Book 2

1.1. The first book, Novatus, had the more indulgent subject; for the descent down the slope of vices is easy. Now we must come to finer points; for we ask whether anger begins from judgment or from impulse—that is, whether it is set in motion of its own accord, or, like very many things that arise within us without our knowing, it comes upon us.

1.2. But our discussion must descend to these matters, that it may afterwards be able to rise to those higher ones as well. For in our own body too the bones and sinews and joints, the supports of the whole and the vital parts, far from comely to look upon, are arranged first; then come those parts from which all the grace of face and aspect derives; and after all these, the colour, which most of all catches the eye, is poured on last, when the body is already complete.

1.3. That anger is moved by the appearance of an injury presented to it is not in doubt; but we ask whether it follows that appearance at once and breaks out without the mind's taking part, or whether it is moved only with the mind's assent.

1.4. Our view is that anger ventures nothing of itself, but only with the mind's approval; for to take in the appearance of an injury received, to crave vengeance for it, and to join the two—that one ought not to have been harmed and that one ought to be avenged—this is not the work of an impulse stirred without our will. That impulse is simple; this is composite and contains several elements: it has understood something, grown indignant, condemned, and now takes vengeance:

1.5. these things cannot happen unless the mind has assented to that by which it was touched.

2.1. "To what end," you say, "is this inquiry?" That we may know what anger is. For if it arises in us against our will, it will never give way to reason. For all motions that come about without our will are unconquerable and unavoidable, like the shudder when cold water is dashed on us, the shrinking at certain contacts; the hair stands on end at bad news, a blush spreads at shameless words, and dizziness follows when one looks down a precipice. Since none of these is in our power, no reasoning can persuade them not to happen. But anger is put to flight by precepts;

2.2. for it is a voluntary fault of the mind, not one of those things that befall us by some condition of the human lot and therefore happen even to the wisest—among which we must place also that first stroke of the mind which moves us upon the notion of an injury.

2.3. This comes upon us even amid the entertainments of the stage and in the reading of ancient histories. Often we seem to grow angry at Clodius driving Cicero into exile, at Antony putting him to death; who is not roused against the arms of Marius, against the proscription of Sulla? Who is not hostile to Theodotus and Achillas and to the boy himself who dared a deed beyond a boy's daring?

2.4. Song and quickened measures sometimes stir us, and that martial sound of trumpets; the mind is moved too by a terrible painting and by the grim sight of even the most just punishments;

2.5. hence it is that we smile at those who laugh, that the throng of mourners saddens us, and that we grow heated at contests not our own. These things are not anger, no more than it is sorrow that knits the brow at the sight of a mock shipwreck, no more than it is fear that runs through the minds of readers when Hannibal, after Cannae, besieges the walls; but all these are motions of minds that do not wish to be moved—not passions, but the preludes that herald passions.

2.6. Thus the trumpet rouses the ears of the soldier even amid full peace, now back in the toga, and the clash of arms makes the warhorses prick up. They say that Alexander, when Xenophantus played, put his hand to his arms.

3.1. None of those things that strike the mind by chance ought to be called a passion; the mind, so to speak, suffers these rather than makes them. A passion, therefore, is not to be moved by the appearances of things presented, but to surrender oneself to them and to follow up this chance motion.

3.2. For if anyone supposes that pallor, falling tears, the prickling stirred at an obscene sight, a deep sigh, the eyes suddenly grown keener, or any like thing, is an indication of a passion and a sign of the mind, he is deceived and does not understand that these are impulses of the body.

3.3. And so even the bravest man, while he is being armed, has often turned pale; the most ferocious soldier's knees have trembled a little at the signal for battle; the heart of a great general has leapt before the lines clashed; and the topmost limbs of the most eloquent orator have stiffened while he composed himself to speak. Anger must not merely be moved but break out; for it is an impulse;

3.4. but there is never an impulse without the mind's assent, for it cannot be that there is a dealing with vengeance and punishment while the mind knows nothing of it. A man thought himself wronged, wished to take vengeance, and, when some cause dissuaded him, at once settled down again. I do not call this anger—a motion of the mind that obeys reason; anger is that which leaps over reason, which sweeps it along.

3.5. Therefore that first agitation of the mind which the appearance of an injury has struck into us is no more anger than the appearance of an injury is itself; that following impulse, which has not only received the appearance of an injury but approved it, is anger—a stirring of the mind that proceeds to vengeance by will and judgment. It is never in doubt that fear involves flight, anger an attack; see, then, whether you suppose that anything can be either sought or guarded against without the mind's assent.

4.1. And that you may know how passions begin, or grow, or are carried away: the first motion is involuntary, a sort of preparation for the passion and a kind of threat; the second is accompanied by a will that is not stubborn—as though I ought to be avenged, since I have been wronged, or this man ought to be punished, since he has done a crime; the third motion is now beyond control, which wishes to take vengeance not if it ought, but at all costs, and has overcome reason.

4.2. That first stroke of the mind we cannot escape by reason, just as we cannot escape even those things which, we have said, befall the body—so that another's yawn does not stir us, so that the eyes are not closed at a sudden thrust of the fingers toward them. These reason cannot conquer; habit, perhaps, and constant attention will lessen them. But that other motion, which is born of judgment, is removed by judgment.

5.1. This, too, must still be asked: whether those who commonly rage and take joy in human blood are angry when they kill men from whom they have received no injury and do not even believe themselves to have received one—such as Apollodorus or Phalaris. This is not anger, it is ferocity;

5.2. for it does not do harm because it has received an injury, but is ready, so that it may do harm, even to receive one; and it seeks blows and lacerations not for vengeance but for pleasure.

5.3. What, then, is it? The source of this evil is anger, which, when by frequent indulgence and satiety it has come to forget mercy and has cast out of the mind every human bond, passes at last into cruelty. And so such men laugh and rejoice and enjoy great pleasure, and are very far from the look of the angry, being savage at their leisure.

5.4. They say that Hannibal, when he had seen a ditch full of human blood, exclaimed: "O lovely sight!" How much fairer it would have seemed to him had it filled some river or lake! What wonder is it, if you are most of all taken by such a sight, you who were born to blood and from infancy brought up amid slaughter? Fortune will follow you, favouring your cruelty for twenty years, and will give your eyes everywhere a welcome spectacle: you will see this at Trasimene and at Cannae and at last around your own Carthage.

