — for no one used a victory more generously, claiming nothing from it for himself but the power of dispensing — but how could he meet such shameless desires, when all coveted as much as one man could grant? 5. And so he saw, around his own chair, swords drawn by his comrades-in-arms — Tillius Cimber, a little before the keenest defender of his party, and others, Pompeians only after Pompey was dead. This it was that turned their own arms against kings and drove the most faithful to plot the death of those for whom, and before whom, they had vowed to die.

To no one who looks at what belongs to others do his own things please: hence we are angry even at the gods, because someone goes before us, forgetting how many men are behind us, and how great a load of envy follows at the back of one who envies a few. Yet so great is men’s unreasonableness that, however much they have received, they count it an injury that they could have received more. 2. "He gave me the praetorship, but I had hoped for the consulship; he gave the twelve fasces, but did not make me consul ordinarius; he wished the year to be reckoned from my name, but I fall short for the priesthood; I was co-opted into the college, but why into one only? he has crowned my standing, but contributed nothing to my estate; what he gave me he owed to someone, he brought out nothing of his own." 3. Give thanks, rather, for what you have received; wait for the rest, and be glad that you are not yet full: it is among the pleasures to have something still to hope for. You have outdone all: rejoice to be first in your friend’s heart. Many outdo you: consider how many more you go before than follow. Do you ask what is your greatest fault? You keep false accounts: what you have given you reckon dear, what you have received cheap.

Let one thing in one man deter us, another in another: at some let us fear to be angry, before some stand in awe, some disdain. A great thing, no doubt, we shall have done, if we have packed some luckless little slave off to the workhouse! Why do we hasten to flog him at once, to break his legs straightway? That power of yours will not perish if it is deferred. 2. Let the time come when we ourselves give the order: as it is, we shall speak at anger’s bidding; when she has gone, then we shall see at how much this dispute is to be valued. For in this above all we are deceived: we come to the sword, to capital punishments, and avenge with chains, prison, and hunger a thing to be chastised with lighter lashes. 3. "How," you say, "do you bid us look at how petty, wretched, childish are all the things by which we seem to be hurt?" I, for my part, would urge nothing more than to take on a vast spirit and see how lowly and abject are these things over which we wrangle, run about, and gasp — things to be regarded by no one who has any lofty or magnificent thought in mind.

Around money is the loudest outcry: this wears out the courts, sets fathers and sons at odds, mixes poisons, hands swords to assassins as much as to legions; this is besmeared with our blood; for its sake the nights of wives and husbands clamor with quarrels, the crowd presses the tribunals of the magistrates, kings rage and plunder and overturn cities built up by the long toil of ages, to rummage for gold and silver in the ashes of the towns. 2. It is a pleasure to look at the money-bags lying in a corner: these are they for whose sake eyes are forced out with shouting, the basilicas ring with the roar of the courts, jurors summoned from distant regions sit to judge whose greed is the juster. 3. What if, not even for a money-bag but for a fistful of coppers, or a denarius charged up by a slave, an old man about to die without an heir bursts with bile? What if, for the interest of even a thousandth, a sickly moneylender, his feet and hands twisted and left him no good for reckoning, shouts and, through bail-bonds, claims his coppers in the very onsets of his disease? 4. If you were to bring me forth all the money from all the mines we are at this moment sinking, if you flung into the midst whatever the treasuries hide — greed once more carrying back under the earth what it had ill dug up — I should not think that whole heap worthy to wrinkle the brow of a good man. With what laughter ought we to follow the things that draw tears from us!

Come now, run through the rest: foods, drinks, and the elegances prepared for show on their account, insulting words, bodily movements too little deferential, contrary draft-animals and lazy slaves, and suspicions and malign interpretations of another’s speech — by which it comes about that speech, given to man, is counted among the injuries of nature: believe me, slight are the things over which we blaze up not slightly, the sort that set boys to brawl and squabble. 2. Nothing of what we do so grimly is serious, nothing is great: from here, I say, come your anger and madness, that you value small things at a great price. This man wished to take my inheritance from me; this one, after long courting me in hope of the last bequest, has slandered me; this one has coveted my mistress: what ought to have been a bond of love is a cause of faction and hatred — to want the same thing. 3. A narrow road stirs quarrels among those passing through; a broad and widely open way does not collide even with peoples: these things you crave, because they are scant and cannot pass to one save when snatched from another, rouse fights and quarrels in those who reach for them.

You are indignant that a slave has answered you back, and a freedman, and your wife, and a client: then you complain that liberty has been taken from the commonwealth — the liberty you have taken away at home. Again, if he kept silent when questioned, you call it defiance. 2. Let him both speak and be silent and laugh! "Before his master?" you say. Nay, before the head of a household. Why do you shout? why do you bawl? why, in the middle of dinner, do you call for the whips — because the slaves talk, because in one and the same place there is not the throng of an assembly and the silence of a desert? 3. You have ears for this, that they may take in not only the measured and soft and what is drawn out and composed from sweetness: you must hear both laughter and weeping, both flatteries and lawsuits, both glad things and sad, both the voices of men and the roarings and barkings of animals. Why, wretch, do you grow terrified at the shout of a slave, at the clang of bronze or the slam of a door? Delicate as you are, you must hear thunder. 4. What has been said of the ears, transfer to the eyes, which labor no less under fastidiousness if they have been badly trained: they are offended by a stain and by dirt, by silver too little bright, by a pool not transparent to the bottom. 5. These eyes, surely — which bear no marble unless variegated and gleaming with fresh care, no table unless picked out with crowded veins, which at home will tread on nothing but what is more precious than gold — these same, with the most even temper, look abroad on rough and muddy lanes, on the greater part of those they meet filthy, on the walls of tenements eaten away, cracked, uneven. What, then, is it but that opinion is fair and patient out there, peevish and querulous at home?

