Book 3

1.1. What you have most desired, Novatus, we shall now attempt to do—to cut anger out of the mind, or at least to rein it in and check its impulses. This is to be done sometimes openly and frankly, where the lesser force of the evil allows it, sometimes covertly, where it burns too fiercely and is exasperated and grows at every obstacle; it matters how great and how unimpaired its strength is, whether it is to be beaten back and driven into retreat, or whether we ought to yield to it while the first storm rages itself out, lest it carry off the very remedies along with it.

1.2. The plan must be adopted according to each man's character; for some are conquered by entreaties; some insult and press upon those who give way, whom we shall appease by frightening them; some a rebuke, some a confession, some shame has cast down from their undertaking, some delay—a slow remedy for a headlong evil, to which we must descend last of all.

1.3. For the other passions admit of postponement and can be cured more slowly, but the violence of this one, roused and sweeping itself along, does not advance little by little but is entire from the moment it begins; nor, like the other vices, does it merely disturb the mind, but it carries it off and drives it on, no longer master of itself, craving even the common ruin, and rages not only against those it has marked out, but against whatever crosses its path along the way. The other vices push the mind; anger hurls it headlong.

1.4. Even if one is not permitted to stand against one's own passions, yet at least one is permitted to halt the passions themselves; but this one, no otherwise than lightning-bolts and gales and whatever else is irrevocable because it does not move but falls, strains its force more and more. Other vices fall away from reason; this one from sanity itself.

1.5. Others have gentle approaches and growths that elude notice; into anger the mind is thrown headlong. There is, therefore, nothing that presses on more frantically, more bent upon its own strength, and—whether it has succeeded—prouder, or—whether it is baffled—madder; not even by a repulse is it driven into weariness, but when fortune has withdrawn its adversary, it turns its teeth upon itself. Nor does it matter how small the thing from which it arose; for from the slightest causes it grows to the greatest.

2.1. It passes by no age, it excepts no class of men. Some nations, by the benefit of poverty, have not known luxury; some, because they are active and roving, have escaped sloth; among those whose ways are uncultivated and whose life is rustic, fraud is unknown, and deceit, and whatever evil is born in the forum. There is no nation which anger does not goad—as powerful among Greeks as among barbarians, no less destructive to those who fear the laws than to those whose rights are bounded only by the measure of their strength.

2.2. Finally, the other passions seize individuals; this is the one passion which is sometimes conceived by a whole people. Never has an entire people burned with love for a woman, nor has a whole state set its hope upon money or gain; ambition takes hold of single men one by one; ungoverned anger is the one public evil.

2.3. Often men have gone into anger in a single column; men and women, old men and boys, princes and common folk have agreed together, and the whole multitude, roused by the fewest words, has outstripped the very man who roused it; at once they have rushed to arms and to fires, and have declared wars on their neighbours or waged them with their fellow citizens;

2.4. whole houses have been burned with all their stock, and a man but lately held in much honour for his winning eloquence has met the anger of his own assembly; legions have hurled their javelins at their own commander; the whole commons has fallen out with the senate; the public council of the senate, without waiting for levies and without naming a commander, has chosen sudden captains for its anger, and, hunting noble men through the houses of the city, has taken vengeance with its own hands;

2.5. embassies have been violated, the law of nations broken, and an unspeakable frenzy has carried the state away, and no time was given for the public swelling to subside, but fleets were straightway launched and laden with hastily-gathered soldiers; without custom, without auspices, the people, going forth under the leadership of its own anger, wielded chance and snatched-up things for arms, and then, with great slaughter, paid the penalty for the rashness of its bold anger.

2.6. This is the end that befalls barbarians when they rush headlong into wars; when the appearance of an injury has struck their mobile minds, they are driven on at once, and where grief has drawn them, they fall upon the legions in the manner of an avalanche—disordered, fearless, incautious, courting their own dangers; they rejoice to be struck and to press upon the steel and to drive the weapons home with their own bodies and to go forth through their own wound.

3.1. "There is no doubt," you say, "that this is a great and pestilent force; therefore show how it ought to be cured." And yet, as I said in the earlier books, Aristotle stands forth as anger's defender and forbids us to cut it out; he says it is the spur of virtue, and that, this taken away, the mind is unarmed and grows sluggish and inert for great endeavours.

3.2. It is necessary, therefore, to convict its foulness and ferocity and to set before our eyes how great a monster is man raging against man, with how great an onset he rushes on, destructive not without his own destruction, and dragging down those things which cannot be sunk save along with the one who sinks them. What, then?

3.3. Does anyone call that man sound who, as though caught by a tempest, does not go but is driven, and is the slave of a raging evil, and does not commit his vengeance to another but, himself the exactor of it, rages in mind and hand alike, the executioner of those dearest to him and of the very things which he will soon weep to have lost?

3.4. Does anyone give this passion to virtue as helper and companion—a passion that throws into confusion the counsels without which virtue accomplishes nothing? Frail and sinister is the strength, and strong only for its own harm, into which disease and its onset have raised a sick man.

3.5. There is no reason, then, why you should think I am wasting my time on superfluities, in that I brand anger as infamous—as though men's opinion of it were in doubt—when there is someone, and indeed one of the illustrious philosophers, who assigns it tasks and summons it as useful and as supplying spirit for battles, for the doing of deeds, for everything that must be carried out with some heat.

3.6. Lest anyone be deceived into thinking it will be of profit at some time, in some place, its unbridled and frenzied madness must be displayed, and its proper equipment must be restored to it: the racks and the cords and the workhouses and the crosses, and the fires set about bodies buried in the ground, and the hook that drags even corpses, the various kinds of chains, the various kinds of penalties, the manglings of limbs, the brandings of the brow, and the cages of monstrous beasts—amid these instruments let anger be placed, hissing something dire and dreadful, fouler than all the things by means of which it rages.

4.1. Granting that there be doubt about the rest, surely no passion has a worse countenance, which we described in the earlier books: harsh and keen, now pale with the blood withdrawn to the rear and put to flight, now reddish and like one bloodied with all the heat and breath turned toward the face, the veins swelling, the eyes now trembling and starting forth, now fixed and clinging in a single stare;

4.2. add the sound of teeth grinding against each other as though longing to be devouring someone, no other than that which boars make whetting their tusks by rubbing; add the cracking of joints when the hands break themselves, and the breast struck again and again, quick panting and groans drawn up from deep within, the unsteady body, words broken by sudden outcries, the lips trembling and now and again pressed together and hissing forth something dire.

4.3. The faces of wild beasts, by Hercules, whether hunger drives them or the steel fixed in their vitals, are less foul—even when, half-alive, they go for their hunter with a last bite—than that of a man blazing with anger. Come, if there be leisure to hear out the words and threats, what manner of words are those of a soul racked on the rack of itself!

4.4. Will not each man wish to call himself back from anger, when he has understood that it begins first of all with his own harm? Do you not wish me, then, to warn those who exercise anger with the height of power and reckon it a proof of strength and set ready vengeance among the great goods of great fortune—to warn them how far from powerful, nay, how far from even free, a man can be called who is the captive of his own anger?

4.5. Do you not wish me to warn—that each man may be the more diligent and look about himself—that the other evils of the mind pertain to the very worst of men, but that wrathfulness creeps even upon learned men and those otherwise sound? So much so that some call wrathfulness a sign of guilelessness, and it is commonly believed that the most open men are the most liable to it.

5.1. "To what end," you say, "does this tend?" That no one may judge himself safe from it, since it summons even the gentle and peaceable by nature into savagery and violence. Just as, against pestilence, bodily firmness and careful attention to health are of no avail—for it attacks the weak and the robust indiscriminately—so there is danger from anger to characters restless as much as to those composed and relaxed, in whom it is the more shameful and dangerous the more it alters them.

5.2. But since the first thing is not to grow angry, the second to leave off, the third to cure another's anger too, I shall say first how we may not fall into anger, then how we may free ourselves from it, and last how we may restrain the angry man and appease him and lead him back to sanity.