5.5. Volesus, lately, under the deified Augustus, when proconsul of Asia, having beheaded three hundred men in one day, walked among the corpses with a proud face, as though he had done some grand and noteworthy thing, and cried out in Greek: "O kingly deed!" What would this man have done as king? This was not anger but a greater and incurable evil.

6.1. "Virtue," he says, "as it is favourable to honourable things, so ought to be angry at base ones." What if he were to say that virtue ought to be both humble and great? Yet this is what he says, for he wishes it both exalted and abased, since joy over a right deed is bright and magnificent, while anger over another's wrongdoing is sordid and the mark of a narrow breast. And virtue will never bring itself, while it checks the vices, to imitate them;

6.2. it holds that anger itself must be chastised, since anger is in no way better—often even worse—than the faults at which it grows angry. To rejoice and be glad is proper and natural to virtue; to be angry does not befit its dignity, any more than to grieve. Yet sorrow is the companion of wrathfulness, and into this all anger relapses, whether after repentance or after a rebuff.

6.3. And if it is the wise man's part to be angry at faults, he will be more angry at greater ones and will be angry often; it follows that the wise man is not merely angry but prone to anger. Yet if we believe that neither great nor frequent anger has a place in the wise man's mind, what reason is there why we should not free him from this passion altogether?

6.4. For there can be no measure, if one must be angry in proportion to each man's deed; for he will be either unjust, if he is equally angry at unequal offences, or most wrathful, if he flares up as often as crimes deserve anger.

7.1. And what is more unworthy than that the wise man's passion should hang upon another's wickedness? Will that Socrates cease to be able to carry back home the same face he had brought from home? Yet if the wise man must grow angry at base deeds, and be roused and saddened at crimes, nothing is more wretched than the wise man; all his life will pass in wrathfulness and grief.

7.2. For what moment will there be in which he does not see things to disapprove? As often as he goes forth from his house, he will have to walk among the criminal and the avaricious and the prodigal and the shameless, men happy because of these very things; nowhere will his eyes turn but they will find something to be indignant at. He will break down, if he exacts anger from himself as often as the occasion demands.

7.3. These so many thousands hurrying to the forum at first light—what shameful suits they have, how much more shameful the advocates! One impugns his father's will, which it were better to have respected; another arrays himself against his mother; another comes as informer of a charge of which he is the more manifest guilty party; and a judge is chosen who will condemn the very things he himself has done, and a crowd stands by for a bad cause, bribed by the fine voice of the advocate.

8.1. Why pursue particulars? When you have seen the forum packed with a multitude, the enclosures full of the gathering of every throng, and that circus in which the people displays the greatest part of itself, know this—that there are just as many vices there as men.

8.2. Among those whom you see in their togas there is no peace; one is led on to another's ruin for a trifling gain; no one has profit except from another's injury; they hate the prosperous, they despise the unfortunate; they are burdened by a greater man, and burdensome to a lesser; they are goaded by opposing desires; for the sake of a slight pleasure and plunder they crave that all should be lost. Their life is no other than that in a gladiator's school—drinking and fighting with the same men.

8.3. That 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 alone they differ from dumb animals, that the latter grow tame toward those who feed them, while the madness of these devours the very ones by whom it was nursed.

9.1. The wise man will never cease to be angry, if once he begins. All things are full of crimes and vices; more is committed than can be cured by restraint. Men contend in a mighty rivalry of wickedness. Daily the lust to sin is greater, the shame less; with all regard for the better and the more just driven out, lust hurls itself wherever it pleases, and crimes are no longer furtive. They pass before our eyes, and wickedness has so far been sent forth into public, and grown so strong in all men's breasts, that innocence is not rare but nonexistent.

9.2. For have only single men, or a few, broken the law? On every side, as if at a given signal, men have risen up to confound right and wrong: "No guest is safe from his host, nor father-in-law from son-in-law; even brotherly goodwill is rare. The husband threatens the life of his wife, she of her husband; dread stepmothers mix the livid aconite; the son inquires into his father's years before their time."

9.3. And how small a part of crimes is that! He did not describe camps set against each other from one and the same womb, and the oaths of parents and children opposed; the torch set by a citizen's hand against his fatherland, and bands of hostile horsemen wheeling about to search out the hiding-places of the proscribed; the springs defiled with poisons, and pestilence wrought by hand, and the ditch dug before the eyes of besieged parents; the prisons full, and conflagrations burning whole cities, and deadly tyrannies, and the secret plots for kingdoms and for the ruin of states; and deeds counted as glorious which, so long as they can be suppressed, are crimes—rapes and defilements, with not even the mouth exempt from lust.

9.4. Add now the public perjuries of nations, and broken treaties, and whatever did not resist carried off as plunder by the stronger—frauds, thefts, deceits, repudiations, for which three forums are not enough. If you wish the wise man to be angry to the degree that the enormity of crimes demands, he must not be angry but mad.

10.1. Rather you will consider this—that we must not be angry at errors. For what, if a man were to be angry at those who in the dark set their steps none too surely? What, if at the deaf who do not hear commands? What, if at children, because, neglecting the survey of their duties, they look to play and the silly jests of their fellows? What, if you wished to be angry at those who fall ill, grow old, grow weary? Among the other discomforts of mortality is this too—the darkness of minds, and not merely the necessity of erring but the love of errors.

10.2. 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 child.

10.3. On these terms we were born—animals liable to no fewer diseases of the mind than of the body, not dull indeed nor slow, but making ill use of our keenness, examples each to other of vices. Whoever follows those before who have set out ill upon the road—why should he not have an excuse, since he went astray upon the public way?

10.4. Against individuals a general'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 unjust it is, and how dangerous, to be angry at a public vice.

10.5. Heraclitus, as often as he had gone out and seen so many living ill about him—nay, perishing ill—would weep, would pity all who met him glad and prosperous, with a mild but too feeble spirit, and he himself was among those to be lamented. Democritus, on the contrary, they say was never in public without laughing; so little did anything that men did in earnest seem to him serious. Where in this is there room for anger? All things must be either laughed at or wept over.

