§ 1. To have conquered pleasures is a great part of wisdom; to have bridled anger belongs to a strong and almost unconquered spirit. Therefore this moderation too is altogether necessary in the commonwealth, and its consideration is connected with those things which we have said concerning pleasures. For irascibility is born especially from wine and a soft education.
“It is difficult,” says Seneca in Book II, Chapter XX of On Anger, “to change nature, nor is it permissible to alter the elements of things once commingled at birth. But the knowledge of this is useful, so that wine may be withdrawn from heated talents; Plato judges that it must be denied to children and forbids fire to be incited by fire. Nor indeed must they be filled with food, for their bodies will be distended and their minds will swell with the body.”
The same things which lead children to good hope generate insolence and irascibility. Nothing makes men more irascible than a soft and indulgent education. Thus Seneca, Book II, Chapter XXI of On Anger: “Therefore,” he says, “we shall not release them into idleness and leisure, and we shall keep them far from contact with delicacies. For from joy comes exultation; swelling and an excessive estimation of oneself follow exultation; thence comes irascibility, for it is an opinion that contempt or injury has been received.” Those who are reared indulgently and amid delicacies interpret it as an injury if they are not treated most softly.
“Therefore,” says the same Seneca, “the more indulgence is shown to only children and the more that wards are permitted, the more corrupt is their mind. He to whom nothing has ever been denied, whose tears an anxious mother has always wiped away, for whom satisfaction has been exacted from his tutor, will not withstand offenses. Do you not see that the greater each man’s fortune is, the greater the anger which accompanies it? It appears especially in the rich, the noble, and magistrates, when a favorable breeze has raised up whatever was light and empty in their mind. Felicity nourishes irascibility where a crowd of flatterers has surrounded haughty ears.”
And in Chapter XXV: “The boy is insufficiently quick, or the water for drinking is rather lukewarm, or his couch is disturbed, or the table is set out rather negligently. It is insanity to be incited by these things. He is sick and of unhappy health whom a light breeze has contracted; eyes are diseased which a white garment troubles; that man is dissolved by delicacies whose side aches from another’s labor. They say that Mindyrides was a citizen of the Sybarites. When he had seen someone digging and raising the mattock rather high, he complained that he was becoming weary and forbade the man to do the work in his sight. The same man complained more frequently because he had lain upon doubled rose-leaves. When pleasures have corrupted mind and body together, nothing seems tolerable—not because the things are hard, but because those who suffer them are soft.
“For what reason is there that someone’s cough, or a sneeze, or a fly driven away with insufficient care should drive you into madness? Or an overturned cup, or a key slipped from the hands of a negligent slave? Will that man bear with an even mind civic reproach and curses heaped upon him in an assembly or senate-house, whose ears the creaking of a bench dragged along offends? Will he endure hunger and the thirst of a summer campaign who is angry at a boy for diluting the snow badly?”
§ 2. Blandishments, therefore, make men irascible because they make them delicate, because they make them weak, and especially because they make them arrogant. I am accustomed to laugh at foolish parents and indulgent teachers when they speak concerning the contumacy of young men: “I offended him in no matter, I denied him nothing; no parent ever loved his sons in this manner. Now he is ungrateful; others, upon whom I bestowed less, return great thanks.” On the contrary, he owes you no thanks because you corrupted him. One admonition has struck out the memory of all your blandishments.
But I shall treat these matters in the book concerning education. Now let us consider anger, the daughter of luxury. The daughter of luxury, I say, but the mother and servant of cruelty. For inhumanity is akin to delicacies. Nero was so soft that he seemed to possess nothing manly, so cruel that he seemed to possess nothing soft.
Anger, or ὀργή, is:
ὄρεξις μετὰ λύπης τιμωρίας φαινομένης, διὰ φαινομένην τὴν ὀλιγωρίαν, τὴν εἰς αὐτόν, ἢ εἰς αὐτοῦ τινα, μὴ προσηκόντως.
- Anger is a desire for vengeance; 2. with pain or sadness; 3. for apparent vengeance; 4. on account of apparent contempt for oneself or for one of one’s own, unfittingly. Thus speaks the best master of defining in Book II, Chapter II of the Rhetoric.
He establishes three kinds of contempt. Καταφρόνησιν, disdain, when one values the thing and the person at nothing. Ἐπηρεασμὸν, spite, which is contempt when an impediment is placed in the way of another’s wishes, not so that the man himself may obtain some advantage from the matter, but lest it accrue to the other. Ὕβριν, insult, when harm and vexation are inflicted upon another with dishonor to the sufferer, not so that something else may accrue to the agent, but so that he may take pleasure.
Seneca, in Book I, Chapter III of On Anger, cites the Aristotelian definition: anger is a desire to repay pain. But an irascible man differs from an angry man, as Seneca explains there in Chapter IV, as a drunkard differs from a drunk man, and one who is afraid from a timid man. Cicero says in Book IV of the Tusculan Disputations that they differ in the same manner as anxiety differs from anguish.
Seneca describes the variety of irascible men. I shall pass over the remaining things which, under several names among the Greeks, distinguish anger into species, because among us they do not have their own terms—even if we speak of a bitter man and a harsh one, and no less of a choleric, raging, clamorous, difficult, and rough man, all of which are differences of angers. Among these you may place the morose man, a delicate kind of irascibility. For there are some angers which subside within clamor; some are no less persistent than frequent; some are savage with the hand and more sparing in words; some pour themselves out in the bitterness of words and curses; some do not go beyond complaints and aversions; some are deep and grave and are turned inward. There are a thousand other species of this manifold evil.
The Greeks call them:
πικρούς, μακρολύπους, ἀκροχόλους, χαλεπούς, κρυψιχόλους, δυσαρέστους, ὀργίλους, ὀξυχόλους, θυμοειδεῖς.
That is: bitter, long-grieving, readily choleric, difficult, concealing anger, hard to please, irascible, quick-tempered, and passionate. Enough has been said concerning the recognition of anger, which is more excellent than defining it.
§ 3. Anger is the greatest and a public evil, for it has afflicted the city more violently than any other thing. Homer too wished to indicate this when he calls the μῆνιν—the wrath—of Achilles οὐλομένην, destructive. Seneca says in Book III, Chapter II of On Anger: “Finally, the other vices seize individuals; this is the one affection which is sometimes conceived publicly. Never has a whole people burned with love for one woman,
nor has an entire city placed its hope in money or profit. Ambition occupies individual men one by one; impotence is not a public evil. Often men have gone into anger in one column. Men, women, old men, children, princes, and the common people have agreed; and the whole multitude, incited by a very few words, has outstripped the inciter himself. Immediately there has been a running to arms and fires, and wars have been declared upon neighbors or waged with fellow-citizens. Whole houses have been burned with their entire stock; and a man held a short while ago in favor because of his eloquence, amid the height of honor, has borne the anger of his own assembly; legions have turned their javelins against their commander.