5.3. We shall keep ourselves from growing angry if we set before ourselves, again and again, all the vices of anger and rightly appraise it. It must be accused before our own bar, condemned; its evils must be searched out and dragged into the open; that it may appear what it is, it must be compared with the worst of things.

5.4. Avarice acquires and gathers, that someone better may use it; anger spends, and is costly to few. How many slaves has a wrathful master driven into flight, how many to death! How much more he has lost by being angry than the thing was for which he was angry! Anger has brought mourning to a father, divorce to a husband, hatred to a magistrate, defeat to a candidate.

5.5. It is worse than luxury, since luxury enjoys its own pleasure, but anger another's pain. It surpasses spite and envy; for these wish a man to become unhappy, anger wishes to make him so; these take delight in chance evils, anger cannot wait upon fortune—it wishes to harm the one it hates, not that he be harmed.

5.6. Nothing is heavier than feuds; these anger brings about. Nothing is more deadly than war; into this the anger of the powerful breaks forth; moreover, even that plebeian and private anger is a war without weapons and without strength. Besides, anger—to set aside the losses that will soon follow, the ambushes, the perpetual anxiety from mutual contests—pays the penalty even while it exacts it; it forswears the nature of man: that calls us to love, this to hatred; that bids us help, this to harm.

5.7. Add that, though its indignation comes from too high an esteem of itself and seems high-spirited, it is paltry and narrow; for no one is not the lesser man than he by whom he judges himself despised. But that great and true appraiser of itself does not avenge an injury, because it does not feel it.

5.8. As weapons rebound from a hard surface, and solid things are struck only with the striker's own pain, so no injury brings a great mind to a sense of itself, being more fragile than the thing it assails. How much fairer it is, as though penetrable by no weapon, to spurn back all injuries and insults! Vengeance is the confession of pain; that is no great mind which an injury bends. He who has harmed you is either stronger than you or weaker; if weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare yourself.

6.1. There is no surer proof of greatness than that nothing can befall you to goad you. The higher and more ordered part of the universe, near to the stars, is neither compacted into cloud nor driven into storm nor whirled into a tempest; it is free of all turmoil; the lower regions are struck by lightning. In the same way a lofty mind, always at rest and set in a tranquil station, crushing beneath itself all the things by which anger is contracted, is modest and venerable and composed; none of which you will find in the angry man.

6.2. For who, surrendered to grief and raging, has not first cast off shame? Who, turbulent with an impulse and rushing upon someone, has not flung away whatever of reverence he had in him? In whom, once roused, has the number or order of his duties held firm? Who has restrained his tongue? Who has held any part of his body still?

6.3. Who, once let loose, has been able to govern himself? It will profit us, that saving precept of Democritus, by which tranquillity is shown—if we undertake not many things, either privately or publicly, nor things greater than our strength. Never does a day pass so happily for one running about among many tasks that there does not arise, either from a man or from a circumstance, some offence which makes the mind ready for angers.

6.4. Just as a man hurrying through the crowded places of the city must collide with many, and somewhere needs must slip, somewhere be held back, somewhere be spattered, so in this scattered and wandering course of life many hindrances, many causes of complaint befall. One man has cheated our hope, another has put it off, another has snatched it away; things have not flowed according to the plan we proposed.

6.5. To no one is fortune so devoted that she answers everywhere to one who tries many things. It follows, then, that the man to whom some things have turned out contrary to what he proposed is impatient of men and of things, and grows angry from the slightest causes—now at a person, now at a business, now at a place, now at fortune, now at himself.

6.6. And so, that the mind may be at rest, it must not be tossed about, nor, as I said, wearied by the doing of many things, nor of great things sought above its strength. It is easy to fit light loads to the neck and to shift them to this side or that without a fall; but those that are laid upon us by others' hands we bear with difficulty, and, overcome, drop them on the nearest man. Even while we stand under the burden, unequal to the load, we totter.

7.1. Know that the same happens in civil and domestic matters. Affairs that are easy and manageable follow the doer; vast ones, and beyond the measure of the man conducting them, do not yield themselves easily and, if taken in hand, press and drag down the manager, and, just when they seem to be held, collapse along with him. So it comes about that the will of the man who attempts not what is easy, but wishes the things he has attempted to be easy, is often frustrated.

7.2. As often as you attempt anything, take the measure at once of yourself and of the things you are preparing and for which you are preparing yourself; for regret at an unfinished work will make you harsh. Here is the difference, whether a man is of a fiery disposition or of a cold and lowly one: in the noble man a repulse will wring out anger, in the languid and inert one sorrow. Therefore let our actions be neither petty nor bold and wicked; let hope reach out only to what is near at hand; let us attempt nothing which, even when we have attained it, we shall marvel to have succeeded.

8.1. Let us take care not to receive an injury, since we do not know how to bear it. We must live with the most peaceable and easy and least anxious and peevish of men; characters are taken on from those we associate with, and just as certain diseases of the body pass to those it touches, so the mind passes on its evils to those nearest it.

8.2. The drunkard has drawn his messmates into a love of wine; the company of the unchaste has softened even a brave man and, were it permitted, a man indeed; avarice has transferred its poison to those nearest. The same principle, from the opposite side, holds for the virtues, that they soften whatever they have with them; and a healthful region and a more wholesome sky have not so profited the body as it profits minds not very firm to dwell among the better sort.

8.3. How much this can do you will understand if you observe that wild beasts too grow tame by association with us, and that to no beast, however savage, does its own ferocity remain if it has long endured the companionship of man; all its harshness is blunted, and little by little, amid gentle things, it is unlearned. There is added to this that not only is the man who lives with quiet men made better by their example, but that he finds no causes of anger and does not exercise his vice. He ought, therefore, to flee all whom he knows will provoke his wrathfulness.

8.4. "Who," you say, "are these?" Many men, who from various causes will do the same: the proud man will offend you by his contempt, the witty by his insult, the insolent by his injury, the spiteful by his malice, the quarrelsome by his contention, the puffed-up liar by his vanity; you will not bear to be feared by the suspicious, to be vanquished by the stubborn, to be disdained by the dainty.

8.5. Choose the straightforward, the easy, the moderate, who will neither call forth your anger nor bear it. More profitable still will be the deferential and humane and pleasant—not, however, to the point of flattery, for excessive assent offends the wrathful.

8.6. There was, certainly, a friend of ours, a good man, but of a temper too ready for anger, for whom it was no more safe to flatter than to speak ill. It is well known that Caelius the orator was most prone to anger. With him, they say, there was dining in his bedchamber a client of choice patience, but it was hard for one cast into such close quarters to escape a quarrel with the man he was bound to; he judged it best to assent to whatever he said and to play second. Caelius could not bear the man's agreeing and cried out: "Say something against me, that we may be two!" But even he, angry that the other was not angry, soon left off for lack of an adversary.

8.7. Let us, then, choose rather even these men—if we are conscious of wrathfulness in ourselves—who will follow our face and our words. They will indeed make us dainty and lead us into the bad habit of hearing nothing against our will, but it will profit us to give our vice an interval and a rest. Even the difficult and untamed by nature will bear a flatterer. Nothing is harsh and frightened toward the one who strokes it.

8.8. As often as a discussion is longer and more contentious, let us resist it at the start, before it gains strength. A dispute feeds upon itself and holds fast those it has drawn deep. It is easier to keep away from a contest than to draw oneself out of one.

9.1. The heavier studies, too, must be given up by the wrathful, or at least pursued short of weariness, and the mind must not be busied among many things but handed over to pleasant arts. Let the reading of poetry soothe it and history detain it with its tales; let it be treated more softly and tenderly.

9.2. Pythagoras used to compose the disturbances of his mind with the lyre; and who does not know that war-horns and trumpets are incitements, just as certain songs are soothings by which the mind is relaxed? For confused eyes green things are good, and for some the weak sight rests on certain colours but is dazzled by the brightness of others; so cheerful studies soothe sick minds.

