Book 1

1.1. You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I write on how anger may be soothed, and it seems to me not without reason that you have dreaded this passion above all others as the most hideous and frenzied. For the rest have something of calm and quiet in them, while this one is wholly turbulent and bent upon the onrush of its grief, raging with a craving for weapons, for blood, for punishments, a craving anything but human, careless of itself so long as it harms another, hurling itself upon the very point of the sword, and greedy for a vengeance that will drag down the avenger with it.

1.2. Certain wise men, accordingly, have called anger a brief madness; for it is no less master of itself, forgetful of decency, heedless of its bonds, stubborn and intent upon whatever it has begun, closed to reason and counsel, stirred by empty causes, unfit to discern what is just and true, and most like those ruins that are shattered upon the very thing they have crushed.

1.3. But that you may know that those whom anger possesses are not sane, look only at their bearing; for just as there are sure signs of the mad—a bold and threatening countenance, a clouded brow, a savage face, a hurried step, restless hands, a changed colour, and breath drawn quick and forced—so the marks of the angry are the very same:

1.4. their eyes blaze and flash, a deep flush spreads over the whole face as the blood boils up from the depths of the heart, the lips tremble, the teeth are clenched, the hair bristles and stands on end, the breathing is laboured and hissing, there is the cracking of joints wrenched by their own twisting, groaning and bellowing, and speech broken off in scarcely articulate words, hands struck together again and again, the ground pounded with the feet, and the whole body roused and "making the great threats of anger," a face foul and horrible to behold as it distorts and swells with rage—

1.5. you could not tell whether the vice is more detestable or more deforming. The other passions can be hidden and nursed in secret; anger thrusts itself forward and comes out upon the face, and the greater it is, the more openly it boils over. Do you not see how, in every animal, the moment it has risen up to do harm, the warning signs run ahead, and the whole body departs from its usual quiet state and bristles its native ferocity?

1.6. The boars foam at the mouth and whet their tusks by grinding; the bulls toss their horns into the empty air and scatter the sand with the stamping of their feet; the lions roar; the necks of provoked serpents swell; the look of mad dogs is grim. There is no creature so dreadful and so deadly by nature that it does not show, the moment anger has invaded it, an added access of fresh ferocity.

1.7. I am not unaware that the other passions, too, are scarcely concealed—that lust and fear and recklessness give their own signs and can be detected beforehand; for no agitation enters us with any force without stirring something in the face. What, then, is the difference? That the other passions are visible, while this one stands out.

2.1. Now if you should care to look upon its effects and the harm it does, no plague has cost the human race more dearly. You will see slaughterings and poisonings, the mutual filth of defendants in court, the ruin of cities and the destruction of whole nations, the heads of princes sold at public auction, torches set to roofs, and fires not confined within the walls but vast tracts of country gleaming with the flame of the enemy.

2.2. Look at the foundations of the most renowned cities, now scarcely to be made out: anger cast them down. Look at the wildernesses, deserted through 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 amid the laws and the crowded spectacle of the forum, bade one give his blood through the parricide of his son, another open a royal throat by the hand of a slave, another stretch his limbs upon the cross.

2.3. And so far I tell only of the punishments of individuals; what if, leaving aside those against whom anger has blazed up man by man, you should choose to look upon assemblies cut down by the sword, and the common people butchered by soldiers let loose upon them, and whole nations condemned to death in indiscriminate destruction—

2.4. as though they were forsaking our care or scorning our authority? Again: why does the crowd grow angry at gladiators, and so unjustly that it counts it an injury when they do not die willingly? It judges itself despised, and by look, by gesture, by its fury it turns from spectator into adversary.

2.5. Whatever is of this kind is not anger but a semblance of anger, like that of children, who, if they have fallen, want the ground to be beaten, and often do not even know why they are angry, but are merely angry—without cause and without injury, yet not without some appearance of injury nor without some craving for punishment. And so they are tricked by the pretence of blows, and appeased by the feigned tears of those who beg pardon, and a false grief is removed by a false revenge.

3.1. "We are often angry," someone says, "not at those who have hurt us but at those who are about to hurt us; from which you may see that anger does not arise from injury." It is true that we are angry at those about to hurt us, but by the very thought they do hurt us, and he who is going to do an injury is already doing it.

3.2. "That you may know," he says, "that anger is not a craving for punishment, the weakest are often angry at the most powerful, and do not crave a punishment they cannot hope for." First, I have said that anger is a craving to exact punishment, not a power to do so; 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. The definition of Aristotle is not far from our own;

3.3. for he says that anger is a craving to pay back pain. To set out the difference between his definition and ours would be a long task. Against both it is objected that wild beasts grow angry, though not provoked by injury nor for the sake of another's punishment or pain; for even if they bring these about, it is not these that they seek.