“The whole plebs has dissented from the fathers; the public council, the senate, without waiting for levies and without naming a commander, has chosen sudden leaders for its anger; and, pursuing noble men through the houses of the city, has taken punishment with its own hand. It has violated embassies, the law of nations having been broken, and unspeakable madness has carried off the state. No time was given in which the public swelling might subside, but fleets were immediately launched and loaded with a hastily gathered soldiery. Without custom, without auspices, the people, under the leadership of its own anger, attacked what chance offered and bore things snatched up as weapons; then with a great slaughter it paid for the rashness of its audacious anger.”
Saul suddenly slaughtered the priests and their city; Nebuchadnezzar condemned three leading men to the fire. I related the irascibility of Cambyses, joined with drunkenness, in the preceding chapter. But it especially befits kings to act without anger. Seneca speaks beautifully in Book III, Chapter XVI of On Anger: “But although restraint of their passions, and especially of this rabid and unbridled one, is useful to subjects, it is more useful to kings. All things perish where fortune permits as much as anger counsels, nor can a power which is exercised to the harm of many stand for long. For we are endangered when a common fear has joined those who groan separately. Therefore at one time individuals have slaughtered very many rulers, at another time all together, when public grief has compelled them to bring their angers together into one.”
Yet very many have exercised anger as though it were a royal insignia, as did Darius, who first, after the dominion was taken from the Magus, obtained the Persians and a great part of the East. For when he had declared war upon the Scythians, who surrounded the East, and was asked by Oeobazus, a noble old man, to leave one of his three sons as a consolation to his father and to use the service of two, he promised more than was asked and said that he would remit them all to him; then he cast them down, slain, in the sight of their parent—though he would have been cruel if he had led all of them away.
But how much more lenient was Xerxes? When Pythius, father of five sons, sought exemption for one, he permitted him to choose the one he wished; he then tore the chosen one into two parts, placed them on either side of the road, and purified his army with this victim. Therefore he had the end which he deserved. Defeated and routed far and wide, seeing everywhere his ruin laid flat, he walked amid the corpses of his men.
Was this ferocity in anger peculiar to barbarian kings whom no learning and no cultivation of letters had imbued? I shall give you from the bosom of Aristotle King Alexander, who at a banquet ran through with a weapon Clitus, a man most dear to him and reared together with him—and indeed with his own hand—because he flattered too little and passed reluctantly from a Macedonian and a free man into Persian servitude. For he cast Lysimachus, equally familiar to him, to a lion. Was this Lysimachus, then, after escaping the lion’s teeth by a certain good fortune, milder on that account when he himself reigned? For he fed Telesphorus the Rhodian, his friend, for a long time in a cage as though he were some new and unusual animal, after he had cut him down on every side and cut off his ears and nose. When the deformity of the truncated and mutilated face had destroyed his human countenance, there were added hunger, squalor, and the filth of a body abandoned in its own dung; his knees and hands were calloused besides, for the narrowness of the place forced him to use them as feet, and his sides were ulcerated by rubbing. His appearance was no less foul than terrible to those who saw him; made a monster by his punishment, he had also lost compassion. Yet, although the man who suffered these things was most unlike a human being, the man who did them was more unlike one.
Would that this savagery had remained among foreign examples and that the barbarism of punishments and angers had not passed into Roman morals with other imported vices! Lucius Sulla ordered the legs of Marcus Marius—upon whom the people had set up statues street by street and to whom the Roman people made supplication with incense and wine—to be broken, his eyes torn out, and his hands cut off; and, as though he killed him as many times as he wounded him, he tore him apart gradually and limb by limb. Who was the minister of this command? Who but Catiline, already exercising his hands for every crime? He mangled him before the tomb of Quintus Catulus, a most grievous burden upon the ashes of a most gentle man; above them a popular man indeed of bad example, and loved not so undeservedly as excessively, gave his blood drop by drop. Marius was worthy to suffer those things, Sulla to order them, Catiline to perform them; but the commonwealth was unworthy to receive into its own body the swords of enemies and citizens alike.
Why do I pursue ancient things? Just now Gaius Caesar, on one day, cut down with scourges and tortured Sextus Papinius, whose father had been consul; Belienus Bassus, his quaestor and the son of his procurator; other senators; and Roman knights—not for the sake of an inquiry, but for the sake of his disposition. Then he was so impatient of deferring the pleasure which immense cruelty demanded without delay that, while walking in the promenade of his mother’s gardens which separates the portico from the riverbank, he decapitated some of them by lamplight in the company of matrons and other senators. What was pressing? What private or public danger did a single night threaten? How small a thing was it to wait for daylight? Finally, was it necessary that, wearing slippers, he should kill senators of the Roman people?
§ 4. Shall I add to these monsters the emperor Severus, truly severe and truly worthy of his name? The world has scarcely experienced a man more irascible. For whom of all those whom chance and necessity had cast into the opposing camp did he ever spare? Nor was his anger satiated by the death of his enemies. “He ordered,” says Aelius Spartianus, “the corpses of the senators who had been slain in the war to be scattered. Then, when the body of Albinus, almost half-dead, was brought to him, he ordered the head to be cut off and carried to Rome, and accompanied it with a letter. Albinus was defeated on the eleventh day before the Kalends of March. He ordered the rest of his body to be exposed before his own house and divided. Moreover, sitting upon a horse himself, he drove it over Albinus’s corpse and admonished it, when it took fright, to trample it boldly with the bridle loosened.”
Others add that he ordered the same corpse to be cast into the Rhône together with those of his wife and children. After innumerable men of Albinus’s party had been killed, among whom were many leading men of the state and many illustrious women, the goods of them all were confiscated and increased the treasury; then many nobles of the Spaniards and Gauls were killed. Finally, he gave the soldiers as much pay as no prince had given. He also left his sons as much from this proscription as none of the emperors had left, since he had already made a great part of the gold throughout the Gauls, Spains, and Italy imperial property; and then for the first time the administration of the private estates was established. Many, indeed, who preserved their loyalty to Albinus after his death were defeated in war by Severus.