10.6. The wise man will not be angry at those who sin. Why? Because he knows that no one is born wise but becomes so, knows that in all the ages the very fewest turn out wise, because he holds the condition of human life thoroughly in view; and no man of sound mind grows angry at nature. For what, if he should wish to marvel that fruit does not hang on the woodland brambles? What, if he should marvel that the thorn-thickets and briars are not filled with some useful crop? No one is angry where nature defends the fault.

10.7. The wise man, therefore, calm and fair toward errors, no enemy but a corrector of sinners, goes forth each day in this spirit: "Many men addicted to wine will meet me, many lustful, many ungrateful, many avaricious, many driven by the furies of ambition." All these he will look upon as kindly as a physician looks upon his sick.

10.8. Does the man whose ship is drawing much water on every side through its loosened seams grow angry at the sailors and at the ship itself? Rather he sets to and shuts out one wave, bails out another, stops up the open holes, and with continuous toil resists those hidden ones that draw the bilge-water from concealment; nor does he stop because, as fast as it is drawn out, more wells up. A steady effort is needed against evils that are continuous and fertile—not that they may cease, but that they may not prevail.

11.1. "Anger is useful," he says, "because it escapes contempt, because it terrifies the wicked." First, anger, if it is as strong as it threatens, is for that very reason both dreadful and hated; but it is more dangerous to be feared than to be despised. If, however, it is without strength, it is the more exposed to contempt and does not escape derision; for what is more chilling than wrathfulness raising a useless uproar?

11.2. Next, some things are not preferable merely because they are more dreadful, and I would not have this said to the wise man: "That which is the beast's weapon is the wise man's too—to be feared." What? Is not a fever feared, the gout, a malignant ulcer? Is there therefore anything good in these? Or are they on the contrary all despised and foul and base, and feared for that very reason? So anger in itself is deformed and least to be dreaded, yet is feared by the many, as an ugly mask is feared by children.

11.3. What of the fact that fear always recoils upon its authors, and that no one is feared who is himself secure? Let that line of Laberius come to your mind here, which, spoken in the theatre in the midst of the civil war, turned the whole people upon him no otherwise than if the voice of public feeling had been uttered: "He must needs fear many whom many fear."

11.4. So nature has ordained, that whatever is great through another's fear is not free from its own. How fearful are the hearts of lions at the lightest sounds! A shadow, a voice, an unfamiliar smell sets the fiercest beasts in a turmoil. Whatever frightens others trembles itself. There is no reason, therefore, why any wise man should crave to be feared, nor should he think anger a great thing because it is an object of dread, since indeed even the most despised things are feared—poisons and pestilent bones and bites.

11.5. Nor is it strange, since the greatest herds of beasts are held in check by a cord set with feathers and driven into the toils—the thing being named "the scarecrow" from its very effect; for empty things are a terror to the empty-minded. The motion of a chariot and the turning face of the wheels drive lions back into the cage; the grunting of a pig terrifies elephants.

11.6. So, then, anger is feared as a shadow by children, as a red feather by beasts. It has in itself nothing firm or strong, but only stirs light minds.

12.1. "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 avoid being cold, though by the nature of things it be winter, and avoid being hot, though it be the summer months. Either by the advantage of his place he is safe against the harshness of the season, or by the endurance of his body he has overcome the sense of both. Next, turn that about:

12.2. you must remove virtue from the mind before you take in wrathfulness, since vices do not consort with virtues, and no one can at the same time be both angry and a good man, any more than both sick and sound.

12.3. "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 difficult and hard that the human mind cannot conquer it and bring it into familiarity by constant practice, and there are no passions so wild and their own masters that they cannot be subdued by discipline.

12.4. Whatever the mind has commanded itself, it has obtained. Some have so far succeeded as never to laugh; some have forbidden their bodies wine, others sexual love, others all moisture; another, content with brief sleep, prolonged an untiring wakefulness; men have learned to run on the slenderest and slanting ropes, to carry huge burdens scarcely to be borne by human strength, to plunge to immense depths and to endure the seas without any turn for breathing.

12.5. There are a thousand other things in which persistence has surmounted every obstacle and shown that nothing is difficult for which the mind itself has prescribed itself endurance. To those whom I mentioned a little before, there was either no reward at all for so persistent an effort, or none worthy of it—for what grand thing does that man attain who has practised walking on stretched ropes? who puts his neck under a huge load? who does not let his eyes droop in sleep? who penetrates to the bottom of the sea?—and yet their toil arrived at the end of its work for no great wage.

12.6. Shall we not call upon our endurance, we who are awaited by so great a reward—the unshaken tranquillity of a happy mind? How great a thing it is to escape that greatest evil, anger, and with it madness, savagery, cruelty, frenzy, and the other passions that are anger's companions!

13.1. There is no reason for us to seek a defence for ourselves and an excused licence, saying either that it is useful or that it is unavoidable; for to what vice, after all, has an advocate been wanting? There is no reason for you to say it cannot be cut out; we are sick with curable evils, and Nature herself, having begotten us for the right, helps us if we wish to be amended. Nor, as some have thought, is the road to the virtues steep and rough; they are approached on level ground. I come to you as the sponsor of no empty thing.

13.2. Easy is the way to the happy life; only enter upon it under good auspices and with the gods themselves graciously helping. It is far more difficult to do the things you do. What is more at leisure than the mind's repose, what more laborious than anger? What more relaxed than mercy, what more taken up with business than cruelty? Chastity is at ease, lust is most fully occupied. In short, the guarding of all the virtues is easy, the vices are cultivated at great cost.

13.3. Anger ought to be removed—this even those in part confess who say it should be diminished; let it be wholly dismissed, it will be of no use. Without it crimes will be removed more easily and more rightly, the wicked will be punished and led over into something better. The wise man will accomplish everything he ought without the ministry of any evil thing, and will mix in nothing whose measure he must too anxiously watch.

14.1. Never, therefore, is wrathfulness to be admitted; sometimes it is to be feigned, if the sluggish minds of the hearers must be roused, just as we rouse horses that rise slowly to the course by goads and torches put beneath them. Sometimes fear must be struck into those with whom reason does not avail; but to be angry is no more useful than to grieve, than to fear. "What then?

14.2. Do there not arise occasions that provoke anger?" But then most of all must hands be set against it. Nor is it hard to conquer the mind, since even athletes, busied with the basest part of themselves, yet bear blows and pains in order to exhaust the striker's strength, and strike not when anger urges, but when opportunity does.