3.4. But it must be answered that wild beasts are without anger, and so are all animals except man; for though anger is the enemy of reason, it nowhere arises save where there is room for reason. Wild beasts have impulses, fury, ferocity, the will to attack; anger they have no more than they have luxury, and yet in certain pleasures they are more intemperate than man.

3.5. You have no reason to believe the man who says: "The boar remembers not his wrath, nor the hind to trust her speed, nor the bears to charge the strong herds." By "grow angry" he means "be roused, be driven on"; for in truth they know no more how to be angry than how to forgive.

3.6. Dumb animals are without human passions, but they have certain impulses resembling them. Otherwise, if love and hatred were in them, there would also be friendship and feud, discord and concord; some traces of these do indeed appear in them too, but the goods and evils of the human breast are properly its own.

3.7. To none but man has been granted foresight, providence, diligence, reflection; and not only from human virtues but even from human vices the animals are barred. Their whole form, without as within, is unlike man's; the royal and governing part of them is shaped otherwise. They have a voice, indeed, but one not articulate and confused and powerless for words; they have a tongue, but one fettered and not loosed for varied movements; and so the ruling part itself is too little subtle, too little exact. It does, then, take in the sights and appearances of things by which it is summoned to its impulses, but only in a turbid and confused way.

3.8. Hence their rushings and tumults are violent, but their fears and anxieties and sorrow and anger do not exist—only certain things resembling these. Therefore they quickly subside and turn into their opposite, and after raging and trembling most fiercely they fall to feeding, and upon their bellowing and frenzied running there follows at once rest and sleep.

4.1. What anger is has been sufficiently set out. How it differs from a wrathful temper is plain—as the drunken man differs from the drunkard, the frightened from the timid. A man may be angry without being of a wrathful temper; a man of wrathful temper may sometimes not be angry.

4.2. The other kinds, which among the Greeks distinguish anger into species under several names, I shall pass over, since with us they have no terms of their own—though we do call a man bitter and harsh, and no less peevish, raving, blustering, difficult, sour, all of which are varieties of anger; among these you may set the fretful man, a fastidious sort of wrathfulness.

4.3. For some angers are such as subside within mere shouting; some are no less stubborn than frequent; some are savage with the hand but sparing of words; some break out into the bitterness of words and curses; some go no further than complaints and turnings-away; some are deep and heavy and turned inward. There are a thousand other species of this manifold evil.

5.1. We have asked what anger is, whether it falls upon any animal other than man, how it differs from a wrathful temper, and how many its species are; now let us ask whether anger is in accordance with nature, and whether it is useful and in some part to be retained.

5.2. Whether it is in accordance with nature will be plain if we look at man. What is gentler than he, while the disposition of his mind is right? Yet what is crueller than anger? What is more loving of others than man? What is more hostile than anger? Man is born for mutual help, anger for mutual destruction; the one wishes to come together, the other to part; the one to help, the other to harm; the one to succour even strangers, the other to attack even those most dear; the one is ready even to spend itself for others' good, the other to plunge into peril, provided only that it drag the other down.

5.3. Who, then, is more ignorant of the nature of things than the man who assigns this savage and ruinous vice to her finest and most faultless work? Anger, as we have said, is greedy for punishment; and that a craving for this should dwell in the most peaceable breast of man is least of all in keeping with his nature. For human life rests upon kindnesses and concord, and is bound into a covenant of mutual aid not by terror but by mutual love.

6.1. "What then? Is not chastisement sometimes necessary?" Of course. But this without anger, with reason; for it does not injure but heals under the appearance of injuring. As we scorch certain warped spear-shafts in order to straighten them, and drive in wedges and press them out, not to break them but to unbend them, so by pain of body and of mind we correct natures distorted by vice.

6.2. Surely the physician, with slight ailments, first tries to alter little in the daily routine, to impose an order upon foods, drinks, and exercise, and to strengthen the health merely by a changed arrangement of life. The next step is that moderation should avail; if moderation and order do not avail, he withdraws something and cuts away; if even to this there is no response, he forbids food and unburdens the body by abstinence; if gentler means have given way in vain, he opens a vein, and if the limbs that cling to the body do it harm and spread the disease, he lays hands on them; nor does any remedy seem harsh whose effect is health.

