Back
Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Anger, Book Two
Contents
Log in

On Anger, Book Two

1 My first book, Novatus,1 had the more inviting material; it is easy to run down the slope of the vices. Now we must come to finer points. We are asking whether anger begins from judgment or from impulse, that is, whether it is set in motion of its own accord or, like most of what arises within us, not without our knowing it. Our discussion has to lower itself to these matters so that it can rise to those loftier ones as well. In our bodies too, the bones, sinews, and joints, the framework of the whole and the seat of life, which are anything but pleasing to the eye, are laid out first; then come the parts that give face and appearance all their beauty; after all these, color, which catches the eye most of all, is poured on last, when the body is already complete.

There is no doubt that anger is set in motion by the impression of having been wronged; but we are asking whether it follows straight on the impression itself and runs out without the mind taking part, or whether it is set in motion with the mind’s assent. Our view is that anger ventures nothing on its own, but only with the mind’s approval. For to form the impression of having been wronged, to crave vengeance for it, and to join the two, judging both that one ought not to have been harmed and that one ought to be avenged, is not the work of an impulse that is stirred up without our will. That impulse is simple; this is compound and contains several parts: the mind has understood something, become indignant, condemned, and now takes revenge. These things cannot happen unless the mind has given its assent to what struck it.

2 “What is the point,” you ask, “of this question?” So that we may know what anger is; for if it arises against our will, it will never give way to reason. All the movements that happen without our will are unconquerable and unavoidable, like the shiver when we are splashed with cold water, or the recoil at certain touches; at bad news the hair stands on end, a blush spreads at foul language, and dizziness follows when we look down a sheer drop. Since none of these is in our power, no reasoning can persuade them not to happen. Anger is put to flight by precepts; for it is a voluntary vice of the mind, not one of those things that happen through some condition of the human lot and so befall even the wisest. Among these we must also place that first jolt of the mind that moves us after the opinion that we have been wronged. This creeps in even amid the entertainments of the stage and the reading of ancient history. We often seem to be angry with Clodius as he drives Cicero out, and with Antony as he kills him. Who is not stirred against the arms of Marius, against Sulla’s proscription?2 Who is not hostile to Theodotus and Achillas, and to the boy himself, who dared a crime beyond his years?3 Sometimes singing and a quick rhythm excite us, and that martial sound of trumpets; a savage painting stirs the mind, and so does the grim sight of punishments, even the most just. That is why we smile at those who smile, why a crowd of mourners saddens us, why we grow heated at other people’s contests. These are not anger, any more than it is sorrow that knits the brow at the sight of a shipwreck on the stage, any more than it is fear that runs through readers’ minds when Hannibal after Cannae lays siege to the walls. All these are movements of minds that do not want to be moved, not passions but the preludes to passions. So too the trumpet rouses the ears of a military man now wearing the toga in the midst of peace, and the clash of arms pricks up the ears of army horses. They say that when Xenophantus4 was singing, Alexander reached for his weapons.

3 None of the things that strike the mind by chance should be called passions: the mind, so to speak, undergoes them rather than causes them. So passion does not consist in being moved by the impressions of things that present themselves, but in giving oneself up to them and following up this chance movement. If anyone thinks that pallor, falling tears, the stirring of the sexual fluid, a deep sigh, eyes suddenly sharper, or anything like these is evidence of passion and a sign of the mind, he is mistaken and does not understand that these are jolts of the body. So the bravest man often turns pale while he is putting on his armor; when the signal for battle is given, the knees of the fiercest soldier tremble a little; the heart of a great general leaps before the lines crash together; and the most eloquent orator goes stiff to his fingertips as he composes himself to speak. Anger must not merely be moved; it must break out, for it is an impulse. But there is never an impulse without the intellect’s assent, since it is impossible for revenge and punishment to be at issue without the mind’s knowledge. Someone thought himself wronged, wanted revenge, and at once settled down when some consideration talked him out of it: this I do not call anger, but a movement of the mind obedient to reason. Anger is what leaps over reason and carries it off. So that first agitation of the mind which the impression of a wrong has struck into it is no more anger than the impression of a wrong itself is. The impulse that follows, which has not only received the impression of a wrong but approved it, is anger: the rousing of a mind that advances toward revenge by will and judgment. There is never any doubt that fear involves flight, and anger an onrush; consider, then, whether you think anything can be either sought or shunned without the intellect’s assent.