§ 5. What movements does that beast excite in the commonwealth, with what swift desire for vengeance, with what blind rush to injure—and does it not spare itself? Valerius says in Book IX, Chapter III: When Livius Salinator was leaving the city to wage war against Hasdrubal, Fabius Maximus admonished him not to descend into battle before he had learned the strength and spirit of the enemy. He replied that he would not omit the first opportunity of fighting. When asked by the same man why he wished to join battle so hastily, he said, “That I may as quickly as possible take either glory from the defeated enemy or joy from my prostrate fellow-citizens.” Anger and courage then divided his speech between them: the former mindful of his unjust condemnation, the latter intent upon the glory of a triumph. But I do not know whether saying this and conquering in this way belonged to the same man.
No less blindly did Roman legions, to the great advantage of the enemy, satiate their resentment and anger. When Fabius was consul, the entire infantry was sent to destroy the enemy’s forces. Although it could destroy them, it refused, retaining in its mind fixed anger over the agrarian law which he had obstructed. Under Appius as leader, although it could conquer, it preferred to turn its back upon the enemy, lest the commander, whose father it knew had assailed its advantages, should triumph in the manner of victors.
§ 6. Quintus Metellus, through hatred of Quintus Pompeius, who was being sent as his successor, almost betrayed conquered Spain. For he dismissed all who had only wished that their military service should be ended. He gave provisions to those requesting them without examining their grounds and without appointing a time. After removing the guards, he offered the granaries ready for plunder. He ordered the bows and arrows of the Cretans to be broken and cast into a river. He forbade food to be given to the elephants. As by these deeds he indulged his desire, so he corrupted the glory of things magnificently conducted; and, a stronger conqueror of enemies than of anger, he lost the merited honor of a triumph.
What is more disgraceful than Julian, who, when administering justice and repeatedly blazing up, not only uttered indecorous reproaches and gestures, but, rushing in the manner of a buffoon upon countrymen disputing at law, struck them with his fists? For anger drives out all sense of shame. It is the more destructive because every angry person judges his own indignation just. For he who has been able to condemn it has already conquered it.
§ 7. If we look at the causes of angers and disturbances in the city and the household, we shall discover that most are doubtful, light, to be pardoned in view of the persons, or unjust; and when vengeance appears just, it nevertheless frequently exceeds measure.
Doubtful causes have entangled kings and cities in most certain destructions. “Therefore,” says Seneca in Book II, Chapter XXII of On Anger, “we ought to fight against the first causes. The cause of irascibility is an opinion of injury, to which credence must not readily be given; nor indeed must one immediately accede even to open and manifest appearances. For some false things bear the appearance of truth. Time must always be given; a day reveals the truth. Let ears not be receptive to accusers; let this vice of human nature be suspected and known to us—that we willingly believe things which we hear unwillingly, and become angry before we judge. What of the fact that we are impelled not only by accusations but by suspicions, and, interpreting worse things from another’s face and laugh, become angry at innocent men? Therefore the absent man’s case must be pleaded against oneself, and anger must be held in suspense. For a delayed penalty can be exacted; an exacted one cannot be recalled.”
That tyrannicide is well known who, seized before his work was completed and tortured by Hippias so that he might disclose his accomplices, named the friends of the tyrant who he knew held the tyrant’s safety most dear. When Hippias had ordered each to be killed as he was named, he asked, “Does anyone remain?” “You alone,” he said, “for I have left no one else to whom you were dear.” Anger brought it about that the tyrant lent his hands to the tyrannicide and cut down his own defenses with his own sword.
With how great a spirit did Alexander act? When he had read his mother’s letter, in which he was admonished to beware the poison of Philip the physician, he drank the potion he had received without being deterred. He trusted his friend more than himself. He was worthy to have an innocent friend, worthy to make him one. I praise this all the more in Alexander because no one was so liable to anger. But the rarer moderation is in kings, the more it must be praised.
There was the greatest affection between Aristobulus and his brother, but Aristobulus, credulous and hasty, destroyed his brother Antigonus and his only friend. Josephus relates the matter thus in Book XIII, Chapter XIX of the Antiquities. When Antigonus once returned magnificently from a war, at the time when the people celebrated the solemn feast of Tabernacles, it happened that Aristobulus lay sick. His brother, however, splendidly adorned because he was to participate in the sacred rites, ascended into the temple with an armed retinue, especially in order to make vows for the king’s health. Then those whose purpose was to excite discord between the brothers, having obtained an opportunity from Antigonus’s successful deeds and the procession which he had prepared, came to the king and exaggerated everything. They said that these things were now above the condition of a private man and were manifest indications that he was seeking the kingdom. They said that he would shortly come with a strong band of armed men to kill the king, because he judged it foolish to be content with a share of the honor when he could possess the royal throne.
Although Aristobulus did not entirely believe them, nevertheless, so that he might both take precautions and avoid suspicion and might consult his own security, he stationed guards in a certain dark and underground place—for he lay in the tower which afterward, its name having been changed, was called Antonia. He commanded that, if his brother came without arms, no one should touch him, but, if he approached armed, that he should be slain. Yet first he sent to him one who was to ask that he come unarmed. But the queen and the remaining plotters persuaded the messenger to say the contrary: that his brother had heard that he had procured remarkable armor for himself and wished to behold him thus armed. Antigonus, suspecting nothing evil and relying upon his brother’s benevolence, came just as he was, in all his armor, to Aristobulus, intending to offer himself for inspection. When he arrived at the tower of Straton, where the passage was very dark, he was slain by the guards. This misfortune easily shows how much envy and false accusation can do and how effective they are at overthrowing even natural benevolence. And at the same time these events teach that judgment should be deferred in a doubtful case.
What made Constantine’s court Neronian and took the young Crispus from the empire, except hasty irascibility arising from credulity? What drove Herod into a fury against his own blood and affections, except that he believed doubtful and fabricated accusations as though true? Therefore, when you think that you have received an injury, restrain your spirit until you learn something certain. Let anger not rage before reason judges.
If others report something, doubt for a little while. “We ought not,” says Seneca in Book II, Chapter XXIX, “quickly to believe things which have been narrated. Many lie in order to deceive; many because they have been deceived. One man seeks favor by an accusation and feigns an injury in order that he may seem to have grieved at its commission. There is some malicious man who wishes to tear apart close friendships; there is a suspicious man, and one who desires to watch games so that from far away and in safety he may look upon those whom he has brought into collision. If you were to judge concerning a very small sum, the matter would not be proved to you without a witness; a witness would have no force without swearing an oath. You would give both parties an advocate, you would give time, and you would not hear them at the same time; for truth shines forth the more, the more frequently it comes to hand.”