6.3. So it befits the guardian of the laws and the ruler of the state to treat natures, as long as he can, with words, and these the gentler kind, so as to urge what ought to be done, to win over men's minds to a desire for the honourable and the just, and to make them hate the vices and prize the virtues; then to pass to sterner speech, by which he still warns and reproaches; last of all to resort to penalties, and these still light and revocable; and let him reserve the extreme punishments for the extreme of crimes, so that no one perish save him whose perishing is in the interest even of the perishing.

6.4. In this one thing he will be unlike those who heal, that whereas they grant an easy death to those to whom they could not grant life, he drives the condemned from life with disgrace and public infamy—not because he takes delight in any man's punishment (for so inhuman a savagery is far from the wise man), but that they may be a lesson to all, and that, since they would not be of use alive, the state may at least make use of their death. Man's nature, then, is not eager for punishment; and therefore neither is anger in accordance with man's nature, since it is eager for punishment.

6.5. I will bring forward also the argument of Plato—for what harm is there in using what belongs to others in the part where it is ours?—: "The good man," he says, "does no harm." Punishment harms; therefore punishment does not befit the good man, and for this reason neither does anger, since punishment befits anger. If the good man takes no joy in punishment, he will take no joy either in that passion to which punishment is a pleasure; therefore anger is not natural.

7.1. Even though anger be not natural, is it not to be taken up, because it has often been useful? It lifts the spirit and spurs it on, and without it bravery achieves nothing splendid in war, unless the flame has been kindled from this source and this goad has driven men on and sent the bold into danger. And so some think it best to temper anger, not to remove it, and, when the part that overflows has been drawn off, to compel it to a wholesome measure, but to retain that without which action will languish and the force and vigour of the mind be unstrung.

7.2. First, it is easier to shut out what is destructive than to govern it, and not to admit it than, once admitted, to keep it within bounds; for when they have once set themselves in possession, they are stronger than their ruler and will not suffer themselves to be cut back or lessened.

7.3. Next, reason itself, to which the reins are handed over, is powerful only so long as it is kept apart from the passions; if it has mingled itself with them and been defiled, it cannot hold back those it might have kept away. For once the mind has been stirred and shaken from its place, it becomes the slave of that which drives it.

7.4. The beginnings of certain things are in our power, but their later stages sweep us away by their own force and leave no way back. As bodies cast down a precipice have no command over themselves, and once flung down can neither resist nor delay, but an irrevocable plunge cuts off all counsel and repentance and forbids them not to arrive where they need not have gone, so the mind, if it has thrown itself into anger, love, or the other passions, is not permitted to check the impulse; its own weight, and the downward bent of vice's nature, must sweep it on and drive it to the bottom.

8.1. It is best to spurn the first incitement to anger at once, to fight against its very seeds, and to take care that we do not fall into anger. For if it has once begun to carry us off our course, the return to safety is hard, since there is no place for reason once passion has been let in and some right has been granted it by our own will; thereafter it will do as much as it pleases, not as much as you permit.

8.2. At the very frontier, I say, the enemy must be barred; for once it has entered and forced its way through the gates, it accepts no measure from its captives. For the mind is not set apart and observing the passions from outside, so as not to let them advance further than they ought; rather it is itself changed into passion, and therefore cannot recall that useful and wholesome power once it has been betrayed and weakened.

8.3. For, as I have said, these have not their seats apart and divided; rather passion and reason are but the changing of the mind for better or for worse. How, then, shall reason rise again once it has been seized and overwhelmed by vices, when it has yielded to anger? Or how shall it free itself from the confusion in which the mixture of the worse has prevailed? "But some men," he says, "control themselves in anger."

8.4. Do they then do none of the things that anger dictates, or some? If they do nothing, it is plain that anger is not necessary for the doing of deeds—the very thing you were calling in, as though it had some force greater than reason.

8.5. Finally I ask: is it stronger than reason or weaker? If stronger, how shall reason be able to set a measure upon it, since only the weaker are wont to obey? If weaker, then reason of itself suffices for the accomplishment of things without it, and does not need the help of something feebler. "But some men, though angry, keep their composure and control themselves."

8.6. When? When anger is already fading and departing of its own accord, not when it is at its very height; for then it is the stronger. "What of it, then?"

8.7. Do they not sometimes, even in anger, let go unharmed and untouched those whom they hate, and refrain from harming them? They do. When? When passion has beaten back passion, and either fear or desire has gained something. Then it was not by the kindness of reason that it grew quiet, but by the treacherous and evil truce of the passions.