All the senses must be led to firmness; they are by nature patient, if only the mind stop corrupting them — the mind, which must be called daily to render its account. Sextius used to do this: when the day was finished and he had withdrawn to his night’s rest, he would question his soul: "What bad thing of yours have you healed today? What vice have you withstood? In what part are you better?" 2. Anger will cease and grow more moderate when it knows it must come daily before a judge. Is anything, then, more beautiful than this habit of sifting the whole day? What a sleep follows that review of oneself — how tranquil, how deep and free, when the soul has been either praised or warned, and, its own watchman and its own secret censor, has taken cognizance of its character! 3. I use this power, and daily plead my cause before myself. When the light has been taken from sight and my wife, now aware of my habit, has fallen silent, I scrutinize my whole day and measure over again my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself, I pass over nothing. For why should I fear anything from my errors, when I can say: "See that you do not do that again; this time I pardon you. 4. In that debate you spoke too pugnaciously: hereafter do not engage with the unskilled; those who have never learned do not wish to learn. You admonished that man more freely than you ought, and so you did not mend him but offended him: for the rest, look not only to whether what you say is true, but to whether the one to whom it is said can bear the truth: a good man rejoices to be admonished, the worst of men bears a corrector most harshly."

At the dinner of certain men, witticisms and words thrown out to your hurt have stung you: remember to avoid vulgar gatherings; license is looser after wine, since even the sober have no shame. 2. You have seen your friend angry at the doorkeeper of some pleader or some rich man, because he had turned him away as he entered, and you yourself, on his behalf, grew angry at the lowest of slaves: will you be angry, then, at a chained watchdog? This too, when it has barked much, grows tame at food thrown to it. 3. Withdraw further off, and laugh! Just now that fellow thinks himself somebody, because he guards a threshold besieged by a crowd of litigants; just now the man who lies within is happy and fortunate, and judges a difficult door the mark of a blessed and powerful man: he does not know that the hardest door is the prison’s. Assume beforehand in your mind that you have much to endure. Does anyone marvel that he is cold in winter, that he is seasick at sea, that he is jolted on the road? The mind is strong against the things for which it comes prepared. 4. Set in a less honored place, you began to be angry at the host, at the inviter, at the very man preferred to you: madman, what does it matter which part of the couch you press? Can a cushion make you more honorable or more base? 5. You looked askance at someone because he spoke ill of your talent: do you accept this rule? Then Ennius, in whom you take no delight, would have hated you, and Hortensius would have declared feuds upon you, and Cicero, if you derided his verses, would have been your enemy. Come — as a candidate, will you not bear the votes with an even mind?

Someone has done you an insult: surely no greater than the one done to Diogenes the Stoic philosopher, at whom, just as he was discoursing on anger, an insolent youth spat? He bore it gently and wisely: "I am not angry, to be sure," he said, "but I am in doubt nonetheless whether I ought to be angry." 2. How much better our own Cato! who, when Lentulus — that factious and ungovernable man within our fathers’ memory — had drawn up as much thick spittle as he could and spat it into the middle of his forehead as he was pleading a case, wiped his face and said: "I shall assure everyone, Lentulus, that they are mistaken who deny that you have a mouth."

It has now fallen to us, Novatus, to compose the mind well: either it does not feel anger or it stands above it. Let us see how we may soothe another’s anger; for we wish not only to be sound ourselves, but to make others sound. 2. The first anger we shall not dare to soothe by speech: it is deaf and out of its mind; we shall give it room. Remedies do good in the remissions; we do not test swollen eyes by moving them, lest we provoke the rigid inflammation, nor the other ills while they seethe: rest cures the onsets of disease. 3. "How little," you say, "does your remedy avail, if it appeases an anger that is ceasing of its own accord!" First, it makes it cease the sooner; next, it keeps guard that it not recur; the very impulse, too, which it does not dare to soothe, it will outwit: it will remove all the instruments of vengeance, it will feign anger so that, as a helper and a companion in grief, it may have more authority in counsel; it will weave delays, and, while it seeks a greater punishment, defer the present one. 4. By every art it will give the frenzy respite: if it is the more violent, it will strike into it either shame, which it cannot resist, or fear; if weaker, it will bring in talk, either welcome or new, and distract it by a desire to learn. They say that a physician, when he had to treat a king’s daughter and could not without the knife, while he gently fomented the swollen breast, slipped in a scalpel hidden in a sponge: the girl would have resisted a remedy applied openly; the same girl, because she did not expect it, bore the pain. Some things are not healed save by deception.