4 And so that you may know how passions begin, grow, and run wild: the first movement is involuntary, a sort of preparation for passion and a kind of threat. The second comes with the will, but a will that is not stubborn, holding that I ought to be avenged since I have been wronged, or that this man ought to be punished since he has committed a crime. The third movement is already out of control: it wants revenge not if it is right but at all costs; it has overpowered reason. That first jolt of the mind we cannot escape by reason, any more than those things we said happen to the body: we cannot keep someone else’s yawn from tempting us to yawn, or our eyes from shutting when fingers are suddenly thrust at them. These reason cannot conquer; habit and constant watchfulness may perhaps weaken them. The second movement, which is born of judgment, is removed by judgment.

5 We must still ask whether those who rage indiscriminately and delight in human blood are angry when they kill people from whom they have received no wrong and do not even think they have, men like Apollodorus or Phalaris.5 This is not anger; it is fierceness. It does not do harm because it has received a wrong; it is ready even to receive a wrong so long as it can do harm, and it seeks floggings and mutilations not for revenge but for pleasure. What, then? This evil has its origin in anger. When anger, through frequent exercise and glut, has come to forget clemency and has cast every human compact out of the mind, it passes at last into cruelty. So these men laugh and rejoice and take great pleasure, and their faces are very far from those of angry men; they are savage at their leisure. They say that Hannibal, when he saw a ditch full of human blood, said, “Oh, what a beautiful sight!” How much more beautiful it would have seemed to him if it had filled a river or a lake! What wonder if this sight above all delights you, born to blood and set among slaughter from infancy? Fortune will follow you, favoring your cruelty for twenty years, and will give your eyes the sight they love everywhere; you will see it at Trasimene and at Cannae, and last of all around your own Carthage. Volesus,6 not long ago proconsul of Asia under the deified Augustus, after beheading three hundred men in one day, walked among the corpses with a proud face, as though he had done something magnificent and worth seeing, and cried out in Greek, “Oh, what a kingly deed!” What would this man have done as a king? This was not anger but a greater evil, and an incurable one.

6 “Virtue,” someone says, “just as it is well disposed toward honorable things, ought to be angry with shameful ones.” What if he said that virtue ought to be both low and great? Yet that is what he is saying when he wants it raised and lowered at once, since gladness at a right action is bright and splendid, while anger at another’s wrongdoing is mean and belongs to a narrow heart. Virtue will never let itself imitate vices while it is checking them; it regards anger itself as something to be punished, for anger is no better, and often even worse, than the offenses it is angry with. To rejoice and be glad is proper and natural to virtue; to be angry is no more in keeping with its dignity than to grieve. Yet sorrow is the companion of irascibility, and all anger comes round to sorrow, either after repentance or after a rebuff. And if it is the wise man’s part to be angry with wrongdoing, he will be angrier with greater wrongs, and he will be angry often: it follows that the wise man will be not only angry but irascible. Yet if we believe that neither great nor frequent anger has a place in the wise man’s mind, why not free him from this passion altogether? For there can be no limit if he must be angry in proportion to each man’s deed: either he will be unfair, if he is equally angry at unequal offenses, or he will be the most irascible of men, if he flares up as often as crimes deserve anger.

7 And what is more unworthy than that the wise man’s passion should hang on other people’s wickedness? Will the great Socrates no longer be able to bring home the same face he took out of the house? Yet if the wise man must be angry at shameful deeds and be stirred and saddened by crimes, nothing is more wretched than the wise man: his whole life will pass in irascibility and grief. For what moment will there be when he does not see things to condemn? Every time he leaves his house he will have to walk among criminals, misers, spendthrifts, the shameless, and men who prosper because of all this; nowhere will his eyes turn without finding something to be indignant at. He will give out if he demands anger of himself as often as there is cause. These thousands hurrying to the forum at first light: how shameful their lawsuits are, and how much more shameful their advocates! One contests his father’s will, when he would have done better not to deserve what it says of him; another goes to law against his mother; another comes forward to inform on a crime of which he himself is more plainly guilty; a judge is chosen to condemn what he himself has done; and the crowd of bystanders, won over by an advocate’s fine voice, stands up for a bad cause.