This counsel is altogether golden. If princes and senators were willing to use it, wretched human beings would have avoided half their evils, and they would torment neither themselves with anxiety nor others with hatred.
§ 8. It is most grievous when supreme power has incited itself against an innocent man, because it admits no defense; it does not even permit innocence to be indicated, because it judges this to be a reproach against its unjust fury. Princes are therefore more inflamed by the remedy itself, since integrity itself, as though a witness of their unjust blazing-up, is rendered hateful to them. In turn, however, those princes are rendered most hateful who not only give ear to rash accusers but also believe them, deny access to men justly defending themselves, and moreover grow angry. And, what is the worst vice of the human disposition, because they think that those men have injured them, they hate them. They hate them for this reason: because they judge those men ill-disposed toward them and because they fear them.
For although they know them to be weak, they nevertheless know that there is danger even from an invalid, especially if an adversary, of whatever sort, has been exasperated. For:
Anger assists hands however weak.
Therefore those who, with anger as leader, proceed to an accusation of princes or the commonwealth, and who declare hostility against more powerful men when they are permitted to be silent, dangerously indulge their own spirit. Let that most familiar saying of the man who grew old in attendance upon kings remain fixed in every mind. When someone asked how he had attained the rarest thing at court, old age, he said, “By receiving injuries and returning thanks.” You stand on sufficiently slippery ground if you preside over a commonwealth or serve a prince; there is no need for you to drive yourself onward.
What did the Roman knights attain when they grieved so greatly that the praetorship had been conferred upon Gnaeus Flavius that they took off their rings and horse-trappings? So great was the impotence of their passions, but it was empty and ridiculous to the more powerful people. For first the people judged that they had thus placed their votes well; for they had ordered Flavius, a man of the lowest condition, to be praetor in order that they might brand proud nobility with grief, and their disgrace would have been lost had the equestrian order not thus grown angry. Next, they alienated the people still more. For, since very many were equal to Gnaeus Flavius and very many inferior to him, all judged that they were despised in him as poor and low. Finally, they showed the people the part by which they lay open to a wound.
§ 9. It happens much more frequently that the cause for raging is light. And the smaller the cause, the more wicked the fury is. If hot water is not properly supplied, they drench the servant with boiling water. If a glass has been broken, a boy is dragged to the moray eels. If a shoe has been spattered with mud, the man who could not guard against it is beaten. If a toga has been disturbed, a day in court is appointed for the man who met it by chance. If a hare is insufficiently suited to the palate, the cook is cut apart by scourges. If one hair is arranged without order, a little maidservant is mangled. What sort of insanity is this? Anger is assuredly blind, or κελαινώπις, dark-eyed, and with its obscure eye it casts one down from the mind. Children dissolve into tears over lost nuts; arthritic men cry out at the suspicion of a touch; every breeze suddenly casts down weak bodies.
It is shameful to say how small a matter compels the most powerful kings into wars; but the same cause entangles private persons in quarrels and lawsuits. Their wars are not milder, nor their angers more civilized; their power is merely less. Wretched is the spirit which is so easily offended: it must be perpetually in grief, because small offenses are never lacking, and often immense ones also remain. The Greeks call μικρολύπους, “small-grievers,” those whom every loss and every adversity afflicts, who boil over at trifles, fashion tragedies out of minute things, and always swell as though in ferment.
Let them instead imitate Cotys. When pottery fashioned with costly workmanship but fragile had been given to him, he broke all of it, lest, if it should be shattered by servants handling it carelessly, it should furnish him an occasion for raging. Who would call Nero sane? He blazed up at the smallest things to such a degree that he ordered many men to be killed because they had praised the divine voice of the prince coldly or had disparaged the pleasures of the prince. He repudiated Octavia and struck out Poppaea’s unborn child. While Gaius reigned and conducted many things foolishly, it was a capital crime for nobles to have laughed. In the presence of Tiberius, to have named a goat was a crime of treason, because, bloodthirsty as he was, beneath those broad jaws he wore a beard not unlike one. To have looked down from a higher place and noticed his baldness was punished by no lesser a penalty than if someone had cast stones at him as he passed. Therefore these men must be agitated by perpetual provocations of irascibility.
What of Mindyrides, the most ruined not merely of men but of Sybarites—or rather his name is Smindyrides—concerning whom Herodotus speaks in Book VII and Aelian in Book IX, Chapter XXIV? He boasts that for twenty years he had seen neither the sun rising nor setting. As Athenaeus relates in Book VI, Chapter XII, when he set out for Sicyon, he drew bird-catchers, fishermen, and a thousand cooks along that journey. With how great a care must we suppose him to have lived, how often angry, if there was a danger that he might see the rising or setting of the sun? He trembled at the light of dawn as though at the head of Medusa.
“When he saw someone digging,” says Seneca in Book II, Chapter XXV of On Anger, “and raising the mattock rather high, he complained that he was becoming weary and forbade the man to do the work in his sight. The same man complained more frequently because he had lain upon doubled rose-leaves.” The reading of another book in Justus Lipsius is more astonishing: “The same man complained more frequently that he had bile because he had lain upon doubled rose-leaves.” If things so small, so utterly nothing, aroused not merely anger but so great an anger, what may we think concerning the rest? For if his shoe pressed him, could he not have killed someone?
Even if the causes are neither doubtful nor light, they are nevertheless frequently of such a kind that they must be pardoned in view of the persons, or certainly not imputed. Nabal had inflicted a grave injury upon David, an innocent prince; but when David hastened to avenge himself and his men, he pardoned it at the entreaty of Nabal’s wife and in consideration of his stupidity. If the man who injured you is an enemy, it is nothing new; if a friend, charge it to his former good deeds. Let the age of this man, the dignity of that one, and the imprudence of another excuse him. Among equitable judges imprudence is held for innocence. Here the kindness and humanity of Christ the Savior is an example to us, as upon the cross he entreated for those who did not know what they were doing.
§ 10. Finally, if the cause is unjust, anger inflicts the greatest disasters and fills everything with plots and machinations: if a man grows angry because another either was unwilling or unable to drink as much as he ordered; if he refused to be the servant of tyrannical cruelty or lust; if he did not learn to flatter with sufficient abasement. Those dominions were never safe which pressed heavily and angrily upon virtues. But the treatment of these evils pertains to the books concerning war and sedition. Now we transmit those things which are fit for extinguishing so great and destructive a flame; both the things which have been said and those which I am about to say will contribute very greatly to this.