14.3. They say that Pyrrhus, the greatest teacher of the gymnastic contest, was wont to charge those whom he trained not to grow angry; for anger disturbs the art and looks only to where it may do harm. So often reason counsels patience, anger vengeance, and we who could have done with the first evils plunge into greater ones.

14.4. Some men the affront of a single word, borne with no even temper, has flung into exile, and those who would not bear a slight injury in silence have been overwhelmed with the gravest evils, and, indignant that something should be subtracted from their fullest liberty, have drawn upon themselves the slave's yoke.

15.1. "That you may know," he says, "that anger has in it something noble, you will see that free nations, which are the most prone to anger, are such as the Germans and Scythians." This happens because natures strong and solid, before they are softened by discipline, are inclined to anger. For certain things are born only in the better natures, just as strong saplings are produced by a rich though neglected soil, and the forest of fertile ground is tall.

15.2. And so natures strong by nature bear wrathfulness, and, being fiery and ardent, take in nothing thin and slight; but their vigour is imperfect, as is that of all things which rise without art by the mere benefit of nature itself; and unless they are quickly subdued, the things that were fit for courage grow accustomed to recklessness and rashness. What?

15.3. Are not lighter vices joined to gentler minds—as pity and love and modesty? And so I will often show you good native quality even by its own faults; yet they are not therefore no vices, if they are indications of a better nature.

15.4. Next, all those nations free in their ferocity, after the manner of lions and wolves, as they cannot serve, so neither can they rule; for they have not the force of a human disposition but of a wild and intractable one; and no one can govern who cannot also be governed.

15.5. And so empires have for the most part rested with those peoples who enjoy a milder sky. In those that incline toward the cold and the north the dispositions are untamed, "and most like to their own sky," as the poet says.

16.1. "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 in whose place impulse stands for reason; in man reason stands in the place of impulse. But not even to all of them does the same thing profit; wrathfulness aids the lion, fear the stag, swiftness of attack the hawk, flight the dove.

16.2. What of the fact that this is not even true—that the best animals are the most prone to anger? I should think the wild beasts that get their food by rapine the better for being the more enraged; I would praise the patience of oxen and of horses obedient to the rein. But what reason is there for you to recall man to such unhappy models, when you have the universe and god, whom alone of all animals man alone understands so as to imitate him alone? "Of all men," he says, "the wrathful are held the most guileless."

16.3. For they are compared with the fraudulent and crafty, and seem guileless because they are open. These men I would call not guileless but incautious; we give this name to the foolish, the dissolute, and to spendthrifts, and to all who are too little cunning in their vices.

17.1. "An orator," he says, "is sometimes better for being angry." Rather, for having imitated the angry man; for actors too, in their delivery, move the people not by being angry but by playing the angry man well; and so before judges and in the assembly and wherever the minds of others must be swayed to our will, we shall ourselves feign now anger, now fear, now pity, that we may strike these into others, and often the imitation of passions has effected what real passions would not have effected. "That mind," he says, "is languid which is without anger." True, if it has nothing stronger than anger.

17.2. One ought to be neither robber nor prey, neither merciful nor cruel; the mind of the one is too soft, of the other too hard. Let the wise man be temperate, and for doing things more bravely let him bring to bear not anger but force.

18.1. Since we have treated the questions raised about anger, let us come to its remedies. There are two, as I think: that we may not fall into anger, and that we may not do wrong in anger. As in the care of bodies some precepts are about preserving health, others about restoring it, so we must repel anger in one way and check it in another. To avoid it, certain precepts pertaining to the whole of life will be given; these will be divided into those for upbringing and those for the times that follow.

18.2. Upbringing demands the greatest diligence, and one that will profit most; for it is easy to mould minds while still tender, but hard to cut back vices that have grown up with us.

19.1. The nature most apt for wrathfulness is the fiery mind. For since the elements are four—fire, water, air, earth—their powers correspond to these: the hot, the cold, the dry, and the moist. The mixture of the elements, accordingly, produces the varieties of places and of animals and of bodies and of characters, and dispositions incline more in some one direction according as the greater force of some one element has abounded. Hence we call certain regions moist and dry and hot and cold. The same distinctions exist among animals and men;

19.2. it matters how much of the moist and the hot each contains; the portion of that element which prevails in a man will determine his character. A fiery nature of mind will make men wrathful, for fire is active and persistent; a mixture of the cold makes them timid, for cold is sluggish and contracted.

19.3. And so some of our school hold that anger is set in motion in the breast when the blood about the heart boils; and there is no other reason why this should be assigned as the seat of anger rather than another than that in the whole body the breast is the hottest part.

19.4. In those who have more of the moist, anger grows little by little, because the heat in them is not ready but is acquired by motion; and so the angers of children and women are keen rather than heavy, and lighter while they begin. In dry ages anger is vehement and robust, but without increase, adding little to itself, because cold follows upon the heat that is about to decline. Old men are difficult and querulous, as are the sick and convalescent and those whose heat has been drained either by weariness or by loss of blood;

19.5. in the same case are those wasted by thirst and hunger and those whose body is bloodless and ill and feebly nourished and failing. Wine kindles anger, because it increases heat; according to each man's nature, some boil over when drunk, some when merely tipsy. And there is no other reason why the fair-haired and the ruddy are the most prone to anger, except that their natural colour is such as is wont to come upon the rest in the midst of anger; for their blood is mobile and restless.

20.1. But just as nature makes some prone to anger, so many causes occur which can do the same as nature. Disease or bodily injury has brought some to this; toil or continual sleeplessness and anxious nights, longings and loves, have brought others; whatever else has harmed either body or mind makes the ailing mind ready for complaints.

20.2. But all these are beginnings and causes; habit has the greatest power, and if it is heavy it nourishes the vice. To change one's nature, indeed, is hard, nor is it permitted to alter the elements once mingled at birth; but it has profited to know this much—that you should withhold wine from heated dispositions, which Plato thinks must be denied to children, and forbids that fire be kindled with fire. They must not even be filled with food; for their bodies will be distended, and their minds will swell along with the body.

20.3. Let toil exercise them short of weariness, that the heat may be lessened, not consumed, and that excessive ardour may boil away. Games too will profit; for moderate pleasure relaxes the mind and tempers it.