8 Why go through them one by one? When you see the forum packed with people, the voting enclosures crammed with a crowd from every quarter, and that Circus where the people show themselves in their greatest numbers, know this: there are as many vices there as there are people. Among those you see in togas there is no peace. One is drawn into ruining another for a small gain; no one makes a profit except from another’s loss; they hate the fortunate and despise the unfortunate; they resent those above them and weigh on those below; they are goaded by conflicting desires; they would have everything ruined for a little pleasure or plunder. Their life is just like that of a gladiatorial school, where men live with the same people they fight. It is a gathering of wild beasts, except that beasts are gentle among themselves and do not bite their own kind, while these men glut themselves on tearing one another to pieces. In this alone they differ from dumb animals: animals grow tame toward those who feed them, while these men’s madness devours the very people who nourished it.

9 The wise man will never stop being angry once he has begun. Everything is full of crimes and vices; more is committed than can be cured by restraint; men compete in a vast contest of wickedness. Every day the desire to sin is greater and shame is less; all regard for what is better and fairer has been driven out, and lust hurls itself wherever it pleases. Crimes are no longer furtive: they pass before our eyes, and wickedness has been let loose in public and has grown so strong in every heart that innocence is not rare but nonexistent. Is it only one man or a few who have broken the law? From every side, as if at a signal, they have risen up to throw right and wrong together:

“Guest is not safe from host,
nor father-in-law from son-in-law; even between brothers love is rare;
the husband plots his wife’s death, she plots her husband’s;
dreadful stepmothers mix the deadly aconite;
the son looks into his father’s years before the day is due.”7

And how small a part of the crimes is that! The poet did not describe camps set against each other by the same people, parents and children sworn to opposite sides, a citizen’s hand putting the torch to his own country, squadrons of hostile cavalry flying about to hunt out the hiding places of the proscribed, springs fouled with poison, plague made by hand, the trench dug in front of besieged parents, the crowded prisons, the fires burning whole cities to the ground, the deadly tyrannies, the secret plots to seize kingdoms and ruin the state, and, counted as glory, deeds that are crimes only so long as they can be put down: rapes and debauchery, and not even the mouth spared from lust. Add now the public perjuries of nations, broken treaties, whatever did not resist carried off as plunder by the stronger, the swindles, thefts, frauds, and denials of debt for which three forums are not enough.8 If you want the wise man to be as angry as the outrageousness of crimes demands, he will not have to be angry; he will have to go mad.

10 You will do better to reflect that we must not be angry with errors. What if someone were angry with people who stumble in the dark? What if with the deaf, for not hearing orders? What if with children, because they forget their duties and look to games and the silly jokes of their playmates? What if you chose to be angry with those who are sick, growing old, worn out? Among the other drawbacks of mortality there is this too, the darkness of our minds, and not only the necessity of erring but the love of error. So as not to be angry with individuals, you must forgive everyone; you must grant the human race pardon. If you are angry with young men and old men because they do wrong, be angry with infants: they are going to do wrong. Does anyone get angry with children, whose age cannot yet tell one thing from another? To be a human being is a greater and juster excuse than to be a child. On these terms we were born: animals liable to no fewer diseases of mind than of body, not dull or slow, but making bad use of our sharpness, each an example of vice to the other. Whoever follows those who set out badly before him, why should he not have an excuse, since he went astray on the public road? A general’s severity is drawn against individuals, but pardon is necessary when the whole army has deserted. What takes away the wise man’s anger? The crowd of wrongdoers. He understands how unfair and how dangerous it is to be angry with a public vice.

Every time Heraclitus9 went out and saw around him so many people living badly, or rather dying badly, he wept; he pitied all those who met him glad and prosperous. His spirit was gentle but too weak: he himself was among those who should be wept for. Democritus, on the other hand, they say, was never in public without laughing, so far was anything done in earnest from seeming serious to him. Where is there room for anger here? Everything calls for either laughter or tears.