The recollection of oneself has drawn back many who were swift to vengeance and has put the brake upon armed anger. Christians and pagans counsel this alike. Gregory, Morals, Book V, Chapter XXXII: “The second manner of preserving forbearance is that, when we behold the excesses of others, we should consider our own offenses in which we have exceeded against others. For our own infirmity, when considered, excuses the evils of others to us. He patiently tolerates an injury inflicted upon him who piously remembers that perhaps he still possesses something in which he himself ought to be tolerated. And anger is extinguished as though by water when, as fury rises in the mind, each man’s own fault is recalled to mind, because he blushes not to spare sins in another when he recollects that he himself has often committed things which need to be pardoned either by God or by his neighbor.”
And Seneca says in Book II, Chapter XXVIII: “But we cannot show ourselves according even to that strictest formula of innocence. We have done some things, thought others, wished others, favored others; in certain things we are innocent because we did not succeed. Thinking of this, let us be more equitable toward offenders; let us yield to those who reproach us; in any case let us not be angry with ourselves—with whom, indeed, shall we not be angry if we are angry even with ourselves?—and least of all with the gods. For we suffer whatever inconvenience befalls us not by their fault but by the law of mortality.”
And again: “Whoever refers to himself how often he has fallen into a false suspicion, how many of his services fortune has clothed with the appearance of injury, and how many men he began to love after hatred, will be able not to grow angry immediately—especially if, silently to himself, at every individual thing by which he is offended, he says, ‘I too have committed this.’ But where will you find so equitable a judge? The man who desires every other man’s wife and considers it a sufficiently just cause for loving her that she belongs to another does not wish his own wife to be looked upon; the most severe exactor of fidelity is faithless; the man who pursues lies is himself perjured; the false accuser bears it most ill that a lawsuit is brought against him. He who has not spared his own chastity does not wish that of his little slaves to be assailed.”
We have the faults of others before our eyes; our own are behind our back. Judah acknowledged his sin while, forgetful of his own fornication, he condemned his daughter-in-law to cruel flames. So great is the depravity of the human disposition that men most gravely prosecute offenses to which they themselves are especially liable. Pirates punish the thefts of their comrades with death; men who expend nations upon their own anger pronounce judgment concerning the lawsuits of citizens. “Pardon others much, yourself nothing,” was said to the ancient nations. I fear that this is too difficult for Christians. I shall therefore soften it; perhaps I shall obtain something: pardon something in others, you who pardon everything in yourself. The foolish love of the man who says this is worthy of notice:
I myself forgive myself.
But if nevertheless this self-love is too tenacious to be struck out, pardon others also. But if you are unwilling to pardon, you will be driven from the state of your mind more quickly than you will correct others by becoming angry. Gregory Nazianzen teaches that anger, when vehemently inflamed, casts and drives a man from the state of his mind. Solomon too teaches thus, Proverbs 27:3: “A stone is heavy, and sand burdensome, but the anger of a fool is heavier than both.” And Saint Gregory, Morals, Book V, Chapter XXXI: “The heart kindled by the goads of anger throbs, the body trembles, the tongue entangles itself, the face grows fiery, the eyes become fierce, and acquaintances are not recognized at all. The tongue indeed forms an outcry, but the understanding does not know what it speaks. How far, then, is that man from one possessed, who is not conscious of his own action?”
And Seneca, Book II, Chapter XXXVI of On Anger: “This should be considered more: how many men anger has harmed by itself. Some have burst their veins through excessive heat; shouting raised beyond their strength has brought forth blood, and humor driven more violently into the eyes has flooded the sight of their eyes, and the sick have relapsed into diseases. No road to insanity is swifter. Many, therefore, have continued the fury of anger and never recovered the mind which they had driven out.
“Fury drove Ajax to death, anger into fury. Men pray for death for their children, want for themselves, and ruin for their house; and, no less than the insane deny that they are insane, these furious men deny that they are angry. Enemies to their dearest friends, to be avoided by those most dear to them, forgetful of laws except where laws injure, moved by the smallest things, they are accessible neither to speech, duty, nor approach. They conduct everything by force, prepared both to fight with swords and to fall upon them. For the greatest evil has seized them, one surpassing all vices.”
How great is this evil, which even invokes evil upon itself, when the other passions flee evil?
§ 11. It is a delight to see the angers of men behaving insanely and almost furiously. Plutarch’s little book Περὶ ἀοργησίας, On Freedom from Anger, is golden. He relates concerning a certain pancratiast that he was so liable to anger that he kicked back against a mule which kicked him. See examples of foolish anger in kings; the first is—and would that it were the last:
The madness of Cyrus—the Gyndes.
“Cyrus,” says Seneca in Book III, Chapter XXI of On Anger, “was angry with a river. For when he was hastening to war in order to attack Babylon—a war whose greatest moments lie in opportunities—he attempted to cross by a ford the river Gyndes, which spread widely. This is scarcely safe even when it has felt the summer and been reduced to its lowest point. There one of the white horses which were accustomed to draw the royal chariot was swept away and vehemently moved the king. He therefore swore that he would reduce that river, which had taken passage away from royal horses, to such a condition that it could be crossed and even trodden upon by women. He then transferred the whole apparatus of war to this place and remained at the work until, the channel having been divided by one hundred and eighty trenches, he dispersed it into three hundred and sixty streams and left it dry as the waters flowed in diverse directions.
“Therefore time perished, with great loss in vain matters; the ardor of the soldiers, which useless labor broke, perished; and the opportunity of attacking men unprepared perished while he, after declaring war upon the enemy, waged it against the river.” Xerxes was more foolish, for he inflicted three hundred lashes upon the sea. Sapor, king of the Persians, was impious and foolish; when about to depart from Nisibis after his siege had been rendered vain by divine power, he discharged a missile into the air as though about to injure God. Many have turned their angers upon themselves, and this is assuredly the final thing, for every madness consumes itself; and the scorpion, when it has despaired of life, falls upon its own tail with a just wound.
All vices indeed produce anger: avarice, if you cut off profits or bring losses; lust, if you impede loves; and so the remaining vices, whenever the things sought are denied to desire, call angers to their aid. But nothing exasperates anger more than pride, for anger is therefore an opinion of contempt. Hence there are always quarrels among the proud. Hence among nobles, whose ancient vice is pride, there are so many contests, single combats, and plots, because they very easily judge that they have received an injury. Hence in cities which cultivate aristocracy there are very many dissensions. Hence there are destructive laws, dangerous when war approaches, which indulge the anger of the powerful against subjects. Such are either the laws or customs of the Sarmatians by which the life of farmers is held cheap.