9.3. We ought to flee the forum, pleadings, trials, and everything that aggravates the vice, and equally to beware bodily weariness; for it uses up whatever is mild and peaceable in us, and rouses what is bitter.

9.4. Therefore those whose stomach is suspect, when about to go forth to conduct affairs of greater importance, temper their bile with food; for fasting especially stirs it—either because it drives the heat into the centre and harms the blood and stops its course in the labouring veins, or because the body, thinned and weakened, weighs upon the mind. Certainly for the same reason those broken by ill health or by age are more irritable. Hunger too and thirst must be avoided for the same reasons; they exasperate and inflame the mind.

9.5. It is an old saying that a quarrel is sought by the weary; and equally too by the hungry and the thirsty and by every man whom anything presses hard. For just as ulcers ache at a light touch, and then even at the suspicion of a touch, so the afflicted mind is offended by the smallest things, so that with some a greeting, a letter, a speech, a question provoke a quarrel. Never can sore places be touched without complaint.

10.1. It is best, therefore, to treat oneself at the first sense of the evil, and then to grant the least liberty even to one's own words, and to check the impulse.

10.2. It is easy, moreover, to catch one's passions as soon as they arise; the signs of diseases run ahead. As the marks of storm and rain come before the things themselves, so there are certain heralds of anger, of love, and of all those tempests that vex the mind.

10.3. Those who are wont to be seized by the falling sickness understand that the ailment is now approaching if the heat has deserted the extremities, and there is a wavering sight and a trembling of the sinews, if the memory slips and the head swims; and so by their accustomed remedies they forestall the incipient cause, and by smell and taste whatever it is that alienates their minds is driven off, or it is fought against with warm applications against the cold and stiffness; or, if the medicine has profited too little, they have avoided the crowd and fallen without a witness.

10.4. It profits to know one's disease and to crush its strength before it spreads. Let us see what it is that most rouses us. One man is moved by insults of words, another by those of deeds; this one would have his nobility spared, that one his beauty; this one longs to be held most elegant, that one most learned; this one is impatient of pride, that one of stubbornness; that one does not think his slaves worthy that he should be angry at them, this one is savage within his house, mild abroad; that one judges it spite to be asked, this one an insult not to be asked. Not all are struck on the same side; one must know, therefore, what is weak in oneself, that one may protect it most of all.

11.1. It is not expedient to see everything, to hear everything. Let many injuries pass us by, of which the man who does not know them takes in most. Do you not wish to be wrathful? Do not be inquisitive. He who inquires what was said against him, who digs up malicious talk even if it was held in secret, disquiets himself. A certain interpretation brings it about that they seem injuries; and so some things must be deferred, some laughed at, some forgiven. Anger must be circumvented in many ways;

11.2. let most things be turned into a joke and a jest. They say that Socrates, struck with a blow on the ear, said nothing more than that it was a nuisance that men did not know when they ought to go out wearing a helmet.

11.3. It matters not how an injury was done, but how it was borne; nor do I see why self-restraint should be difficult, when I know that even the tempers of tyrants, swollen by fortune and licence, have repressed the savagery familiar to them. At least Pisistratus,

11.4. the tyrant of the Athenians, is recorded—when a drunken guest had said many things against his cruelty, and there was no lack of those willing to lend a hand against him, and one from here, another from there set torches beneath the fire—to have borne it with a calm mind and to have answered those who were provoking him that he was no more angry at the man than if someone with bandaged eyes had run into him.

12.1. The greater part of men have made their own complaints, either by suspecting falsely or by aggravating trifles. Often anger comes to us, more often we to it. It must never be sent for; even when it falls upon us, let it be thrown back.

12.2. No one says to himself: "This thing for which I am angry, I have either done or could have done"; no one weighs the mind of the doer, but the deed itself. And yet the doer is what must be considered—whether he willed it or fell into it, whether he was compelled or deceived, whether he followed hatred or reward, whether he gratified himself or lent his hand to another. The age of the offender counts for something, his fortune for something, so that to bear or endure it is either humane or humble.

12.3. Let us set ourselves in the place where he is at whom we are angry; as it is, an unjust estimate of ourselves makes us wrathful, and we are unwilling to suffer what we should be willing to do.

12.4. No one defers himself; and yet the greatest remedy for anger is delay, that its first heat may grow faint and that the darkness which presses on the mind may either settle or be less dense. Some of the things that were carrying you headlong an hour, not merely a day, will soften; some will vanish altogether; if the adjournment you sought has accomplished nothing, it will appear that there is now judgment, not anger. Whatever you wish to know the quality of, hand it over to time; nothing is discerned clearly in a flood.

12.5. Plato could not obtain from himself the time, when he was angry at his slave, but ordered him at once to take off his tunic and offer his shoulders to the lash, intending to beat him himself with his own hand; after he understood that he was angry, he held back his hand, raised aloft, and stood like a man about to strike; then, asked by a friend who happened to come in what he was doing, he said: "I am exacting penalties from an angry man."

12.6. As though stunned, he kept that gesture—an unseemly one for a wise man, of a man about to be savage—now forgetting the slave, because he had found another whom he might rather chastise. And so he took from himself power over his household, and, somewhat moved by some fault, said: "You, Speusippus, rebuke that little slave with the lash; for I am angry."

12.7. For this reason he did not beat him, on account of which another would have beaten him. "I am angry," he said; "I shall do more than I ought, I shall do it too gladly; let not that slave be in the power of a man who is not in his own." Does anyone wish vengeance to be committed to the angry, when Plato abrogated his own authority over himself? Let nothing be permitted to you while you are angry. Why? Because you wish everything to be permitted.

13.1. Fight with yourself! If you wish to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you. You begin to conquer it if it is hidden, if it is given no outlet. Let us bury its signs and keep it, as far as may be, concealed and secret.

13.2. This will be done with great trouble to ourselves, for it longs to leap forth and kindle the eyes and change the face; but if it has been allowed to show itself outside us, it is above us. Let it be hidden away in the inmost recess of the breast and be borne, not bear us; nay, let us turn all its symptoms into their opposite. Let the face be relaxed, the voice gentler, the step slower; little by little the inner is shaped by the outer.

13.3. In Socrates a sign of anger was to lower his voice, to speak more sparingly. It was apparent then that he was setting himself against himself. And so he was caught out by his friends and convicted, nor was the reproach of his lurking anger unwelcome to him. Why should he not rejoice that many perceived his anger while no one felt it? But they would have felt it had he not given his friends the right of rebuking him, as he himself had taken it with respect to his friends.

13.4. How much more must we do this! Let us beg each of our dearest friends to use his freedom against us most of all when we shall least be able to bear it, and not to assent to our anger; against an evil so powerful and so favoured in our eyes let us call them in while we are still in our senses, while we are our own masters.

13.5. Those who bear wine badly, and fear the rashness and insolence of their drunkenness, charge their people to carry them off from the banquet; having found their own intemperance in sickness, they forbid themselves to be obeyed when in ill health.

13.6. It is best to provide hindrances against known vices, and above all so to compose the mind that, even when shaken by the gravest and most sudden events, it either does not feel anger, or, the anger having arisen from the magnitude of an unexpected injury, draws it back into the depths and does not avow its pain.

13.7. That this can be done will appear if I bring forward a few examples out of a vast number, from which it is possible to learn both how much evil anger has, when it uses the whole power of overmastering men, and how far it can command itself, when it is repressed by a greater fear.

14.1. King Cambyses was too much given to wine, and Praexaspes, one of his dearest friends, warned him to drink more sparingly, saying that drunkenness was disgraceful in a king, whom the eyes and ears of all men followed. To this the king replied: "That you may know how I never lose command of myself, I will prove at once that, after wine, both my eyes and my hands are still at their office."

14.2. He then drank more freely than at other times, from larger cups, and now heavy and steeped in wine, ordered the son of his rebuker to come forth beyond the threshold and stand with his left hand raised above his head. Then he bent his bow and pierced the very heart of the youth—for that, he had said, was what he aimed at—and, cutting open the breast, showed the shaft lodged in the very heart, and, looking back at the father, asked whether he had a sure enough hand. But the father denied that Apollo could have shot more surely.