The wise man will not be angry with wrongdoers. Why? Because he knows that no one is born wise but becomes so; he knows that in every age very few turn out wise, because he has looked closely at the condition of human life; and no sane man is angry with nature. What if he chose to be surprised that fruit does not hang from the bushes in the woods? What if he were surprised that thickets and briars are not full of some useful crop? No one is angry where nature excuses the flaw. So the wise man, calm and fair toward errors, not the enemy but the corrector of wrongdoers, goes out every day with this thought: “Many will meet me who are given to wine, many lustful, many ungrateful, many greedy, many driven by the furies of ambition.” He will look on all of them as kindly as a doctor looks on his patients. Is the man whose ship has sprung its seams and is taking in water everywhere angry with the sailors and with the ship itself? No, he runs to help: he keeps out some of the water and bails out the rest, stops up the holes he can see, and fights with constant work the hidden ones that let the bilge in secretly; and he does not stop because as much comes in as has been bailed out. Against evils that are constant and prolific we need patient help, not to make them stop, but to keep them from winning.

11 “Anger is useful,” someone says, “because it escapes contempt, because it frightens the wicked.” First, if anger is as strong as its threats, it is hated for the very reason that it is terrifying; and it is more dangerous to be feared than to be despised. If it is without strength, it is all the more exposed to contempt and does not escape ridicule; for what is more flat than irascibility raging to no purpose? Second, some things are not better for being more terrifying, and I would not want this said to the wise man: “The wild beast’s weapon is the wise man’s weapon too: being feared.” Well? Are fever, gout, and a bad ulcer not feared? Is there therefore anything good in them? On the contrary, they are all despised and foul and shameful, and feared for that very reason. So too anger is ugly in itself and not at all to be dreaded, yet most people fear it, as children fear an ugly mask. And what of this: fear always rebounds on those who cause it, and no one is feared who is himself free of fear? Here you may recall that line of Laberius which, spoken in the theater in the middle of the civil war, turned the whole people toward it just as if it had voiced the public feeling:

“The man whom many fear must fear many.”10

Nature has so arranged it that whatever is great through others’ fear is not free of its own. How the hearts of lions quail at the slightest sounds! A shadow, a voice, an unfamiliar smell throw the fiercest beasts into a panic: whatever terrifies, trembles. So there is no reason for any wise man to want to be feared, or to think anger something great because it inspires dread, since even the most contemptible things are feared, like poisons, plague-infected bones, and bites. Nor is it surprising, when a line strung with feathers can hold in the greatest herds of wild beasts and drive them into traps, and is called a “scare” (formido) from the very feeling it causes; for to empty creatures empty things are frightening. The motion of a chariot and the sight of turning wheels have driven lions back into their cages; the squeal of a pig terrifies elephants. So anger is feared in the way a shadow is feared by children, a red feather by wild beasts. It has nothing firm or strong in itself, but it moves light minds.

12 “Wickedness,” someone says, “must be removed from the nature of things if you want to remove anger; and neither can be done.” First, a man can keep from being cold even though it is winter, and from being hot even though it is the summer months: either the advantage of his place protects him against the harsh season, or his bodily endurance has overcome the feeling of both. Second, turn that around: you must remove virtue from the mind before you let irascibility in, since vices do not keep company with virtues, and no one can be at the same time angry and a good man any more than he can be sick and well. “Not all anger can be removed from the mind,” he says, “and human nature does not allow it.” Yet nothing is so hard and steep that the human mind cannot conquer it and constant practice cannot make it familiar, and no passions are so wild and so much their own masters that discipline cannot tame them. Whatever the mind has commanded itself, it has achieved. Some have managed never to laugh; some have forbidden their bodies wine, others sex, some all liquids; another, content with little sleep, stretches out an untiring wakefulness. Men have learned to run along the thinnest ropes, and up them too, to carry huge loads scarcely bearable by human strength, to dive to immense depths and endure the sea without any chance to take a breath. There are a thousand other things in which persistence has surmounted every obstacle and shown that nothing is difficult once the mind has ordered itself to endure it. For the men I have just mentioned there was either no reward for such persistent effort or none worth having (for what splendid thing does the man achieve who has practiced walking on stretched ropes, putting his neck under a huge load, keeping his eyes from closing in sleep, reaching the bottom of the sea?), and yet their labor reached the end of the task for no great pay. Shall we not call on endurance, we for whom so great a prize waits, the unshaken tranquility of a fortunate mind? What a thing it is to escape the greatest evil, anger, and with it rage, savagery, cruelty, frenzy, and the other passions that keep it company!