20.4. From the moister and drier and colder there is no danger of anger, but the more cowardly vices are to be feared—dread and peevishness and despair and suspicions. Such dispositions, therefore, must be lifted up and cherished and called forth into cheerfulness. And because for some, against anger, for others, against sorrow, different remedies must be used—and these to be cured by means not merely unlike but contrary—we shall always meet whatever has grown excessive.

21.1. It will profit most, I say, for boys to be soundly trained at once; but the guidance is difficult, because we must take pains neither to nourish anger in them nor to blunt their natural quality.

21.2. The matter needs careful watching; for each thing—both that which must be lifted up and that which must be kept down—is nourished by like means, and like things easily deceive even one who is attentive.

21.3. The spirit grows by licence, is diminished by servitude; it rises if it is praised and brought to a good hope of itself, but these same things breed insolence and wrathfulness; and so the boy must be guided between the two, that we use now the rein, now the goad.

21.4. Let him suffer nothing humble, nothing servile; let it never be necessary for him to beg as a suppliant, nor profitable to have begged; rather let it be granted to his cause and to his past deeds and to good promises for the future.

21.5. In contests with his equals let us suffer him neither to be beaten nor to grow angry; let us take care that he be on friendly terms with those with whom he is wont to compete, that in the contest he may grow accustomed to wish not to harm but to win; as often as he has prevailed and done something worthy of praise, let us suffer him to be lifted up but not to exult, for joy is followed by exultation, exultation by swelling and an excessive estimate of self.

21.6. We shall give him some relaxation, but not loosen him into idleness and ease, and shall keep him far from the touch of luxuries; for nothing makes men wrathful so much as a soft and indulgent upbringing. Therefore, the more an only child is indulged, the more a ward is allowed, the more corrupt his mind is. He will not stand up to affronts who has never been denied anything, whose tears an anxious mother has always wiped away, for whom satisfaction has always been exacted of his tutor.

21.7. Do you not see how a greater anger attends each greater fortune? It appears most of all in the rich and the noble and the magistrates, when whatever was light and empty in the mind has been lifted up by a favouring breeze. Prosperity nourishes wrathfulness, when a crowd of flatterers has stood about proud ears: "Should that fellow answer you? You do not measure yourself by your rank; you throw yourself away"—and other things which minds scarcely sound and well-founded from the start have hardly resisted.

21.8. Far, therefore, must flattery be removed from boyhood; let the boy hear the truth. And let him sometimes fear, always feel awe, rise up before his elders. Let him obtain nothing through wrathfulness; let what was denied him while weeping be offered him when quiet. And let him have his parents' riches in his sight, not in his use.

21.9. Let his ill deeds be reproached to him. It will pertain to the matter that the teachers and tutors given to boys be of a calm temper. Everything that is tender attaches itself to those nearest and grows into their likeness; the characters of nurses and tutors soon reappear in those of young men.

21.10. A boy brought up in Plato's house, when he had been brought back to his parents and saw his father shouting, said: "I never saw this in Plato's house." I doubt not that he sooner imitated his father than Plato.

21.11. Above all let his fare be plain and his clothing not costly, and let his style of living be like that of his equals. He will not grow angry at being compared with someone if from the start you make him the equal of many.

22.1. But these things pertain to our children; in ourselves, indeed, the lot of birth and our upbringing have no longer room for fault—nor yet for precept; what follows must be set in order. Against the first causes, therefore, we ought to fight.

22.2. Now the cause of wrathfulness is the belief that one has been injured, which must not be readily believed. Not even to the open and manifest must we at once assent; for certain false things bear the appearance of truth.

22.3. Time must always be given; the day brings out the truth. Let not our ears be easy to accusers; let this fault of human nature be suspect and known to us—that what we hear unwillingly we readily believe, and that, before we judge, we grow angry.

22.4. What of the fact that we are driven not only by accusations but by suspicions, and, having put the worse interpretation upon another's look or smile, grow angry at the innocent? And so the cause of the absent must be pleaded against ourselves, and anger held in suspense; for a deferred punishment can still be exacted, but one exacted cannot be recalled.

23.1. Well known is that tyrant-slayer who, caught with his work unfinished and tortured by Hippias to make him reveal his accomplices, named those of the tyrant's friends standing about whose safety he knew was dearest to him; and when the tyrant had ordered them to be killed one by one as they were named, and asked whether any survived, "You," he said, "alone; for I have left no one else to whom you are dear." Anger brought it about that the tyrant lent his hands to the tyrant-slayer and cut down his own guards with his own sword.

23.2. How much more high-spirited was Alexander! When he had read his mother's letter, in which he was warned to beware of poison from the physician Philip, he took the draught he had been given and, undeterred, drank it. He trusted his own judgment of his friend the more.

23.3. He was worthy to have an innocent friend, worthy to make one! This I praise the more in Alexander because no one was so liable to anger; and the rarer self-restraint is in kings, the more it is to be praised.

23.4. This too was done by that Gaius Caesar who used his victory in the civil war most mercifully; when he had seized the caskets of letters sent to Gnaeus Pompeius 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 moderation, yet he preferred not to be able to be angry at all; he thought the most welcome kind of pardon was not to know what each man had done amiss.

24.1. Credulity does the most harm. Often we ought not even to listen, since in certain matters it is better to be deceived than to be distrustful. Suspicion and conjecture, those most deceptive goads, must be removed from the mind. "That man greeted me too coldly; that one did not cling to my kiss; that one cut short the conversation he had begun; that one did not invite me to dinner; that one's face seemed turned away." Argument will not be wanting to suspicion.

24.2. What is needed is straightforwardness and a kindly estimate of things. Let us believe nothing but what strikes the eyes and is manifest, and as often as our suspicion has proved empty, let us rebuke our credulity; for this chastisement will produce the habit of not believing readily.

25.1. Hence this also follows—that we should not be embittered by the smallest and basest things. The slave is none too nimble, or the water too tepid for one about to drink, or the couch disordered, or the table too carelessly laid—to be roused at such things is madness. Sick and of unhappy health is the man whom a slight breeze chills, his eyes are afflicted whom a white garment dazzles, dissolved by luxuries is he whose side aches at another's toil.