14.3. May the gods destroy that man, a slave more in mind than in condition! He was the praiser of a thing of which it was too much even to have been a spectator. He thought his son's breast drawn apart into two and his heart throbbing beneath the wound an occasion for flattery. He ought to have raised a dispute with him over the glory and called for a second shot, that it might please the king to show a surer hand upon the father himself! O bloody king!

14.4. O man worthy that against him should be turned the bows of all his people! Though we have cursed him for dissolving his banquets with punishments and funerals, yet that weapon was more criminally praised than launched. We shall see how the father ought to have borne himself, standing over the corpse of his son and over that slaughter of which he had been both witness and cause. The thing now at issue is plain—that anger can be suppressed.

14.5. He spoke no ill of the king, he let fall no word even of a stricken man, though he saw his own heart pierced as much as his son's. He may be said to have rightly swallowed his words; for if he had said anything as an angry man, he could have done nothing as a father.

14.6. He may be thought, I say, to have borne himself more wisely in that calamity than when he gave counsel about moderation in drinking to one for whom it had been better to drink wine than blood, whose hands occupied with cups meant peace. And so he was added to the number of those who have shown, by great disasters, how dearly good counsel costs the friends of kings.

15.1. I do not doubt that Harpagus, too, gave some such counsel to his king and the king of the Persians, offended by which he set before him his own children to feast on, and asked again and again whether the seasoning pleased him; then, when he saw him full enough of his own ills, he ordered their heads to be brought in and asked how he had liked the entertainment. Words did not fail the wretched man, his lips did not falter: "At the king's table," he said, "every dinner is delightful."

15.2. What did he gain by this flattery? That he was not invited to the leavings. I do not forbid the father to condemn his king's deed, I do not forbid him to seek a penalty worthy of so savage a monster, but in the meantime I draw this conclusion—that anger arising even from the greatest of evils can be concealed and forced to words contrary to itself.

15.3. This curbing of grief is necessary, especially for those who have drawn this kind of life by lot and are admitted to a royal table. So one eats among them; so one drinks; so one answers; one must smile at one's own funerals. Whether life be worth so much we shall see; that is another question. We shall not console so grim a workhouse, we shall not exhort men to bear the commands of executioners; we shall show that in every servitude the road to liberty lies open. If the mind is sick and wretched through its own fault, it is permitted to such a one to end his miseries along with himself.

15.4. I will say both to that man who fell in with a king aiming his arrows at the breasts of his friends, and to that one whose master gorges fathers with the entrails of their children: "Why do you groan, madman? Why do you wait for some enemy to avenge you through the destruction of your people, or for a king powerful from afar to fly to your aid? Wherever you look, there is the end of your evils. Do you see that steep place? Down there one descends to liberty. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Liberty sits there in the depths. Do you see that low, stunted, ill-omened tree? From it hangs liberty. Do you see your own throat, your gullet, your heart? They are escapes from servitude. Do I show you exits too laborious and demanding much spirit and strength? Do you ask what is the road to liberty? Any vein in your body!"

16.1. As long, indeed, as nothing seems to us so intolerable as to expel us from life, let us, in whatever state we shall be, put anger away. It is destructive to those who serve. For all indignation goes toward its own torment, and feels commands the heavier the more stubbornly it endures them. So the wild beast, while it tosses, draws the snares tighter; so birds, while they trembling shake off the birdlime, smear it over all their feathers. No yoke is so close that it does not gall the one who pulls against it less than the one who resists. There is one alleviation of great evils—to endure and to submit to one's necessities.

16.2. But while self-control over one's passions, and over this raging and unbridled one in particular, is useful to those who serve, it is more useful to kings. All is lost when fortune permits as much as anger urges, nor can a power that is exercised to the harm of many long stand; for it is in peril when a common fear has joined those who groan apart. And so many have been slain, now by single men, now by all together, when a public grief had compelled them to bring their angers into one.

16.3. And yet most have exercised anger as though it were a royal emblem, like Darius, who, first after the empire was taken from the Magian, held the Persians and a great part of the East. For when he had declared war on the Scythians who girdle the East, and was asked by Oeobazus, a noble old man, that of his three children one might be left as a comfort to the father, and that he might use the service of the other two, he promised more than was asked, said he would release them all to him, and threw them down slain before the eyes of their parent—being cruel had he carried them all off.

16.4. But how much more easygoing Xerxes! When Pythius, the father of five sons, asked exemption for one, he allowed him to choose whichever he wished; then the one he had chosen he tore into two parts and set on either side of the road, and with this victim purified his army. And so he had the end he deserved: conquered and routed far and wide, and seeing his own ruin strewn everywhere, he walked amid the corpses of his own men.

17.1. This ferocity in anger belonged to barbarian kings, whom no learning, no cultivation of letters had imbued. I will give you, from the very bosom of Aristotle, King Alexander, who ran Cleitus, most dear to him and reared along with him, through amid the feast—with his own hand, indeed—because he flattered too little and passed too slowly from a free Macedonian into Persian servitude.

17.2. For Lysimachus, equally a familiar of his, he threw to a lion. Did this Lysimachus, then, having by some good luck escaped the lion's teeth, prove for that reason milder when he himself reigned?

17.3. For Telesphorus the Rhodian, his own friend, mutilated on every side—when he had cut off his ears and nose—he kept long in a cage, like some strange and never-before-seen animal, when the deformity of his truncated and mutilated face had lost the human likeness; there was added hunger and squalor and the filth of a body left to lie in its own dung;

17.4. besides this, with knees and hands calloused, which the narrowness of the place forced him to use for feet, and his sides ulcerated with chafing, his shape was no less foul than terrible to those who looked on, and, made a monster by his own punishment, he had lost even pity. Yet, though most unlike a man was he who suffered these things, more unlike still was he who did them.

18.1. Would that this savagery had remained within foreign examples, and that the barbarity of tortures and angers had not, along with other imported vices, passed over into Roman ways too! Upon Marcus Marius, to whom the people had set up statues quarter by quarter, to whom they offered incense and wine, Lucius Sulla ordered the legs to be broken, the eyes torn out, the tongue cut off, the hands cut off, and, as though he killed him as often as he wounded him, mangled him little by little and limb by limb.

18.2. Who was the minister of this command? Who but Catiline, already exercising his hands in every crime? He tore that man to pieces before the tomb of Quintus Catulus, a grievous burden to the ashes of that gentlest of men, above which a man of evil example—yet popular, and not so undeservedly as too much loved—gave up his blood drop by drop. Marius was worthy to suffer those things, Sulla to command them, Catiline to do them, but the republic was unworthy to receive into its own body alike the swords of its enemies and of its avengers.

18.3. Why do I search out ancient things? Lately Gaius Caesar, in one day, scourged and tortured Sextus Papinius, whose father was of consular rank, Betilienus Bassus his own quaestor, the son of his procurator, and others, both senators and Roman knights—not for the sake of inquiry but for the pleasure of it;

18.4. then he was so impatient of postponing the gratification which his cruelty demanded, vast and without delay, that, walking in the colonnade of his mother's gardens that separates the portico from the riverbank, he beheaded some of them by lamplight, along with married women and other senators. What was pressing? What danger, private or public, did a single night threaten? How small a thing it would have been to wait at least for daylight, that he might not kill the senators of the Roman people in his slippers!

19.1. How arrogant his cruelty was, it pertains to the matter to know, though to someone we may seem to wander and go astray; but this very thing will be a part of anger raging beyond its custom. He had scourged senators; he himself brought it about that it could be said, "It is wont to be done." He had tortured them with all the most grievous things in the nature of the world—with cords, with foot-presses, with the rack, with fire, with his own face.

19.2. And at this point it will be answered: "A great matter! if a man divided three senators among the lashes and the flames like worthless slaves, who was thinking of butchering the whole senate, who wished that the Roman people had a single neck, that he might gather his crimes, scattered over so many places and times, into one stroke and one day." What is so unheard-of as a punishment by night? Whereas robberies are wont to be hidden by darkness, the more conspicuous punishments are, the more they profit for example and amendment.