9.1. Next, anger has in itself nothing useful, nor does it sharpen the mind for the business of war. For virtue, being content with itself, never needs to be helped by vice. Whenever there is need of an onset, it does not grow angry but rises up, and is roused and let down again just so far as it has judged needful, exactly as the missiles hurled from engines are in the power of the one who launches them, as to how far they are flung.

9.2. "Anger," says Aristotle, "is necessary, and nothing can be carried by storm without it, unless it fills the mind and kindles the spirit; we must use it, however, not as a commander but as a common soldier." Which is false. For if it gives ear to reason and follows where it is led, it is no longer anger, whose mark is defiance; but if it resists and does not grow quiet where it is bidden, but is carried on by lust and fierceness, it is as useless a servant of the mind as the soldier who disregards the signal for retreat.

9.3. And so, if it suffers a measure to be set upon 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, then it is destructive and not to be reckoned among our aids; so either it is not anger, or it is useless.

9.4. For if a man exacts a punishment not because he is greedy for the punishment itself but because it ought to be done, he is not to be counted among the angry. He will be the useful soldier who knows how to obey counsel; passions, indeed, are as evil as servants as they are as leaders.

10.1. Therefore reason will never take to its aid those rash and violent impulses over which it has no authority, which it can never restrain unless it sets against them their equals and likes—fear against anger, anger against sloth, desire against fear.

10.2. Far from virtue be this evil, that reason should ever flee for refuge to the vices! This mind can take no faithful repose; it must needs be shaken and tossed—the mind that is safe only through its own evils, that cannot be brave unless it is angry, nor industrious unless it covets, nor quiet unless it fears: it must live under a tyranny, having come into bondage to some passion. Is it not shameful to send down the virtues into clientship to the vices?

10.3. 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 is just as ill-advised a thing without reason as reason is ineffectual without passion? The two are equal, when neither can exist without the other. But who could endure to set passion on a level with reason? "In this way," he says, "passion is useful, if it is moderate."

10.4. Nay rather, if by its nature it is useful. But if it will not endure command and reason, by moderation it will gain only this much—that the less it is, the less harm it does: therefore a moderate passion is nothing else than a moderate evil.

11.1. "But against enemies," he says, "anger is necessary." Nowhere less; where impulses ought not to be poured out but tempered and obedient. For what else is it that crushes the barbarians, so much stronger of body, so much more enduring of toil, than anger, which is its own worst enemy?

11.2. Skill, too, protects the gladiators, anger lays them bare. Besides, what need is there of anger, when reason accomplishes the same? Do you suppose the hunter is angry at the beasts? Yet he meets them as they come and pursues them as they flee, and reason does all this without anger. What was it that so destroyed the many thousands of Cimbri and Teutones poured down over the Alps, that no messenger but only rumour carried word of so great a disaster to their own people, except that with them anger stood in the place of valour? And as it sometimes drives back and lays low what is in its way, so more often it is its own destruction. What is more spirited than the Germans? What keener for the charge?

11.3. What more eager for arms, among which they are born and reared, whose one care is for arms while they neglect all else? What more hardened to every endurance, seeing that for the most part no coverings for the body have been provided them, no shelters against the perpetual harshness of their sky?

11.4. Yet these the Spaniards and Gauls, and the men of Asia and Syria, soft in war, cut down before a legion comes into sight, exposed for no other reason than their wrathfulness. Come, give to those bodies, to those minds that know nothing of dainties, luxury, and riches, give them reason, give them discipline—to say nothing more, we shall certainly need to recall the Roman character.

11.5. By what else did Fabius restore the broken forces of the empire, except that he knew how to delay and to draw things out and to wait—all of which the angry know not how to do? The empire, which then stood on the very brink, would have perished if Fabius had dared all that anger urged: he took the public fortune into his counsel, and, having reckoned its forces, of which now nothing could be lost without the whole, he set aside grief and vengeance for the one consideration of usefulness, intent upon opportunities; he conquered anger before he conquered Hannibal. What of Scipio?

11.6. Did he not, leaving Hannibal and the Punic army and all those who deserved his anger, carry the war over into Africa, so unhurried that he gave malicious men a notion of luxury and indolence?

11.7. What of the other Scipio? Did he not sit before Numantia long and patiently, and bear with an even mind this grief, his own and the state's, that Numantia was being conquered more slowly than Carthage? While he hemmed in and shut up the enemy, he brought them to such a pass that they fell by their own steel.

11.8. Anger, therefore, is not useful even in battles or wars; for it is prone to rashness, and while it wishes to bring on dangers, it does not guard against them. That is the surest valour which has long and well looked about it and governed itself and advanced from a slow and settled course.