25.2. They say there was a certain Mindyrides, of the city of the Sybarites, who, when he had seen a man digging and raising his mattock rather high, complained that he was made weary, and forbade the man to do that work in his sight; the same man complained that he was the worse for having lain upon rose-leaves that were folded double.

25.3. When pleasures have corrupted mind and body alike, nothing seems endurable—not because the things are hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For what is there in another's cough, or sneeze, or a fly too carelessly driven off, or a dog that has crossed one's path, or a key slipped from the hands of a careless slave, to drive a man to fury?

25.4. Will that man bear with an even mind the railing of the citizenry and the abuse heaped on him in assembly or senate-house, whose ears are offended by the scraping of a dragged bench? Will he endure hunger and the thirst of a summer campaign who grows angry at a slave for mixing his snow-water badly? Nothing, therefore, nourishes wrathfulness more than luxury, intemperate and impatient; the mind must be roughly handled, that it may feel no blow but a heavy one.

26.1. We grow angry either at those from whom we could not even have received an injury, or at those from whom we could.

26.2. Of the former, some are without feeling—like a book, which, written in too small a hand, we have often thrown aside, or torn when it was full of errors; like garments, which, because they displeased us, we have rent. How foolish it is to be angry at these things, which have neither deserved our anger nor feel it!

26.3. "But it is those who made them, of course, who offend us." First, often we grow angry before we distinguish these in our minds. Next, perhaps the craftsmen themselves will offer just excuses. One could not do better than he did, and did not learn his trade too poorly for the purpose of insulting you; another did not act in order to offend you. Lastly, what is more demented than to pour out upon things a bile gathered against men?

26.4. Yet as it is the part of a madman to be angry at things which lack life, so too at dumb animals, which do us no injury, because they cannot wish to; for there is no injury except such as proceeds from design. They can, then, harm us, like iron or a stone, but they cannot do an injury.

26.5. Yet some think themselves despised when the same horses are obedient to one rider and stubborn to another, as though by deliberate judgment, and not by habit and the art of handling, certain creatures were more submissive to some men than to others.

26.6. And as it is foolish to be angry at these, so too at children, and at those not far removed from children in understanding; for all these faults, before a fair judge, count their want of understanding as innocence.

27.1. There are some things which cannot do harm and have no power but a beneficent and salutary one—like the immortal gods, who neither will to do harm nor can; for their nature is mild and peaceable, as far removed from another's injury as from their own.

27.2. Demented, therefore, and ignorant of the truth, are those who charge them with the savagery of the sea, with excessive rains, with the obstinacy of winter, when meanwhile none of these things that harm or profit us is directed against us in particular. For we are not the reason why the universe brings round winter and summer; these have their own laws, by which the divine things are exercised. We esteem ourselves too highly, if we seem to ourselves worthy that for our sake such great things should be set in motion. None of these things, then, is done for our injury; nay, on the contrary, there is nothing of them that is not done for our safety.

27.3. We have said that there are some things which cannot do harm, and some which will not. Among these will be good magistrates and parents and teachers and judges, whose chastisement is to be taken as one takes the surgeon's knife, and abstinence, and other things that torment in order to profit.

27.4. We have been visited with a penalty; let it occur to us not only what we suffer, but what we have done; let us be sent into a deliberation about our own life; if only we are willing to tell ourselves the truth, we shall set a higher value on our adversary's case.

28.1. 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 from this arises the greatest indignation: "I have done no wrong" and "I have done nothing." Rather, you confess nothing! We are indignant at being chastised by some warning or restraint, when at that very moment we are doing wrong, in that we add to our misdeeds arrogance and defiance.

28.2. Who is there who professes himself innocent under all laws? Grant that this is so—how narrow an innocence it is, to be good according to the law! How much wider does the rule of duties extend than that of right! How many things piety, humanity, generosity, justice, good faith demand, all of which are outside the public statutes! But not even to that narrowest formula of innocence can we hold ourselves true.

28.3. Some things we have done, others we have thought, others we have wished, others we have favoured; in some we are innocent only because we did not succeed. Thinking on this, let us be more fair to the offending, let us believe those who reproach us;

28.4. and above all let us not be angry at the good (for at whom shall we not be angry, if even at the good?), least of all at the gods; for it is not by their force but by the law of mortality that we suffer whatever misfortune befalls. "But diseases and pains assail us." One must, after all, pay something, having drawn the lot of a crumbling dwelling. Someone will be said to have spoken ill of you: consider whether you did so first, consider of how many men you speak.

28.5. Let us reflect, I say, that some men do us no injury but only repay one, others act on our behalf, others act under compulsion, others in ignorance, and that even those who act willingly and knowingly do not, out of our injury, seek the injury itself: either a man has slipped through the sweetness of his wit, or he has done something not to harm us, but because he himself could not attain his end unless he thrust us aside; often flattery, while it fawns, gives offence.

28.6. Whoever will turn his mind back to himself—how often he himself has fallen under a false suspicion, how many of his own good services fortune has clothed with the appearance of injury, how many men 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 that offends him: "This I too have committed."

28.7. But where will you find so fair a judge? He who covets every man's wife, and thinks it cause enough for loving that she is another's, is the same who will not have his own wife looked at; and the perfidious man is the most relentless exactor of good faith, and the perjurer himself pursues lies, and the false accuser bears it most ill that a suit is brought against him; he who has not spared his own chastity will not have the chastity of his little slaves assailed. Others' vices we keep before our eyes; our own are behind our back;

28.8. hence it is that a father worse than his son chastises his son's untimely revels, and that he pardons nothing of another's luxury who has denied nothing of his own, and a tyrant grows angry at a murderer, and a temple-robber punishes thefts. The greater part of men are angry not at the sins but at the sinners. Regard for ourselves will make us more moderate, if we take counsel with ourselves: "Have we ourselves not committed something of the kind? Have we not gone astray in this way? Is it expedient for us to condemn these things?"

29.1. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Ask this of it at the outset—not that it may pardon, but that it may judge: its first onsets are heavy; it will subside, if it waits. And do not try to remove the whole of it at once; the whole will be conquered while it is plucked away piecemeal.

29.2. Of the things that offend us, some are reported to us, others we ourselves hear or see. Of those that are told us, we ought not to believe quickly; many lie in order to deceive, many because they have been deceived. One courts favour by accusation and feigns an injury, that he may seem to have grieved that it was done; there is the malignant man who would pull apart well-knit friendships; there is the busybody, the scandalmonger, who longs to watch the games and from a distance, in safety, looks on at those he has set together by the ears.