19.3. And at this point it will be answered to me: "What you so greatly marvel at is a daily matter to that beast; for this he lives, for this he is awake, for this he burns the midnight oil." Certainly no one else will be found who ordered that the mouths of all those whom he had bidden to be punished be stopped with a sponge thrust in, that they might have no faculty of uttering a sound. To what dying man was there ever not left a means to groan? He feared lest a too-free voice should be sent forth by the last agony, lest he hear something he did not wish; for he knew that there were countless things which no one would dare to cast in his teeth except a man about to die.

19.4. When sponges could not be found, he ordered the garments of the wretches to be torn and rags stuffed into their mouths. What savagery is this? Let a man draw his last breath, give room to the departing soul, let it be permitted to go forth otherwise than through a wound!

19.5. It is long to add to these that the fathers also of the slain he finished off that same night, by sending centurions through their houses—that is, a merciful man freed them from their grief! For it is not Gaius's savagery that I have set out to describe, but anger's, which rages not only against single men but mangles whole nations, which lashes cities and rivers and things safe from all sense of pain.

20.1. So the king of the Persians cut off the noses of a whole people in Syria, whence the place has the name Rhinocolura. Do you judge that he spared them, because he did not cut off their whole heads?

20.2. He took delight in a new kind of penalty. Some such thing would the Ethiopians too have suffered, who, because of the very great length of their life, are called Macrobii; for against these, because they had not received servitude with upturned hands and had given free answers to the envoys sent to them—answers which kings call insolent—Cambyses raged, and, with no provisions made ready, no routes explored, dragged through trackless and parched lands all the throng useful for war. Within the first stage the necessaries failed him, nor did the barren and untilled region, unknown to any human footstep, supply anything.

20.3. They stayed their hunger at first with the tenderest of leaves and the tops of trees, then with hides softened by fire and whatever necessity had made into food; afterwards, when among the sands even roots and grasses had failed and a wilderness destitute even of animals appeared, they drew lots for every tenth man and had a food more savage than hunger.

20.4. Anger still drove the king on headlong, when he had lost part of his army, eaten part, until he feared lest he himself too be called to the lot. Then at last he gave the signal for retreat. Meanwhile his noble birds were kept for him and the apparatus of feasts was carried on camels, while his soldiers drew lots—who should perish in misery, who live in worse misery.

21.1. This man was angry at a nation both unknown and undeserving, yet one that would feel it; Cyrus, at a river. For when, about to besiege Babylon, he was hurrying to a war whose greatest crises lie in opportunities, he tried to cross the river Gyndes, which spreads wide, at a ford—a thing scarcely safe even when it has felt the summer and been brought to its lowest.

21.2. There one of those horses which were wont, being white, to draw the royal chariot was swept away and violently moved the king; he swore, therefore, that he would reduce that river, which was carrying off the king's retinue, to such a state that it could be crossed and trodden even by women.

21.3. To this he then transferred all the apparatus of war, and sat over the work so long that he split the channel into a hundred and eighty trenches, dispersed it into three hundred and sixty streams, and left it dry, the waters flowing off in different directions.

21.4. And so there perished both time—a great loss in great affairs—and the soldiers' ardour, which useless toil broke, and the opportunity of attacking the unprepared, while he waged against a river the war he had declared against the enemy.

21.5. This madness—for what else would you call it?—has touched Romans too. For Gaius Caesar tore down a most beautiful villa in the Herculanean territory, because his mother had once been imprisoned in it, and through this made its fortune notable; for, while it stood, we used to sail past it, now the reason for its demolition is asked.

22.1. And these examples are to be pondered, those which you may avoid, and on the contrary those which you may follow—moderate, gentle ones, men who lacked neither cause for anger nor power for vengeance.

22.2. For what was easier for Antigonus than to order two common soldiers to be led off who, leaning against the king's tent, were doing what men do most dangerously and most gladly—thinking ill of their king? Antigonus had heard everything, since only the canvas was between the speakers and the hearer; this he lightly stirred and said: "Withdraw further, lest the king hear you."

22.3. The same man, one night, when he had overheard some of his soldiers calling down all evils upon the king who had led them into that march and that inextricable mire, came up to those who were labouring most, and, when he had extricated them as they knew not by whom they were being helped, said: "Now curse Antigonus, by whose fault you have fallen into these miseries; but wish well to him who has led you out of this quagmire."

22.4. The same man bore the ill words of his enemies as mildly as those of his own people. And so, when the Greeks were besieged in some little fort and, despising the enemy through confidence in the place, were making many jests at Antigonus's ugliness, now deriding his low stature, now his flattened nose, he said: "I am glad, and hope for some good, if I have a Silenus in my camp."

22.5. When he had subdued these jesters by hunger, he made such use of the captured that those who were fit for service he enrolled in the cohorts, the rest he handed over to the auctioneer—and said he would not have done this had it not been expedient for those who had so bad a tongue to have a master.

23.1. The grandson of this man was Alexander, who hurled his lance at his own guests, who, of the two friends I mentioned a little before, threw one to a beast, the other to himself. Of these two, however, the one thrown to the lion lived.

23.2. He had not this vice from his grandfather, nor even from his father; for if there was any other virtue in Philip, there was also patience under insults, a vast instrument for the safeguarding of a kingdom. Demochares, surnamed Parrhesiastes for his too free and saucy tongue, had come among the other Athenian envoys. The embassy heard kindly, Philip said: "Tell me what I can do that would be welcome to the Athenians." Demochares broke in and said: "Hang yourself."

23.3. The indignation of the bystanders had risen at so inhuman an answer; but Philip bade them be silent and let that Thersites go safe and sound. "But you," he said, "the rest of the envoys, report to the Athenians that those who say such things are far prouder than he who hears them said and lets them go unpunished."

23.4. The deified Augustus too did and said many things worthy of memory, from which it may appear that anger did not rule him. Timagenes, the writer of histories, had said certain things against him, certain things against his wife and his whole house, nor had he wasted his words; for reckless wit is the more passed about and on men's lips.

23.5. Often Caesar warned him to use his tongue more moderately; as he persisted, he forbade him his house. Afterwards Timagenes grew old in the household of Asinius Pollio and was sought after by the whole city. The closing of Caesar's house against him shut no other door to him.

23.6. He recited the histories he had written afterwards, and the books containing the deeds of Caesar Augustus he put into the fire and burned; he carried on a feud with Caesar; no one dreaded his friendship, no one fled from him as from a man struck by lightning, there was found one to offer his bosom to a man falling from so high. Caesar bore this, as I said,

23.7. patiently, not moved even by the fact that he had laid hands upon his own praises and deeds; he never complained to the host of his enemy.

23.8. He said only this much to Asinius Pollio: "You keep a wild beast." Then, when Pollio was preparing an excuse, he cut him short and said: "Enjoy him, my Pollio, enjoy him!" And when Pollio said: "If you bid me, Caesar, I will at once forbid him my house," Caesar said: "Do you think I would do that, when it was I who reconciled you two?" For Pollio had at one time been angry with Timagenes, and had had no other cause for ceasing than that Caesar had begun.

24.1. Let each man, therefore, say to himself, as often as he is provoked: "Am I more powerful than Philip? Yet he was abused with impunity. Have I more power in my own house than the deified Augustus had over the whole world? Yet he was content to withdraw from the man who reviled him.

24.2. Why should I expiate with whips and fetters my slave's too plain answer and too stubborn look and a muttering that does not even reach me? Who am I, that it should be a sin for my ears to be offended? Many have pardoned their enemies; shall I not pardon the slothful, the negligent, the talkative?

24.3. Let his age excuse the boy, his sex the woman, his independence the stranger, his familiarity the member of my household. He offends now for the first time: let us consider how long he has pleased us; he has often offended in other matters too: let us bear what we have long borne. He is a friend: he did what he did not wish; an enemy: he did what he ought.