12.1. "What then?" he says. "Will the good man not grow angry if he sees his father slain, his mother carried off?" He will not grow angry, but he will avenge, he will protect. But why do you fear that filial duty, even without anger, will be too feeble a spur to him? Or say in the same manner: "What then? When he sees his father or his son cut down, will the good man not weep nor lose his senses?" These are things we see happen to women, whenever the suspicion of slight danger has struck them.

12.2. The good man will perform his duties unperturbed, undaunted; and he will do what is worthy of a good man in such a way as to do nothing unworthy of a man. My father will be slain: I will defend him; he has been slain: I will avenge him—because it ought to be done, not because it grieves me. "Good men grow angry at injuries to their own."

12.3. When you say this, Theophrastus, you seek to bring odium upon the braver precepts, and, leaving the judge, you appeal to the crowd. Because each man grows angry at such a misfortune of his own, you suppose that men will judge it right that what they do should be done; for nearly everyone judges that passion just which he recognizes in himself.

12.4. But they do the same if the hot water is not well served, if a glass is broken, if a shoe is spattered with mud. It is not filial duty that stirs that anger but weakness, as with children, who will weep as much for parents lost as for nuts lost.

12.5. To grow angry on behalf of one's own is the mark not of a dutiful mind but of a feeble one; that is the fine and worthy thing—to come forward as defender of parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens, led by duty itself, willing, deliberate, foreseeing, not driven and frenzied. For no passion is greedier for vengeance than anger, and for that very reason it is unfit for vengeance: headlong and out of its mind, like nearly every desire, it puts itself in its own way toward the very thing it hastens to. And so it has never been of good service either in peace or in war; for it makes peace like war, and in arms it forgets that Mars is common to both sides, and comes into another's power because it is not in its own.

12.6. Next, vices are not to be taken into use merely because they have sometimes accomplished something; for fevers, too, relieve certain kinds of ill health, and yet it is not therefore better not to have been wholly free of them. It is an abominable kind of remedy to owe one's health to disease. In like manner anger, even if it has sometimes, like poison and a fall and a shipwreck, been of unexpected use, is not for that reason to be judged wholesome; for things that bring ruin have often been the means of safety.

13.1. Next, the things that are to be possessed are, the greater they are, the better and more desirable. If justice is a good, no one will say it would be better for something to be taken from it; if courage is a good, no one will wish it to be diminished in any part.

13.2. Therefore the greater anger is, the better it would be too; for who would refuse an addition to any good? Yet to increase it is harmful; therefore so is its very existence. That is no good which by increase becomes an evil.

13.3. "Anger," he says, "is useful, because it makes men more combative." In that way so is drunkenness; for it makes them brazen and bold, and many have been the better for the sword when poorly sober; in that way you may call frenzy and madness, too, necessary to strength, because rage often makes men more powerful. What of it?

13.4. Has not fear, on the contrary, sometimes made men bold, and the dread of death roused even the most cowardly into battle? But anger, drunkenness, fear, and other such things are base and fleeting goads; they do not equip virtue, which has no need of vices, but only lift a little a mind otherwise sluggish and craven. No one is made braver by growing angry, except one who would not have been brave without anger.

13.5. Thus it comes not to the aid of virtue but in its stead. Again, if anger were a good, would it not attend every most perfect man? Yet the most prone to anger are infants and old men and the sick, and everything weak is by nature querulous.

14.1. "It cannot be," says Theophrastus, "that a good man should not grow angry at the wicked." In that way, the better a man is, the more prone to anger he will be; whereas, see whether on the contrary he is not more placid and freed from the passions, and one to whom no man is hateful.

14.2. What reason, indeed, has he to hate those who do wrong, since it is error that drives them into faults of this kind? And it is not the part of a wise man to hate those who err; otherwise he will be hateful to himself. Let him reflect how many things he does against good conduct, how many of the things he has done call for pardon; soon he will be angry even at himself. For no just judge passes one sentence on his own cause and another on another's.

14.3. No one, I say, will be found who can acquit himself; and each man calls himself innocent with an eye to a witness rather than to his conscience. How much more humane it is to show a mild and fatherly spirit toward those who do wrong, and not to hound them but to call them back! When a man is straying through the fields from ignorance of the road, it is better to set him on the right path than to drive him off.

15.1. He who does wrong, therefore, 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 is healing? "But they cannot be corrected, and there is in them nothing mild or capable of good hope." Then let them be removed from the company of mortals, since they are bound to make worse whatever they touch, and let them cease to be evil in the one way they can—but let this be without hatred.