29.3. If you were going to judge of a trifling sum of money, the matter would not be proved to you without a witness, a witness would not avail without an oath, you would grant a hearing to both parties, grant time, hear more than once; for the truth shines out the more, the oftener it comes to hand. Do you condemn a friend on the spot? Before you hear, before you question, before he is even allowed to know his accuser or the charge, do you grow angry? Why, have you already, already, heard what was said on both sides?

29.4. This very man who brought the report to you will cease to speak, if he is to prove it. "There is no reason," he says, "for you to drag me forth; if I am produced, I shall deny it; otherwise I will never tell you anything again." At one and the same time he incites and withdraws himself from the contest and the fight. He who will tell you nothing except in secret all but tells you nothing. What is more unjust than to believe in secret and be angry openly?

30.1. Of some things we are ourselves the witnesses; in these we shall examine the nature and the will of those who do them. He is a child: let it be granted to his age, he does not know whether he is doing wrong. He is your father: either he has done so much for you that he has a right even to do you injury, or perhaps this very thing at which we are offended is a service of his. It is a woman: she errs. He was commanded: who but an unjust man is angry at necessity? He has been wronged: it is no injury to suffer what you yourself did first. He is a judge: trust his sentence more than your own. He is a king: if he punishes the guilty, yield to justice; if the innocent, yield to fortune.

30.2. 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 over more lightly those who bear it. It is a god: you waste your effort as much when you are angry at him as when you pray that he be angry at another. He is a good man who has done the injury: do not believe it. He is a bad one: do not wonder; he will pay to another the penalty he owes to you, and already he has paid it to himself, in that he has sinned.

31.1. There are two things, as I have said, that rouse wrathfulness: 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 I must speak. Men judge some things unjust because they ought not to have suffered them, others because they had not expected them. We think those things undeserved which are unforeseen;

31.2. and so those things move us most which have happened against hope and expectation, and there is no other reason why in domestic matters the smallest things offend, while in friends we call mere negligence an injury.

31.3. "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 effect of an excessive love of ourselves. We judge that we ought to be inviolate even to our enemies; each man has within him the spirit of a king, so that he would have licence granted to himself but not against himself.

31.4. And so it is either insolence that makes us wrathful, or ignorance of things; for what wonder is it that the bad do bad deeds? What is new in 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 general: "I did not think"; I think it the most shameful for a man. Think of everything, expect everything; even in good characters something rather harsh will appear.

31.5. Human nature breeds treacherous minds, breeds ungrateful ones, breeds covetous, breeds impious. When you judge of one man's character, think of the public. Where you most rejoice, you will most fear. Where all things seem tranquil to you, there things that will harm are not absent but at rest. Always suppose that something will happen to offend you. The pilot never spreads all his sails so securely that he does not have his tackle set ready to be hauled in.

31.6. Before all things consider this—that the power of doing harm is foul and abominable and utterly alien to man, by whose kindness even savage things grow tame. Look at the elephants' necks bowed to the yoke, the bulls' backs trodden with impunity by boys and women alike as they leap about, the serpents gliding with harmless slither among the cups and in the bosom, the placid mouths of bears and lions within the house, and the wild beasts fawning on those who handle them; you will be ashamed to have exchanged characters with the animals. It is a sin to harm one's country;

31.7. therefore a fellow citizen too, for he is a part of one's country—the parts are sacred if the whole is venerable—and therefore a man too, for he is a citizen with you in a greater city. What if the hands wished to harm the feet, the eyes the hands? As all the members agree among themselves, because it is in the interest of the whole that each be preserved, so men will spare individuals, because they were born for society, and society cannot be kept safe except by the guardianship and love of its parts.

31.8. We would not even strike down vipers and water-snakes and whatever harms by bite or sting, if for the future we could tame them or render them no danger to us or others. Therefore neither will we harm a man because he has sinned, but that he may not sin, and never will punishment look to the past but to the future; for it is not angry, but takes precaution. For if anyone of crooked and malicious disposition must be punished, punishment will spare no one.

32.1. "But anger has some pleasure, and it is sweet to repay pain." By no means; for it is not as in benefits, where it is honourable to repay services with services, so honourable to repay injuries with injuries. In the one it is shameful to be outdone, in the other to outdo. "Vengeance" is an inhuman word, and yet received as just; and retaliation differs little except in order; he who returns pain sins only with more excuse.

32.2. Someone, not knowing him, struck Marcus Cato unawares in the bath; for who would have done him an injury knowingly? Afterwards, when the man was making amends, Cato said: "I do not remember being struck." He thought it better not to acknowledge it than to avenge it.

32.3. "Was nothing," you say, "done to that man after such insolence?" Rather much good: he began to know Cato. It is the mark of a great mind to despise injuries; the most insulting kind of vengeance is for the offender not to have been thought worthy that vengeance should be exacted from him. Many have driven slight injuries the deeper into themselves by avenging them. He is great and noble who, after the manner of a great beast, hears unmoved the barking of little dogs.

33.1. "We shall be the less despised," he says, "if we avenge an injury." If we come to it as to a remedy, let us come without anger, not as though it were sweet to be avenged, but as though it were useful; yet 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. This is the worst trait of minds made insolent by great fortune: they hate those whom they have injured.

33.2. 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 at court—old age—he said: "By receiving injuries and giving thanks." Often it is so far from expedient to avenge an injury that it is not even expedient to admit it.

33.3. Gaius Caesar, having held in custody the son of Pastor, a distinguished Roman knight, offended at his elegance and his too carefully arranged hair, when the father begged that he grant him his son's life, ordered him at once to be led off to execution, as if reminded of the punishment; yet, that he might not do everything inhumanely toward the father, he invited him to dinner that very day. Pastor came, with a face that reproached nothing.

33.4. Caesar drank to him a measure and set a guard over him; the wretched man held out, no otherwise than if he were drinking his son's blood. He sent him perfume and garlands and bade them watch whether he took them; he took them. On that day, on which he had buried his son—nay, on which he had not buried him—he reclined as the hundredth guest, and the gouty old man drained draughts scarcely seemly even on the birthdays of his children, while meanwhile he let fall no tear, suffered no grief to break out by any sign; he dined as though he had pleaded successfully for his son.