24.4. The wiser man let us believe, the more foolish let us forgive. For whomsoever it be, let us answer ourselves this—that even the wisest men do many wrong things, that no one is so circumspect that his diligence does not sometimes fail itself, that no one is so mature that his gravity is not driven by chance into some too-heated deed, that no one is so fearful of giving offence that he does not fall into offences while avoiding them."

25.1. Just as it has been a comfort to a petty man in his troubles that even great men's fortune stumbles, and a man has wept for his son in a corner with a more even mind who has seen bitter funerals led even out of a palace, so a man bears more evenly to be wronged by one, to be despised by another, whoever it has occurred to that no power is so great that injury does not meet it.

25.2. But if even the wisest sin, whose error has not a good case? Let us look back at how often our youth was too little diligent in its duty, too little modest in speech, too little temperate in wine. If a man is angry, let us give him space in which he can discern what he has done; he will chastise himself. Finally, let him owe the penalty; there is no reason for us to settle scores with him.

25.3. This will come into no doubt—that whoever has despised those who provoke him has set himself apart from the crowd and stood higher. It is the property of true greatness not to feel the blow. So the huge beast looks back slowly at the barking of dogs; so the wave dashes vainly against a vast crag. He who does not grow angry has stood unshaken by injury; he who grows angry has been moved.

25.4. But that man whom I just now set higher than every misfortune holds the highest good in a kind of embrace, and answers not only a man but fortune itself: "Do all you please, you are too small to overcast my serenity. Reason forbids this, to which I have given my life to govern. Anger will harm me more than injury. Why more? Because the measure of injury is fixed, but how far that other will carry me is in doubt."

26.1. "I cannot," you say, "endure it; it is hard to bear an injury." You lie; for who cannot bear an injury who can bear anger? Add now that you are at work to bear both anger and injury. Why do you bear the raving of the sick and the words of the delirious, the saucy hands of children? Surely because they seem not to know what they do. What does it matter through what fault each man becomes unaware?

26.2. Unawareness is an equal defence in all. "What then?" you say; "shall he go unpunished?" Suppose you wish it, yet he will not; for the greatest penalty for an injury done is to have done it, and no one is more grievously afflicted than he who is handed over to the punishment of remorse.

26.3. Next, we must look back at the condition of human affairs, that we may be fair judges of all that happens; and he is unjust who casts up a common fault against single men. The Ethiopian's colour is not remarkable among his own people, nor does red hair gathered into a knot disgrace a man among the Germans. You will judge nothing notable or foul in one man which is common to his nation; and those things I have mentioned the custom of a single region and corner defends. See now how much juster pardon is in those things which are spread through the whole human race.

26.4. We are all inconsiderate and improvident, all uncertain, querulous, ambitious—why do I hide the public sore with gentler words?—we are all bad. Therefore whatever is blamed in another, each man will find in his own bosom. Why do you note that man's paleness, that one's leanness? It is a pestilence. Let us, then, be gentler to one another; we live, bad men among bad. One thing can make us peaceable—an agreement of mutual indulgence.

26.5. "That man has already harmed me, I have not yet harmed him." But perhaps you have already wronged someone, or you will. Do not estimate this hour or this day; survey the whole disposition of your mind; even if you have done no evil, you can do it.

27.1. How much better it is to heal an injury than to avenge it! Vengeance takes up much time, exposes itself to many injuries while it grieves over one; we all stay angry longer than we are hurt. How much better to go off in the opposite direction and not to set vices against vices! Would anyone seem sufficiently self-consistent who kicked back at a mule and bit a dog?

27.2. "Those creatures," you say, "do not know they are doing wrong." First, how unjust is the man with whom to be human is a hindrance to obtaining pardon! Next, if the other animals are withdrawn from your anger because they lack reason, let whoever lacks reason be in the same place with you; for what does it matter whether he has other things unlike the dumb beasts, if he has this, which excuses the dumb beast in every fault—the darkness of mind? He has sinned;

27.3. is this the first time? Is this the last? There is no reason for you to believe him, even if he says: "I will not do it again." Both he will sin, and another against him, and the whole of life will be rolled about among errors. Untamed things must be handled gently.

27.4. What is most effectively said in grief will be said in anger too: will you at some time leave off, or never? If at some time, how much better to leave anger than to be left by anger! Or will this agitation always remain? You see how unpeaceful a life you are pronouncing upon yourself? For what will the life of one always swelling be?

27.5. Add now that, though you keep kindling yourself well and continually renewing the causes by which you are goaded, anger will depart of its own accord, and the days will withdraw its strength from it. How much better that it be conquered by you than by itself!

28.1. You are angry at this man, then at that; at slaves, then at freedmen; at parents, then at children; at acquaintances, then at strangers; for everywhere causes abound, unless an interceding mind has come between. Hence frenzy will sweep you to that man, thence to another, and, with new provocations continually arising, the rage will be unbroken. Come, unhappy one, when ever will you love? O what good time you waste on a bad thing!

28.2. How much better it were now to make friends, to soften enemies, to administer the commonwealth, to transfer your effort to domestic affairs, than to look about for what evil you can do to someone, what wound you can inflict either on his dignity or his estate or his person—when this cannot fall to you without a contest and danger, even if you close with an inferior!

28.3. Granted you receive him in chains and exposed to your every wish for any cruelty; often the excessive force of the striker has either put a joint out of place or fixed a sinew in the teeth he had broken. Wrathfulness has made many maimed, many crippled, even when it found matter that endured it. Add now that nothing is born so weak that it perishes without danger to the one who crushes it; pain at one time, chance at another, makes the weak equal to the strongest.

28.4. What of the fact that most of the things for which we grow angry offend us rather than harm us? But there is a great difference whether someone thwarts my wish or merely falls short of it, snatches a thing away or does not give it. Yet we put on a level whether someone takes away or refuses, whether he cuts off our hope or defers it, whether he acts against us or for himself, out of love for another or hatred of us.

28.5. Some, indeed, have not only just causes for standing against us, but even honourable ones. One protects his father, another his brother, another his country, another his friend; and yet we do not pardon them for doing the very thing we would condemn them for not doing—nay, what is incredible, we often think well of the deed and ill of the doer.

28.6. But, by Hercules, a great and just man looks up to the bravest of his enemies and the most stubborn in defence of the liberty and safety of his country, and wishes that such a citizen, such a soldier, might fall to his own lot.

29.1. It is shameful to hate one whom you praise; how much more shameful to hate a man for that on account of which he is worthy of pity. If a captive, suddenly thrust down into slavery, retains the remnants of liberty and does not run nimbly to base and laborious services, if, sluggish from leisure, he does not keep pace at a run with his master's horse and carriage, if, worn out by daily watchings, sleep has overcome him, if he refuses rustic toil or does not stoutly undertake it, transferred from an urban and holiday servitude to hard work—let us distinguish whether a man cannot or will not. We shall acquit many, if we begin to judge before we grow angry. But as it is, we follow the first impulse, then, although empty things have roused us, we persist, lest we seem to have begun without cause, and—what is most unjust—the injustice of our anger makes us the more stubborn; for we keep it and increase it, as though it were proof of a justly angry man to be heavily angry.

30.1. How much better it is to look through the very beginnings—how slight they are, how harmless! What you see happening to dumb animals, the same you will detect in man; we are troubled by trifling and empty things. A red colour rouses the bull, the asp rises up at a shadow, a cloth provokes bears and lions; all things that are wild and raging by nature are scared at empty things.

30.2. The same befalls restless and stupid dispositions. They are struck by the mere suspicion of things, so much so that they sometimes call moderate kindnesses injuries, in which lies the most frequent—certainly the most bitter—material for wrathfulness. For we grow angry at our dearest, because they have given us less than we conceived in our minds, and less than others received, though there is a ready remedy for both.

30.3. He has indulged another more; let our own things delight us without comparison. He will never be happy whom a happier man torments. I have less than I hoped; but perhaps I hoped for more than I ought. This part is most to be feared; hence are born the most destructive angers, ready to assail even the most sacred things.