15.2. For why should I hate the man whom I most benefit at the very moment I snatch him from himself? Does anyone hate his own limbs at the time he cuts them off? That is not anger but a wretched cure. We dispatch mad dogs; we kill the fierce and untamed ox; we put the knife to diseased flocks, lest they infect the herd; we destroy monstrous births; we even drown our children if they are born weak or deformed; it is not anger but reason that sets apart the useless from the sound.

15.3. Nothing less befits one who punishes than anger, since the penalty avails the more for amendment if it is delivered with judgment. This is why Socrates said to a slave: "I would beat you, were I not angry." He put off the correction of the slave to a saner time; at that time he corrected himself. Whose passion, after all, will be under control, when Socrates did not dare to entrust himself to anger?

16.1. Therefore, for the restraint of the erring and the wicked, an angry chastiser is not needed; for since anger is a fault of the mind, it is not fitting that one who errs should correct faults. "What then? Shall I not be angry at a robber? What then? Shall I not be angry at a poisoner?" No; for neither am I angry at myself when I let my blood. Every kind of punishment I apply in the place of a remedy.

16.2. You are still in the first stage of errors, and stumble not 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 shall be held in check by disgrace. Upon you something stronger must be branded, something you will feel: you shall be sent into exile and to unknown lands. Against you, harsher remedies are now demanded by a settled wickedness: public bonds and the prison shall be employed.

16.3. Yours is an incurable mind, weaving crimes upon crimes, and you are now driven on not by motives—which will never be wanting to the evil—but it is motive enough for you to sin that you have sinned; you have drunk wickedness to the dregs and so mingled it with your vitals that it cannot come out except along with them; long since, wretch, you have sought to die; we shall do you a service, we shall take from you that madness with which you torment others and are tormented yourself, and to one tossed amid his own and others' sufferings we shall hold out the one good that remains to you, death. Why should I be angry at one whom I most of all benefit? Sometimes the best kind of mercy is to kill.

16.4. If I had entered an army's hospital as a man who knew his business, or a rich man's house, I would not have prescribed the same thing for all who were sick in various ways; I see in so many minds various vices, and I have been called to heal the state; for each man's disease let its own medicine be sought—let modesty heal this one, travel that one, pain this, want that, the sword another.

16.5. And so, even if a magistrate's robe must be put on and an assembly summoned by the trumpet, I shall go up to the tribunal not raging nor hostile, but with the countenance of the law, and shall utter those solemn words in a voice gentle and grave rather than frenzied, and shall order that the law take its course not in anger but in sternness; and when I command the neck of a guilty man to be struck off, when I sew up parricides in the sack, when I send a man to a soldier's punishment, when I set a traitor or a public enemy upon the Tarpeian Rock, I shall be without anger and with the same look and mind with which I strike serpents and venomous creatures.

16.6. "Wrath is needed for punishing." What? Does it seem to you that the law is angry at those it does not know, has not seen, hopes will never be? We must take on, therefore, the spirit of the law, which is not angry but determines. For if it befits a good man to be angry at evil deeds, it will also befit him to envy the prosperity of wicked men. For what is more shameful than that certain scoundrels should flourish, and abuse the indulgence of fortune—men for whom no fortune can be found bad enough? Yet he will look upon their advantages without envy, as upon their crimes without anger; the good judge condemns what deserves condemnation, he does not hate it. "What then?

16.7. When the wise man has something of this kind in hand, will not his mind be touched and more stirred than its wont?" I grant it; he will feel a certain slight and faint motion; for, as Zeno says, even in the mind of the wise man, although the wound has healed, the scar remains. He will feel, then, certain suspicions and shadows of the passions, but the passions themselves he will be without.

17.1. Aristotle says that certain passions, if a man uses them well, serve as arms. This would be true if, like weapons of war, they could be taken up and laid down at the will of the wearer. These arms, which Aristotle gives to virtue, fight of their own accord, do not wait for the hand, and possess rather than are possessed.

17.2. There is no need of other instruments: nature has equipped us sufficiently with reason. She has given us this weapon—firm, lasting, obedient, neither double-edged nor such as could be turned back upon its master. Not for foresight only, but for the carrying out of affairs, reason of itself is enough; for what is more foolish than to seek protection for it from wrathfulness—a stable thing from an uncertain, a faithful from a faithless, a sound from a sick one?

17.3. What of the fact that even for actions—in which alone the work of wrathfulness seems necessary—reason is by itself far stronger? For when it has judged that something must be done, it perseveres in it; for it will find nothing better than itself by which to be changed; and therefore it stands by its decisions once made.