33.5. Do you ask why? He had another. What of that Priam? Did he not dissemble his anger and embrace the king's knees, and carry to his lips the murderous hand drenched with his son's blood, and dine? But yet without perfume, without garlands, and his most savage enemy urged him with many comforts to take food, not to drain huge cups with a guard set over his head.

33.6. You would have despised the Roman father if he had feared for himself; as it is, filial love checked his anger. He was worthy to be allowed to withdraw from the banquet to gather his son's bones; not even this did the kindly and courteous youth, meanwhile, permit; he kept provoking the old man with frequent toasts, urging him to let his care be soothed; the old man, on the contrary, showed himself glad and forgetful of what had been done that day. His other son would have perished, if the guest had not pleased the executioner.

34.1. Anger, therefore, must be abstained from, whether he who is to be provoked is your equal, your superior, or your inferior. To contend with an equal is hazardous, with a superior mad, with an inferior degrading. It is the part of a petty and wretched man to bite back the one who bites him. Mice and ants, if you put your hand to them, turn their mouths toward it; weak things think themselves injured if they are touched.

34.2. It will make us gentler if we consider what the man at whom we are angry has at some time done for us, and the offence will be redeemed by his services. Let this too occur to us—how much credit the repute of clemency will bring us, how many useful friends pardon has made.

34.3. That we should not be angry at the children of our enemies and foes—it is among the instances of Sulla's cruelty that he debarred the children of the proscribed from public life. Nothing is more unjust than that anyone should be made heir to his father's hatred.

34.4. Let us consider, as often as we are hard to forgive, whether it is expedient for us that all men be inexorable. How often has the man who refused pardon sought it! How often has one fallen at the feet of him whom he had thrust from his own! What is more glorious than to change anger into friendship? What more faithful allies has the Roman people than those it once had as its most stubborn enemies? What empire would there be today, if a wholesome foresight had not mingled the conquered with the conquerors?

34.5. Someone will grow angry; do you, on the contrary, provoke him with kindnesses. The feud falls at once when deserted by one party; none but matched fighters fight. But if anger contends on both sides, they clash; the better is he who first drew back his foot; the conqueror is the one who has been conquered. He struck you; withdraw; for by striking back you will give both the opportunity of striking more often and an excuse; you will not be able to wrench yourself away when you wish.

35.1. Would anyone wish to strike an enemy so hard as to leave his hand in the wound and be unable to recall himself from the blow? Yet anger is such a weapon; it is scarcely drawn back. We look out for ourselves weapons that are easily handled, a sword convenient and manageable; shall we not avoid those impulses of the mind that are heavy and burdensome and irrevocable?

35.2. That swiftness alone pleases which, when bidden, halts in its tracks and does not run on beyond what was appointed, and can be turned and brought back from a run to a walk; we know the sinews are diseased when they move against our will; he is an old man or one of infirm body who runs when he wishes to walk. Let us count those motions of the mind the most sound and strong which will go at our discretion, and not be carried on at their own.

35.3. Yet nothing will profit so much as to look first at the deformity of the thing, then at its danger. There is no passion whose face is more disturbed; it has befouled the fairest features, made grim the most tranquil countenances; all comeliness forsakes the angry, and whether their dress was arranged to rule, they will drag their garment and pour out all care of themselves, or whether their hair, by nature or by art, lay not ungracefully, it bristles up with the mind; the veins swell; the breast is shaken by quickened breath; a frenzied bursting-forth of the voice distends the throat; then the limbs tremble, the hands are restless, the whole body tosses.

35.4. What do you think the mind is within, whose image without is so foul? How much more terrible is the face within the breast, the breath keener, the impulse more intense, ready to burst itself unless it bursts forth!

35.5. Such as are the looks of enemies, or of beasts dripping with slaughter or going to the slaughter; such as the poets have fashioned the monsters of the underworld, girt with serpents and breathing fire; such as the most hideous of the powers below come forth to stir up wars and divide discord among the peoples and tear peace asunder—such let us picture anger to ourselves: its eyes ablaze with flame, loud with hiss and bellow and groan and shriek and any voice more hateful than these, shaking its weapons in either hand (for it has no care to cover itself), grim and bloodstained and scarred and livid with its own blows, its gait frenzied, wrapped in a thick darkness, rushing on, laying waste and putting to flight, labouring under the hatred of all, and most of all of itself, longing, if it cannot harm otherwise, to bring down earth, seas, and sky—hostile and hateful alike.

35.6. Or, if you please, let it be such as it is in our own bards: "Bellona, brandishing the bloody scourge in her right hand," or "Discord goes rejoicing in her rent robe," or whatever more dreadful aspect of a dreadful passion can be devised.

36.1. To some, as Sextius says, it has profited, when angry, to look in a mirror; so great a change in themselves disturbed them; brought, as it were, into the presence of the thing, they did not recognize themselves. And how small a part of the true deformity did that image cast back by the mirror render?

36.2. If the mind could be displayed and could shine through in any material, it would confound us as we gazed—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 naked?

36.3. You will not believe that anyone was ever deterred from 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 one—such as they even wish to seem.

36.4. Rather is this to be considered—at how many men anger has done harm of itself. Some, through excessive ardour, have burst their veins, and a shout raised beyond their strength has brought up blood, and a humour driven too violently into the eyes has flooded the keenness of their sight, and the sick have relapsed into their diseases. There is no quicker road to madness.

36.5. Many, therefore, have prolonged the frenzy of anger and never recovered the mind they had driven out. Frenzy drove Ajax to death, anger to frenzy. They call down death on their children, want on themselves, ruin on their house, and deny that they are angry, no less than madmen deny that they are mad. Enemies to their dearest friends, to be shunned by those most dear, mindful of the laws only where they do harm, set in motion by the smallest things, not easy to approach by word or service, they do everything by violence, ready both to fight with the sword and to fall upon it.

36.6. For the greatest evil has seized them, one surpassing all vices. Other vices enter little by little; the force of this 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 slain; avarice, that hardest of evils and least pliant, anger has trampled, driving it to scatter its own wealth and to set fire to the house and to the goods gathered into one place. What? Has not the ambitious man cast away the marks of office he had prized so highly, and refused an honour offered him? There is no passion over which anger does not hold sway.