30.4. The deified Julius was finished off by more friends than enemies, whose insatiable hopes he had not satisfied. He wished to, indeed—for no one used a victory more generously, claiming nothing from it for himself but the power of distributing—but how could he be enough for desires so shameless, when all coveted as much as one man could give?

30.5. And so he saw about his chair, with drawn swords, his comrades-in-arms—Tillius Cimber, a little before the keenest defender of his party, and others who became Pompeians only after Pompey. This thing turned their own arms against kings and drove the most faithful to plot the death of those for whom, and before whom, they had vowed to die.

31.1. To no one who looks at others' things do his own please. Hence we grow angry even at the gods, because someone is ahead of us, forgetting how many men are behind, and how great a load of envy follows at the back of one who envies a few. So great, however, is men's importunity that, though they have received much, it counts as an injury to have been able to receive more.

31.2. "He gave me the praetorship, but I had hoped for the consulship; he gave me the twelve fasces, but did not make me an ordinary consul; he wished the year to be numbered from me, but I lack a priesthood; I was co-opted into the college, but why into one only? He has crowned my dignity, but contributed nothing to my estate; what he gave me, he gave because he owed it to someone, he brought nothing out of his own." Rather give thanks for the things you have received;

31.3. await the rest, and rejoice that you are not yet full; it is among pleasures that there remains something for you to hope. You have surpassed all: rejoice to be first in your friend's mind; many surpass you: consider how far you go ahead of more than you follow. Do you ask what is the greatest vice in you? You keep false accounts; what you have given you reckon high, what you have received low.

32.1. Let one thing deter us in one man, another in another. From some let us fear to grow angry, some let us respect, some let us disdain. A great thing, no doubt, we shall have done, if we have sent an unhappy little slave to the workhouse! Why do we hasten to scourge him at once, to break his legs forthwith? That power of yours will not perish if it is deferred.

32.2. Let that time come when we ourselves give the order; now we shall speak at the bidding of anger; when that has gone, then we shall see how great this dispute is to be reckoned. For in this above all we are deceived: we come to the steel, to capital punishments, and we avenge with chains, prison, hunger a matter to be chastised with lighter lashes.

32.3. "How," you say, "do you bid us look at how trifling, how wretched, how childish all the things are by which we seem to be hurt?" I, indeed, would counsel nothing more than to take on a vast spirit and to see how lowly and abject are these things over which we wrangle, run about, pant—things to be looked at by no one who has any high or magnificent thought.

33.1. Around money there is the greatest outcry. This wearies the courts, sets fathers and children at odds, mixes poisons, gives swords to assassins as much as to legions; this is smeared with our blood; on its account the nights of wives and husbands resound with quarrels, and the tribunals of the magistrates are pressed by a crowd; kings rage and plunder, and overthrow states built up by the long toil of ages, that they may search out gold and silver in the ashes of cities.

33.2. It is pleasant to look at the money-bags lying in a corner. These are the things for which the eyes are forced out by shouting, for which the basilicas resound with the din of trials, for which judges summoned from far-off regions sit in judgment to decide whose avarice is the juster.

33.3. What if it be not even for a money-bag, but a handful of bronze or a denarius charged by a slave, that an old man about to die without an heir bursts with rage? What if for interest, even of a thousandth part, a sickly usurer, his feet twisted and his hands left unfit for reckoning, cries out and, by adjournments, claims his pennies in the very onsets of his disease?

33.4. If you were to bring me out all the money from all the mines which we are at this very moment digging down to, if you were to cast into the open whatever the treasuries hide—avarice carrying back beneath the earth what it had ill brought up—I should not think all that heap worthy to knit the brow of a good man. With what laughter are those things to be pursued which draw tears from us!

34.1. Come now, run through the rest—foods, drinks, and the niceties prepared for the sake of these out of ostentation; insulting words, gestures of the body too little respectful; stubborn beasts of burden and sluggish slaves; and suspicions and malicious interpretations of another's speech, by which it comes about that speech, given to man, is counted among the injuries of nature. Believe me, the things over which we blaze up not lightly are light—such as those that rouse boys to brawl and wrangle.

34.2. Nothing of those things which we treat so grimly is serious, nothing great. Hence, I say, comes your anger and madness, that you esteem trifles at a great price. This man wished to take my inheritance from me; this one accused me, after long courting me in hope of my last will; this one coveted my mistress.

34.3. That which ought to have been a bond of love is a cause of strife and hatred—wanting the same thing. A narrow road sets passers-by quarrelling; a wide and open way does not even bring whole peoples into collision. Those things you long for, because they are scanty and cannot be transferred to one save by being snatched from another, stir up fights and quarrels among those who strive after them.

34.4. It vexes you that your slave answered you back, and your freedman and your wife and your client; then the same man complains that liberty has been taken from the commonwealth, which he has taken away in his own house. Again, if when questioned he was silent, you call it stubbornness. Let him both speak and be silent and laugh!

34.5. "In the master's presence?" you say. Nay, in the presence of the father of the household. Why do you shout? Why do you bawl? Why, in the middle of dinner, do you call for the lash, because slaves are talking, because there is not in the same place the throng of an assembly and the silence of a solitude?

35.1. You have ears for this purpose—that they may take in not only the modulated and soft and what is drawn from sweetness and composed; you must hear both laughter and weeping, both blandishments and quarrels, both the prosperous and the grim, the voices of men and the roarings and barkings of animals. Why, wretched man, do you take fright at a slave's shout, at the ringing of bronze or the push of a door? Though you be so dainty, thunder must be heard.

35.2. Transfer this, which has been said of the ears, to the eyes, which labour under fastidiousness no less, if they have been badly trained. They are offended by a spot and by dirt and by silver too little bright and by a pool that does not let the light through to the bottom.

35.3. These very eyes, forsooth, which cannot bear marble unless it is variegated and shining with fresh polish, which cannot bear a table unless it is marked with frequent veins, which will tread underfoot at home nothing but things more precious than gold, look with the most even mind abroad upon rough and muddy paths and upon the greater part of those they meet being squalid, the walls of tenements eaten away, cracked, uneven. What else is it, then, that does not offend them in public but moves them at home, save an opinion there fair and patient, at home peevish and querulous?

36.1. All the senses must be brought to firmness; they are by nature patient, if the mind ceases to corrupt them—the mind which must be summoned daily to render its account. This Sextius used to do, that, when the day was finished and he had withdrawn to his nightly rest, he would ask his mind: "What evil of yours have you healed today? What vice have you withstood? In what part are you better?"

36.2. Anger will cease and be more moderate which knows that it must come daily before its judge. What, then, is fairer than this habit of sifting the whole day? What manner of sleep follows that review of oneself—how tranquil, how deep and free, when the mind has been either praised or warned, and, a watcher of itself and a secret censor, has taken cognizance of its own character!

36.3. I use this power and daily plead my cause before myself. When the light has been taken from sight and my wife, now aware of my custom, has fallen silent, I examine my whole day and measure again my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself, I pass over nothing. For why should I fear anything from my errors, when I can say: "See that you do that no more; for now I pardon you.

36.4. In that discussion you spoke too contentiously; do not hereafter engage with the unskilled; those who have never learned do not wish to learn. You admonished that man more freely than you ought, and so you did not amend but offend him. For the rest, see not only whether what you say is true, but whether the man to whom it is said can bear the truth. A good man rejoices to be admonished; the worse a man is, the more harshly he bears a corrector."

37.1. At someone's banquet the witticisms and words flung out to your pain have touched you. Remember to avoid the company of the common sort; after wine licence is the looser, because not even the sober have any shame.

37.2. You have seen your friend angry at the doorkeeper of some pleader or rich man, because he had turned him away as he was entering, and you yourself, on his behalf, have grown angry at the lowest of slaves. Will you, then, grow angry at a chained watchdog? Even he, when he has barked much, is tamed by food thrown to him. Withdraw further and laugh!