17.4. Anger has often been driven back by pity; for it has no solid strength but only an empty swelling, and uses violent beginnings, just like the winds that rise from the earth and, conceived in rivers and marshes, are vehement without persistence.

17.5. It begins with great force, then fails, worn out before its time; and that which had been turning over nothing but cruelty and new kinds of punishment, when the moment for action comes, is already broken and mild. Passion quickly falls; reason is constant.

17.6. Moreover, even where anger has persisted, sometimes, if there are several who have deserved to perish, after the blood of two or three it ceases to kill. Its first blows are sharp; so the venom of serpents creeping from their lair does harm, but their fangs are harmless once a frequent biting has drained them.

17.7. Therefore those who have committed equal offences do not suffer equal punishments, and often he who has offended less suffers more, because he was thrown in the way of an anger more recent. And on the whole it is unequal; now it runs out beyond what is fitting, now it stops short of what is due; for it indulges itself, and judges by caprice, and will not listen, and leaves no room for a defence, and clings to what it has seized, and does not allow its own judgment, even if it is wrong, to be wrested from it.

18.1. Reason gives time to both sides, then asks an adjournment even for itself, that it may have space to sift out the truth; anger is in haste. Reason wishes to judge what is just; anger wishes that to seem just which it has already judged.

18.2. Reason looks at nothing beyond the matter at issue; anger is stirred by empty things hovering outside the case. A countenance too assured, a voice too loud, speech too free, dress too elegant, a too-ambitious pleading, popularity with the crowd—these exasperate it; often, hostile to the advocate, it condemns the defendant; even if the truth is thrust before its eyes, it loves and protects its error; it will not be refuted, and in ill-begun courses obstinacy seems to it more honourable than repentance.

18.3. Gnaeus Piso was, within our own memory, a man free from many vices, but warped, and one to whom rigidity passed for steadfastness. When in anger he had ordered the leading off to execution of a soldier who had returned from leave without his comrade, on the ground that he had killed the man he could not produce, he granted no time to one who asked for it to make a search. The condemned man was led out beyond the rampart and was already stretching forth his neck, when suddenly there appeared that very comrade who had seemed to be slain.

18.4. Then the centurion in charge of the execution bade the guardsman sheathe his sword, and led the condemned man back to Piso, to restore Piso's innocence to him; for to the soldier fortune had restored it. They are brought back through a great throng, embracing each other, the comrades amid the great rejoicing of the camp. Piso mounted the tribunal in a fury and ordered both to be led off—both the soldier who had not killed and the one who had not perished. What could be more outrageous than this?

18.5. Because one had been found innocent, two were perishing. Piso added a third as well. For he ordered the very centurion who had brought the condemned man back to be led off. Three were appointed to die in that same place on account of one man's innocence.

18.6. O how ingenious is wrathfulness at inventing pretexts for its frenzy! "You," it says, "I order to be led off, because you were condemned; you, because you were the cause of your comrade's condemnation; you, because, ordered to kill, you did not obey your commander." It contrived how to make three charges, because it had found none.

19.1. Wrathfulness has, I say, this evil in it: it will not be governed. It grows angry at truth itself, if truth has shown itself against its will; with shouting and uproar and the tossing of the whole body it pursues those it has marked out, adding insults and curses. This reason does not do;

19.2. but, if there is need, silently and quietly it sweeps away whole houses to their foundations, and destroys families pestilent to the state along with their wives and children, razes the very dwellings and levels them with the ground, and roots out names hostile to liberty—and this without gnashing the teeth, without tossing the head, without doing anything unbecoming to a judge, whose countenance ought then most of all to be calm and composed, when he pronounces great judgments.

19.3. "What need is there," says Hieronymus, "when you wish to flog someone, to bite your own lips first?" What would he have said if he had seen a proconsul leaping down from the tribunal, snatching the rods from the lictor, and tearing his own clothes because another's were torn too slowly?

19.4. What need is there to overturn the table? To dash down the cups? To hurl oneself against the columns? To tear out the hair, to strike the thigh and the breast? How great an anger do you think that is which, because it does not break out upon another as swiftly as it wishes, turns back upon itself? And so they are held back by those nearest them, and are begged to be reconciled with themselves.

19.5. None of these things does the man do who, empty of anger, imposes on each the punishment he has deserved. Often he releases the man whose offence he has detected. If repentance for the deed promises good hope, if he sees that the wickedness does not come from the depths but clings, as they say, only to the surface of the mind, he will grant an impunity that will harm neither those who receive it nor those who give it;

19.6. sometimes he will check great crimes more lightly than lesser ones, if those were committed by a slip and not by cruelty, while in these lurks a hidden, concealed, and inveterate craft; he will not visit the same offence in two men with the same penalty, if the one committed it through carelessness, the other took pains to be guilty.