§ 12. Nevertheless, patrons of anger are not lacking—indeed, neither are its eulogists. They say that it is useful to the commonwealth and that without it authority is despised. In Plutarch anger is said to be the whetstone of courage, οἷον βαφὴν τὸν θυμόν, ἢ στόμωμα. They say that anger supplies courage with what dye supplies to cloth, which renders it conspicuous, and what steel supplies to iron, to which, when hardened, it imparts firmness and the power of cutting. They say that this appears in all wild animals, and that both for them and for human beings it is a σύμφυτον ὅπλον, “an inborn weapon.” The Latins too call it the whetstone of courage.
They say that not to grow angry belongs to sluggishness, and that anger befits brave men: ἔχειν κότον ὄφρα τελέσῃ; and that each man is then truly brave: ὅταν κότον ἔθετο θυμῷ. They say that one must possess anger which is not ineffectual, and that the spirit is then beautifully fortified when anger has been set upon it as a fearsome defense.
Nature herself stands constantly against them and cries out with her inborn voice: namely, that courage was given to her for the defense and preservation of herself; that anger is hostile to her and casts courage itself headlong. “Whether anger is according to nature,” says Seneca in Book I, Chapter V of On Anger, “will be plain if we examine the human being. What is gentler than he while his mind’s disposition is right? But what is more cruel than anger? What is more loving of others than a human being? What is more hostile than anger? The human being has been born for mutual assistance; anger for destruction. The one wishes to be gathered together, the other to depart; the one to benefit, the other to injure; the one to succor even strangers, the other to assail even the dearest; the one is prepared even to expend itself for the advantages of others, anger to descend into danger provided that it drags another down.
“Who, therefore, is more ignorant of the nature of things than the man who assigns this savage and destructive vice to nature’s best and most highly commended work? Anger, as we have said, is greedy for punishment. That desire should be present in the most peaceful breast of a human being is least of all according to his nature. For human life consists in benefits and concord, and is bound into a covenant and common assistance not by terror but by mutual love. What then? Is chastisement not sometimes necessary? Why not? But let it be sincere and accompanied by reason; for it does not injure but heals under the appearance of injuring.”
Aristotle, in Book VII, Chapter VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, says that anger is according to nature and numbers it among the ὀρέξεις φυσικὰς, “natural desires”; he says that it is more such than the other desires and therefore worthy of pardon.
But all passions have their origin from nature and ought to be tempered by reason; those which wander beyond the path now destroy nature.
§ 13. Next, courage, unless it rests upon reason and wisdom, is rashness and audacity. Anger is destructive to prudence and hostile to counsel. Nazianzen says prudently:
Οὐδεὶς μετ’ ὀργῆς ἀσφαλῶς βουλεύεται,
Τὰ γὰρ μετ’ ὀργῆς οὐδέπω βουλὴν ἔχει.
No one deliberates safely through anger,
For things done through anger never give place to counsel.
Therefore, not even in the conflicts themselves and in the arena, where there is both a school and a stripping-room for anger, must anger be joined to courage. Pyrrhus, a noble trainer of gladiators, ordered his pupils to lay aside anger. “Anger,” he said, “disturbs art.” But if anger casts headlong the art which the common people think proper to it, how much more the art of gentleness and prudence, according to which the state is ruled—the art whose business it is to gather many into one and bind them together by mutual charity and friendship?
By no other reason did a few Romans conquer the Cimbri and other nations infinite in number and excelling in courage than because the Romans proceeded into battle with reason, art, and counsel, while those nations, rushing with impetus, ferocity, and unconsidered anger, offered themselves to be slaughtered by barbarians. Therefore not an angry commander but a prudent and brave one must be chosen, one who brings against the enemy not fury but counsel. Anger, therefore, is not the companion of courage. For although a brave and angry man runs forward more swiftly and strikes more violently, nevertheless he acts less bravely because less prudently. He acts incautiously; he can strike but cannot defend himself. Every anger has this characteristic: it is prodigal of itself and attends to what may injure another, not to what may profit itself. Courage is strengthened by time and grows powerful because it uses counsel; anger languishes through delay. Give fury space; it subsides of its own accord.
So far am I from judging that this disease befits brave men that I judge irascible men least brave. The angers of children and women are sharper rather than weightier. Old men, the sick, the thirsty, and the hungry readily become angry. Plutarch certainly attributes anger to weakness in Περὶ ἀοργησίας:
Ὡς γὰρ οἴδημα μεγάλης ἐστὶν ἐν σαρκὶ πληγῆς πάθος, οὕτως ἡ ταῖς μαλακωτάταις ψυχαῖς ἡ πρὸς τὸ λυπηρὸν ἔνδοσις ἐκφέρει μείζονα θυμὸν ἀπὸ μείζονος ἀσθενείας. Διὸ καὶ γυναῖκες ἀνδρῶν ὀργιλώτεραι, καὶ νοσοῦντες ὑγιαινόντων, καὶ γέροντες ἀκμαζόντων, καὶ δυστυχεῖς πράττοντες εὐτυχούντων.
For as an ulcer or swelling is the affection of some great blow inflicted upon the flesh, so in the softest minds the yielding toward grief expresses and brings forth greater anger from greater weakness. Therefore women are more irascible than men, the sick than the healthy, old men than those in their prime, and the unfortunate than the fortunate.
The teacher of nature speaks no differently in Book II, Chapter II of the Rhetoric: “It is already apparent from these things in what dispositions men themselves grow angry, with whom, and on account of what. Men themselves grow angry when they grieve, for the grieving man desires something. Therefore, whether someone directly obstructs him—as, for example, a thirsty man from drinking—or not directly, he seems in like manner to accomplish the same thing; and if someone resists him, or does not assist him, or disturbs him in any other matter while he is in this disposition, he grows angry at all. For this reason the sick, those laboring under poverty, lovers, the thirsty—in general, those desiring something and not acting rightly—are irascible and fit to be incited.
“They are so especially against those who despise their present condition: the sick in matters which pertain to illness, the man laboring under poverty in matters which pertain to poverty, the warrior in matters which pertain to war, the lover in matters which pertain to love. It is similar also in the other cases; for each person is prepared for his own particular anger by the passion adhering to him.”