To one you will say, "See that your anger is not a pleasure to your enemies"; to another, "See that the greatness of your spirit, and the strength credited to you in most men’s eyes, do not fall. I am indignant, by Hercules, and find no measure for my grief, but the time must be waited for; he will pay the penalty. Keep this in your heart: when you can, you will pay it back, and with interest for the delay." 2. But to chide one who is angry, and to be angry back at him in turn, is to goad him on: you will approach in various ways, and coaxingly — unless perhaps you are so great a personage that you can shatter his anger, as the deified Augustus did, when he was dining with Vedius Pollio. One of his slaves had broken a crystal cup; Vedius ordered him seized, to perish in no common way: he was to be thrown to the lampreys, which he kept, huge, in a fishpond. Who would not think he did this for luxury’s sake? It was savagery. 3. The boy slipped from their hands and fled to Caesar’s feet, asking nothing else than to perish some other way — not to become fish-food. Caesar was moved by the novelty of the cruelty, and ordered him released, and all the crystal broken before his eyes, and the fishpond filled in. 4. Thus had Caesar to chastise his friend; he used his powers well: "Do you order men snatched from a banquet and mangled with punishments of a new kind? If your cup is broken, shall a man’s entrails be torn apart? Will you so please yourself as to order someone led off to death in the place where Caesar is?" 5. So let one who has so much power that he can assail anger from a higher place handle it roughly — but only such anger as I just now described, a beast monstrous and bloodthirsty, which is now past cure unless it has come to dread something greater.

Let us give the mind a peace that the constant meditation of wholesome precepts will give, and the doing of good deeds, and a mind intent on the desire for the one honorable good. Let conscience be satisfied; let us labor nothing for reputation; let even a bad name follow, so long as we deserve well. 2. "But the crowd admires spirited things, and the bold are held in honor, while the placid are reckoned sluggish." At the first look, perhaps; but as soon as an evenness of life has made it credible that this is not slackness of spirit but peace, that same people venerates and reveres them. 3. So this foul and hostile passion has nothing useful in it, but, on the contrary, all evils, iron and fire. Trampling shame underfoot, it has stained its hands with slaughter, scattered the limbs of children, left nothing free of crime, mindful of no glory, fearing no infamy, past mending once, from anger, it has hardened into hatred.

Let us be rid of this evil, and cleanse the mind, and tear out by the roots the things that, however slight, will — wherever they have clung — grow again; and let us not temper anger but remove it entirely; for what tempering is there of a bad thing? And we shall be able to, if only we strive. 2. Nor will anything help more than the thought of mortality. Let each say to himself and to another: "What good is it to declare angers, as though we were born for eternity, and to squander a most brief span of life? What good is it to turn to someone’s grief and torment the days that may be spent on honorable pleasure? These things do not admit of waste, nor is there leisure to lose time. 3. Why do we rush into the fray? Why do we summon contests upon ourselves? Why, forgetting our frailty, do we take up vast hatreds and rise up, fragile, to break others? Soon a fever, or some other bodily ill, will forbid the carrying-on of those enmities we wage with implacable mind; soon death in the midst will part the fiercest pair. 4. Why do we make tumult and, in sedition, throw our life into confusion? Fate stands over our head and reckons up the perishing days and draws nearer and nearer; that time which you destine for another’s death is perhaps near your own."

Why not rather gather up your brief life and make it peaceful, both for yourself and for the rest? Why not make yourself, while you live, dear to all, and, when you have departed, longed for? Why do you desire to drag down the man who deals with you too loftily from on high? Why do you try to grind away with your strength the man who barks at you — lowly indeed and despised, but acid and troublesome to his betters? Why are you angry at your slave, at your master, at your king, at your client? Hold off a little: behold, death comes, to make you equals. 2. We are wont to see, among the morning shows of the arena, the fight of a bull and a bear bound together, whom, when they have worn each other out, their own dispatcher awaits: we do the same — we provoke someone bound to us, when an end, and a ripe one, hangs over both conquered and conqueror. Let us rather spend in quiet and peace what little remains; let our corpse lie hateful to no one. 3. Often a fire cried out in the neighborhood breaks off a brawl, and the coming of a wild beast parts the robber and the traveler: there is no leisure to wrestle with smaller evils when a greater fear has appeared. What have we to do with fighting and ambushes? Do you wish anything more for the man at whom you are angry than death? Even with you at rest, he will die. You waste your labor, if you wish to do what is going to happen anyway. 4. "I do not wish, to be sure, to kill," you say, "but to afflict with exile, with disgrace, with loss." I more readily pardon the man who covets an enemy’s wound than the one who covets a blister; for this is the mark not only of a bad mind but of a petty one. Whether you think of the utmost penalties or the lighter ones, how little is the time in which either he is tortured by his punishment or you take a wicked joy from another’s pain! 5. 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 terror to none, a danger to none; let us despise losses, injuries, insults, and pin-pricks, and bear with great spirit our short-lived discomforts: while we are looking back, as the saying goes, and turning round, death is already at hand.