19.7. This he will always observe in every punishment—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 wise man punishes because a wrong has been done, but that wrong may not be done; for the past cannot be recalled, the future is forbidden—and those whom he wishes to be made examples of a wickedness that comes to a bad end he will put to death openly, not only that they themselves may perish, but that by their perishing they may deter others.

19.8. He who has these things to weigh and assess—you see how free he ought to come from every perturbation when he handles a matter to be treated with the utmost care, the power over life and death; the sword is ill entrusted to an angry man.

20.1. Nor is even this to be supposed, that anger contributes anything to greatness of mind. For that is not greatness; it is a swelling. Nor, when bodies are distended with an abundance of corrupt humour, is the disease a growth, but a pestilent excess.

20.2. All those whom a frenzied mind lifts above human thoughts believe that they breathe something lofty and sublime; yet there is nothing solid beneath, but things that have grown without foundations are prone to ruin. Anger has nothing to stand on. It does not rise from what is firm and lasting, but is windy and empty, and is as far from greatness of mind as recklessness is from courage, insolence from confidence, gloom from austerity, cruelty from severity.

20.3. There is, I say, a great difference between a lofty mind and a proud one. Wrathfulness undertakes 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 feel pain, like ulcerated and sickly bodies that groan at the lightest touch. Thus anger is above all a womanish and childish vice. "But it befalls men too." Yes, for men also have childish and womanish dispositions.

20.4. "What then? Are not some utterances flung out by the angry which seem flung from a great spirit?" Rather, from men ignorant of true greatness, such as that dreadful and abominable one: "Let them hate, so long as they fear." You may know it was written in Sulla's age. I do not know which he wished worse for himself—to be hated or to be feared. "Let them hate." It occurs to him that the result will be that they will curse him, lie in wait for him, crush him. What did he add? May the gods curse him—so apt a remedy did he find for being worthy of hatred. "Let them hate"—and what then? "So long as they obey"? No. "So long as they approve"? No. What, then? "So long as they fear." On those terms I should not even wish to be loved. Do you think this was said with a great spirit? You are deceived;

20.5. for that is not greatness but monstrousness. You have no reason to believe the words of the angry, whose noise is great and threatening, while within the mind is most cowardly.

20.6. Nor have you reason to think that true which is said in that most eloquent man, Titus Livius: "A man of great rather than of good genius." That cannot be separated; either he will be good as well, or not great either, since I understand greatness of mind as unshaken and solid within and equal and firm from the very bottom—such as cannot exist in evil natures.

20.7. For they can be terrible and tumultuous and ruinous; but greatness, whose foundation and strength is goodness, they will not have. Yet by their speech, their effort, and all their outward show they will give an impression of greatness;

20.8. they will utter something you might think the mark of a great spirit, as did Gaius Caesar, who, angry at the heavens because a thunderstorm was drowning out the pantomimes—whom he imitated more zealously than he watched—and because his revelry was frightened by lightnings (very ill-aimed ones, at that), called Jupiter to battle, and that to the death, shouting out that Homeric line: "Lift me up, or I will lift you." What madness was this! He thought either that he could not be harmed even by Jupiter, or that he could even harm Jupiter. I do not think this utterance of his added little weight to inciting the minds of the conspirators; it seemed the limit of endurance to put up with a man who could not put up with Jupiter.

21.1. There is nothing, then, in anger—not even when it seems vehement and contemptuous of gods and men—that is great, nothing that is noble. Or if anger seems to anyone to produce greatness of mind, let luxury seem so too—it wants to be borne on ivory, to be clothed in purple, to be roofed with gold, to shift lands, to enclose seas, to fling rivers headlong, to hang woods aloft;

21.2. let avarice, too, seem of a great mind—it broods over heaps of gold and silver, farms whole estates that bear the names of provinces, and under single overseers holds wider bounds than those the consuls drew by lot;

21.3. let lust, too, seem of a great mind—it swims across straits, castrates herds of boys, comes under the husband's sword with death despised; let ambition, too, seem of a great mind—it is not content with yearly honours; if it can, it wishes to seize the calendar under one man's name and to set its titles throughout the whole world. All these things, no matter how far they advance and stretch themselves, are narrow, wretched, low;

21.4. virtue alone is lofty and sublime, and nothing is great that is not at the same time tranquil.