37.3. Now that fellow thinks himself somebody, because he guards a threshold beset by a crowd of litigants; now the man who lies within is happy and fortunate, and judges a difficult door the mark of a blessed and powerful man. He does not know that the door of a prison is the hardest of all. Assume beforehand in your mind that you have many things to endure. Does anyone marvel that he is cold in winter? That he is seasick at sea, jolted on the road? The mind is brave toward those things to which it comes prepared.

37.4. Placed in a less honourable seat, you have begun to be angry at the host, at the inviter, at the very man preferred before you. Madman, what does it matter what part of the couch you press? Can a cushion make you more honourable or more base?

37.5. You have looked with no fair eyes upon a certain man, because he spoke ill of your talent. Do you accept this law? Then Ennius, in whom you take no delight, would have hated you, and Hortensius, if you disapproved his speeches, would declare a feud against you, and Cicero, if you derided his verses, would be your enemy. As a candidate, will you not bear the votes with an even mind!

38.1. Someone has done you an insult. Was it greater than the one done to Diogenes the Stoic philosopher, upon whom, at the very moment he was discoursing on anger, an insolent youth spat? He bore this gently and wisely: "I am not, indeed, angry," he said, "but I am in doubt whether I ought to be angry." How much better did our Cato do!

38.2. He, when, as he was pleading a case, that Lentulus—a man factious and ungoverned within our fathers' memory—had spat upon the middle of his forehead, drawing up as much thick spittle as he could, wiped his face and said: "I will affirm to all men, Lentulus, that they are mistaken who deny that you have a mouth."

39.1. We have now succeeded, Novatus, in composing the mind well; it either does not feel wrathfulness or is superior to it. Let us see how we may soothe another's; for we wish not only to be sound ourselves, but to make others sound.

39.2. We shall not venture to soothe the first anger with speech. It is deaf and out of its mind; we shall give it space. Remedies do good in the remissions. We do not handle swelling eyes, lest by moving the stiffened part we provoke it, nor the other ailments while they are at their height. The beginnings of diseases are cured by rest.

39.3. "How small," you say, "is the profit of your remedy, if it appeases anger that is leaving off of its own accord!" First, it brings it about that it leaves off the sooner; next, it guards against its returning; and the very impulse which it does not venture to soothe, it will outwit; it will remove all the instruments of vengeance, it will feign anger, that, as a helper and companion of the grief, it may have more authority in its counsels; it will contrive delays and, while it seeks a greater penalty, will defer the present one.

39.4. By every art it will give the frenzy a respite. If it is more violent, it will strike into it either shame, which it cannot resist, or fear; if weaker, it will bring in talk either welcome or new, and divert it by the desire of learning. They say that a physician, when he had to cure a king's daughter and could not without the knife, while he gently soothed the swollen breast, slipped in a scalpel hidden in a sponge. The girl would have struggled against a remedy openly applied; because she did not expect it, she bore the pain. Some things are cured only by being deceived.

40.1. To one you will say: "See that your wrathfulness be not a pleasure to your enemies"; to another: "See that your greatness of mind and the strength credited to you among most men do not fall. I am indignant, by Hercules, and find no measure for my grief, but the time must be awaited; he will pay the penalty; keep this in your mind; when you are able, you will repay even with interest for the delay." To chastise the angry, however, and to be angry at them in turn, is to incite them;

40.2. you will approach them in various ways and gently, unless perhaps you be so great a person that you can crush the anger, as the deified Augustus did when he was dining with Vedius Pollio. One of his slaves had broken a crystal cup; Vedius ordered him to be seized to die in no common fashion: he was ordered to be thrown to the lampreys, huge ones, which he kept in a fishpond. Who would not have thought he did this for the sake of luxury? It was savagery.

40.3. The boy slipped from their hands and fled to Caesar's feet, asking nothing else than to perish otherwise—not to be made fish-food. Caesar was moved by the novelty of the cruelty and ordered him to be released, but all the crystal to be broken before his eyes and the fishpond to be filled in.

40.4. Caesar had thus to chastise his friend; he made good use of his power: "Do you order men to be snatched from a banquet and torn apart by new kinds of punishment? If your cup is broken, shall a man's entrails be pulled apart? Will you please yourself so far as to order anyone to be led off where Caesar is?"

40.5. So let a man who has so much power that he can attack anger from a higher place handle it ill—but only such anger as I just now described, savage, monstrous, bloodthirsty, which is now incurable unless it has come to fear something greater.

41.1. Let us give peace to the mind, which the constant meditation of saving precepts will give, and good deeds, and a mind intent upon the desire of the honourable alone. Let us satisfy our conscience, let us labour nothing for reputation.

41.2. Let reputation follow even an evil one, so long as it follows one who deserves well. "But the crowd admires high-spirited and bold men are held in honour, the peaceable are reckoned slothful." At first glance, perhaps; but as soon as the evenness of his life has produced confidence that it is not sluggishness of mind but peace, the same people venerate and reverence them.

41.3. This foul and hostile passion, then, has in it nothing useful, but on the contrary all evils—the sword and fire. Trampling shame underfoot, it has stained its hands with slaughter, scattered the limbs of children, left nothing free of crime, mindful of no glory, fearing no infamy, beyond amendment when from anger it has hardened into hatred.

42.1. Let us be free of this evil, and let us purge the mind and tear it out by the roots, which, however slender the fibres that have clung anywhere, will grow again; and let us not temper anger, but remove it altogether—for what tempering is there of an evil thing? We shall be able, if only we strive.

42.2. And nothing will profit us more than the thought of our mortality. Let each man say to himself and to another: "What good is it to declare angers, as though we were born for eternity, and to squander a most brief span of life? What good is it to transfer to the pain and torment of someone the days which it is permitted to spend on honourable pleasure? These things do not bear waste, nor is there time to spare for losing.

42.3. Why do we rush into a fight? Why do we summon contests for ourselves? Why, forgetful of our weakness, do we take up vast hatreds and rise up, fragile, to break others? Soon a fever or some other bodily ill will forbid these enmities, which we carry on with an implacable mind, to be carried on; soon death, coming between, will part the keenest pair.

42.4. Why do we make tumult and, like rebels, throw life into confusion? Fate stands over our head and reckons up the days of the dying and draws nearer and nearer; that time which you appoint for another's death is perhaps near to your own."

43.1. Why do you not rather gather up your short life and render it peaceful both for yourself and for others? Why do you not rather make yourself loved by all while you live, and longed for when you have departed? Why do you long to drag down a man who deals too haughtily with you? Why do you try to wear down with your strength a man who snarls at you—lowly, indeed, and despised, but sour and troublesome to his betters? Why are you angry at your slave, at your master, at your king, at your client? Hold out a little; behold, death comes, which will make you equals.

43.2. We are wont to see, among the morning shows of the arena, the fight of a bull and a bear bound together, whom, when they have torn each other, their own finisher awaits. We do the same: we provoke someone bound to us, when an end—and an early one—threatens both the conquered and the conqueror. Rather let us pass what little remains in quiet and at peace! Let our corpse lie hateful to no one!

43.3. Often a fire raised in the neighbourhood breaks up a brawl, and the coming of a wild beast parts the robber and the traveller. There is no leisure to wrestle with lesser evils when a greater fear has appeared. What have we to do with fighting and ambushes? Do you wish anything more for the man at whom you are angry than death? Even if you rest, he will die. You waste your effort if you wish to do what is going to happen anyway.

43.4. "I do not wish," you say, "to kill him outright, but to punish him with exile, with disgrace, with loss." I more readily pardon the man who covets an enemy's wound than the one who covets his blister; for this one is not only of an evil mind, but of a petty one. Whether you are thinking of the extreme punishments or of lighter ones, how brief is the time in which either he is racked by his penalty or you take an evil joy from another's! Soon we shall breathe out this breath of ours.

43.5. Meanwhile, while we draw breath, while we are among men, let us cultivate humanity. Let us be a terror to no one, a danger to no one; let us despise losses, injuries, revilings, and pinpricks, and let us bear our brief discomforts with a great spirit. While we look back, as they say, and turn about, mortality will already be at hand.