Anger is therefore a most feeble thing and comes from infirmity. “It is womanish,” says Seneca, “to rage in anger.” Scripture certainly testifies that there is no anger above the anger of a woman. Thus too the satirist sings in Satire VI:
Whenever anger makes this sex guilty,
And they are borne along, with rage inflaming the liver,
Headlong, like rocks torn from mountain ridges,
From which the mountain withdraws and the side recedes down the hanging slope.
Moreover, a woman is more irascible than herself when she bears a child or is heavy with age; thus the Conciliator teaches in Book X of the Problems, Chapter XXXV. Menander says best:
Πολὺ χεῖρόν ἐστιν ἐρετίσαι γραῦν, ἢ κύνα.
It is worse to provoke an old woman than a dog.
§ 14. But that opinion inflicts injury not only upon the most holy martyrs, heroes truly and properly so called, but upon the bravest of all the brave, Christ the Lord, who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross and despised its shame. The highest courage is to stand immovable against pains, death, and torments; the gentlest of human beings have displayed this. Do you judge that Christ was angry when, hanging amid his torments, he said, “Father, forgive them”? Or Stephen, when he repeated the same words amid the blows of those stoning him? Courage, therefore, is most placid. Anger must never be admitted, although it has sometimes been useful by occasion of diverse causes. But in the same way drunkenness too was sometimes useful, because it put tyrants to sleep and freed innocent men. We inquire what is good, not what sometimes obtains good outcomes.
§ 15. How, then, will the rulers of peoples restrain so many desires of the wicked and avenge so many crimes unless they grow angry and terrify by anger?
The answer is ready. Let the wicked fear your justice, prudence, and strength, not your fury. Whatever is feared apart from these is hated; and it is not only hated but dangerous and exposed to contempt. For nothing is more accustomed to be laughed at than irascibility making a commotion in vain. Therefore a prince ought not to be angry at crimes, because, since all things are full of vices, he will never be able to lay aside anger if he thinks that he must be angry at them all. If you wish to be as angry as the unworthiness of crimes demands, you must not become angry but insane. The multitude of offenders removes the prince’s anger, for he ought to be angry neither at all together nor at individuals. Let him be not a hater but a corrector of offenders; when punishment is required, let him decree the penalty without passion, in the manner of laws which do not know how to grow angry. Let him punish not so much because sin has been committed, but lest it be committed. A judge’s anger renders even the most just sentence suspect. He torments more by his countenance than by death when, in the likeness of a Fury, he carries before him the dreadful face of a dreadful passion.
“Nevertheless, nothing has profited equally,” says Seneca in Book II, Chapter XXXV of On Anger, “with first looking upon the deformity of the thing, and then its danger. The face of no passion is more disturbed. It has made the most beautiful countenances foul and rendered savage faces out of the most tranquil. All grace abandons the angry; and even if a man’s clothing has been arranged according to rule, he will drag his garment and pour out every care of himself. If the natural or artificial arrangement of his lying hair is not unshapely, it bristles together with his mind. The veins swell; the breast is shaken by frequent breath; a rabid eruption of the voice distends the neck. Then the limbs tremble, the hands are restless, the whole body fluctuates. What sort of mind do you suppose to be within when its image without
is so foul? How much more terrible is the countenance within its breast, how much sharper the breath, how much more intense the impetus, which will burst itself unless it breaks forth? As are the appearances of enemies or wild beasts drenched in slaughter or going to slaughter; as the poets fashioned infernal monsters, girded with serpents and fiery breath; as the foulest Furies go forth to excite wars, divide discord among peoples, and tear apart peace—such let us picture anger to ourselves: its eyes burning with flame; resounding with hissing, bellowing, groaning, and shrieking, and with whatever voice is more hateful than these; shaking weapons in both hands, for it has no care to hide itself; savage and bloody, scarred and livid from its own blows; of the gait of a madman; covered with much darkness; rushing upon, laying waste, and putting to flight; laboring under the hatred of all, especially of itself; desiring, if it cannot injure otherwise, that lands, seas, and heaven should fall; equally hostile and hated. Or, if it seems better, let it be such as it is among our poets:
Bellona shaking a bloody scourge in her right hand,
Or Discord goes rejoicing in her torn mantle.
A judge incurs the hatred of all when he attributes to his own passions what is owed to public utility. Everyone pities a defendant, although he deserves the utmost punishment, if they perceive that his judge is angry with him. A physician looks upon so many sick persons without indignation; a surgeon, when he cuts, burns, and, more gravely than a torturer, tears away flesh, does not grow angry. Therefore let every magistrate who belongs to the Christian profession imitate the gentleness of Christ, the holy martyrs, and the bishops. Let him strive with every effort to remove the angers, insults, and hostilities of citizens. Let him order those whose angers and contentions he knows to be incurable to go into exile. If they have dared crimes, let him visit them with deserved punishment. Let him never permit the anger of the more powerful to determine the punishment of a weaker man.
Unless he diligently takes care of this, immense difficulties will arise not only when advantage is displayed and the profit of crime set before men, but also when an insatiable zeal for conquering has occupied their spirits. The ardor of contention has exasperated many lawsuits which were light at the beginning. Contention from contention, anger from anger, as an image from an image when mirrors are placed opposite one another, is born, and evils are multiplied by their mutual reflections.
Look at the Roman commonwealth in Nero’s age and you will not marvel that it fell. Seneca says in Book II of On Anger: “One man accuses the judgments of his father, which it would have been preferable to deserve; another stands in litigation with his mother; another comes as informer of a crime of which he is a manifest defendant; and a judge is chosen who is to condemn things which he himself has done; and the surrounding crowd is corrupted in favor of a bad case by the good voice of its advocate. Why do I pursue individual things? When you see the forum filled with a multitude, the enclosures full with the concourse of every class, and that circle in which the people displays the greatest part of itself, know this: there are as many vices there as human beings.
“Among those whom you see wearing the toga there is no peace. One is led to another’s destruction for a slight profit. No one gains except from another’s loss. They hate the fortunate and despise the unfortunate. They are burdened by a greater man and burdensome to a lesser. They are goaded by diverse desires. They desire that all things be destroyed for a slight pleasure and plunder. Life is no different from a gladiatorial school, since men live and fight with the same persons. It is an assembly of wild beasts, except that wild beasts are placid among themselves and abstain from biting their own kind, while these men are satiated by mutual laceration. In this one respect they differ from speechless animals: the latter become tame toward those who use them; the madness of the former devours the very men by whom it is nourished.”
§ 16. I wish the prince to be tireless, diligent, effective, and active; I forbid him to be irascible. Clemency agrees well with grave punishment; anger never does. Saint Cyprian says in his book On the Lapsed: “He is an unskilled physician who handles the swelling recesses of wounds with a sparing hand and, by preserving the poison enclosed in the deep recesses of the entrails, increases it. The wound must be opened and cut, and, after the putrid parts have been amputated, treated with a stronger remedy. Let the impatient sick man shout and cry out and complain through pain; afterward he will give thanks when he has perceived health.”
Often in the commonwealth safety is sought by severity, which is certainly necessary in military service. A distinguished commander, according to Tacitus in Book XIII, contained his army by severity. A soldier was noted who, carrying a bundle of wood, had his hands frozen so rigidly that, adhering to the burden, they fell away from the truncated arms. The commander himself, lightly clothed and with his head uncovered, was frequently present in the marching column and in labors, displaying praise to the vigorous, comfort to the weak, and an example to all. Then, because many refused and deserted on account of the harshness of the climate and military service, a remedy was sought by severity. For, unlike in other armies, a first and second offense was not pursued with pardon; rather, one who had abandoned the standards immediately paid the penalty with his head. This appeared wholesome in practice and better than mercy, for fewer deserted that camp than those in which pardon was given.
§ 17. The same thing often occurs in a kingdom. But just as discipline ought not to be dissolved by leniency, so harshness ought altogether to be absent. How dreadful and wicked was Piso’s argument, which put justice forward as a pretext for the most unjust fury! Seneca relates it in Book I, Chapter XVI of On Anger:
“Gnaeus Piso was in our memory a man free from many vices, but depraved and one to whom rigor was pleasing in place of constancy. In anger he had ordered that man to be led away who had returned from leave without his fellow-soldier, as though he had killed the man whom he did not produce. When the soldier asked for some time to search, Piso did not give it. Condemned, he was led outside the rampart and was already extending his neck when suddenly that fellow-soldier who was thought to have been killed appeared. Then the centurion set over the execution ordered the executioner to sheath his sword and led the condemned man back to Piso, intending to return innocence to Piso, for fortune had returned the soldier. Amid an immense concourse the fellow-soldiers were led in, embracing one another, with great joy in the camp.
“Piso, raging, ascended the tribunal and ordered both to be led away: both the soldier who had not killed and the one who had not perished. What could be more unworthy than this? Because one innocent man had appeared, two were perishing. Piso added a third, for he ordered the very centurion who had led the condemned man back to be led away. Three men were stationed in that same place to perish on account of one man’s innocence. O how ingenious irascibility is at fashioning causes of fury! ‘I order you,’ he said, ‘to be led away because you were condemned; you, because you were the cause of your fellow-soldier’s condemnation; you, because, though ordered to kill, you did not obey your commander.’ He contrived how he might make three crimes because he had found none.”
This anger destroys everything, and the world deservedly attributes to angers its destructions, which rage by turns everywhere and always make devastation in some place. The same Seneca—whom I produce more frequently in this place because among all pagans he wrote most effectively concerning anger—says in Book I, Chapter II: “Now, if you wish to look upon its effects and harms, no plague has cost the human race more. You will see slaughter and poisonings, the mutual filth of defendants, the disasters of cities, the destructions of whole nations, the heads of princes put up for sale beneath the public spear, torches placed beneath roofs, and fires not confined within walls but immense expanses of regions shining with hostile flame.
“Look upon the foundations of the noblest cities, scarcely discernible: anger cast them down. Look upon the solitudes deserted without habitation for many thousands of miles: anger exhausted them. Look upon so many commanders delivered to memory as examples of an evil fate: anger stabbed one in his bed; struck another amid the sacred rites of the table; tore another apart amid the laws and the crowded spectacle of the forum; ordered another to give his blood to the parricide of a son; another to open a royal throat by a servile hand; another to divide his limbs upon crosses. And thus far I relate the punishments of individuals.
“What if it should please you, leaving those against whom anger blazed individually, to look upon assemblies cut down by the sword, a plebs slaughtered after soldiers were sent in, and entire peoples condemned to capital punishment for indiscriminate destruction, as though they had abandoned our care or despised our authority?”
§ 18. I have spoken concerning the moderation of anger and am about to pass to other matters. I give the admonition which others gave long ago: namely, the greatest remedy for anger is delay. Do not initially ask anger to pardon, but to judge. It will cease if it waits. Do not attempt to remove the whole of it at once; its first impulses are grave. It is wholly conquered while it is plucked away in parts.
Athenodorus, now an old man—I think he was the man who was the teacher of Dionysius the Areopagite—when he had obtained his discharge from Augustus, left this final command to the emperor while saying farewell: “When you are angry, say or do nothing before you have recited to yourself the names of the twenty-four Greek letters.” Delighted by this saying, Augustus took hold of his right hand and said, “I still need you present,” and kept him with himself for a whole year.
But if you will listen to me for a little while, O prince, when you are angry, do nothing and say nothing unless you have first said the Lord’s Prayer in your heart. Or, if this is too much, at least run through these words: “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” But if a mind twisted by anger cannot be directed toward prayer, merely recite some sentence, for example Matthew 6:14: “For if you forgive human beings their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive your offenses. But if you do not forgive human beings, neither will your Father forgive your offenses.”
Or Chapter 5:22: “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. But he who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ will be liable to the council. But he who says, ‘Fool,’ will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.”
Or Job 28: “An irascible man kindles a quarrel, and a sinful man will trouble friends and cast enmity into the midst of those possessing peace.”
Or Proverbs 15:1: “A soft answer breaks anger; a hard word arouses fury.”
Or Job 36:18: “Therefore let anger not overcome you, so that you oppress someone.”
Or Ecclesiastes 11:10: “Remove anger from your heart.”
Or Ephesians 4:31: “Let all bitterness and anger and indignation and clamor and blasphemy be taken away from us, with all malice.”
But if he does not admit even sacred counsels, let him take some pagan as counsellor and say:
He who will not moderate his anger
Will wish undone what grief and mind have counselled,
While he hastens by force to exact penalties for unavenged hatred.
Anger is a brief madness. Rule your spirit, which, unless it obeys,
Commands. Restrain it with bridles, restrain it with a chain.
An angry man understands his error after the deed.
If you are angry, you are mad.
Trust no angry man—not even your own spirit.
The irascibility of a good man quickly dies.