13 There is no reason for us to look for a defense and an excuse for license by saying that anger is either useful or unavoidable; for what vice, after all, has ever lacked an advocate? There is no reason to say that it cannot be cut out. The ills we suffer from are curable, and Nature herself, who made us for what is right, helps us if we want to be set right. Nor is the road to the virtues steep and rough, as some have thought: they are reached on level ground. I am not coming to you with an empty promise. The road to the happy life is easy: only set out under good auspices, with the gods themselves helping. It is much harder to do what you are doing now. What has more leisure than a quiet mind, what more toil than anger? What is more relaxed than clemency, what busier than cruelty? Chastity has time to spare; lust is always occupied. In short, all the virtues are easy to keep; vices are maintained at great cost. Anger must be removed (even those who say it should be reduced admit this in part): let it be dismissed entirely; it will do no good. Without it crimes will be removed more easily and more rightly, and the wicked punished and brought over to the better. The wise man will accomplish everything he ought without the help of anything evil, and he will mix in nothing whose limits he must anxiously watch.

14 So irascibility must never be admitted, though sometimes it may be feigned, if the sluggish minds of listeners need to be roused, just as we rouse horses slow to start a race with goads and torches put under them. Sometimes fear must be struck into those on whom reason has no effect; but being angry is no more useful than grieving or being afraid. “Well then? Do causes not arise that provoke anger?” But that is precisely when we must put up our hands against it. Nor is it hard to conquer the mind, when even athletes, who are concerned with the basest part of themselves, still endure blows and pain so as to wear out the strength of the man striking them, and strike not when anger urges but when the opening comes. They say that Pyrrhus, the greatest trainer for athletic contests, used to instruct those he trained not to get angry; for anger confuses skill and looks only for a way to hurt. So reason often counsels endurance, anger revenge, and we who could have got off with the first ills roll down into greater ones. Some have been flung into exile because they could not calmly bear an insult of a single word; men who would not bear a slight wrong in silence have been crushed by the heaviest ills; and indignant that anything should be taken from their full freedom, they have brought the yoke of slavery on themselves.

15 “So that you may know,” someone says, “that anger has something noble in it, you will see that the most irascible nations are free, like the Germans and the Scythians.” This happens because characters strong and solid by nature are prone to anger before discipline softens them. For some things grow only in better natures, just as land, even when neglected, puts out strong trees and lush growth, and the forest is tall on fertile soil. So too characters strong by nature bring forth irascibility, and, being fiery and hot, admit nothing thin or slight; but their vigor is incomplete, as in everything that springs up without art from the bounty of nature alone; and unless they are tamed quickly, what was suited to courage grows used to boldness and rashness. Well? Are not milder vices joined to gentler minds, like pity, love, and bashfulness? So I will often show you a good disposition even by its faults; but they are no less vices for being signs of a better nature. Then again, all these nations, free in their fierceness, are like lions and wolves: just as they cannot serve, so they cannot rule; for they have the strength not of a human character but of a wild and untamable one, and no one can rule who cannot also be ruled. So for the most part empires have been held by peoples who enjoy a milder climate. Those who lie toward the cold and the north have “untamed characters,” as the poet says,

“and very like their own sky.”11

16 “The animals considered noblest,” someone says, “are those with a great deal of anger in them.” He is wrong to take as a model for man creatures that have impulse in place of reason: man has reason in place of impulse. But not even among animals does the same thing help them all: irascibility helps lions, fear deer, the swoop the hawk, flight the dove. And what of this: it is not even true that the best animals are the most irascible. I might suppose wild beasts that live by plunder to be the better the angrier they are; but I would praise the endurance of oxen and of horses that follow the rein. Yet why do you call man back to such sorry models, when you have the universe and god, whom man alone of all animals understands, so that he alone may imitate him? “The irascible,” he says, “are considered the most straightforward of all men.” Yes, because they are compared with the deceitful and the cunning, and seem straightforward because they are exposed. I would call them not straightforward but unguarded. That is the name we give to fools, voluptuaries, and spendthrifts, and to all vices that lack cunning.

17 “The orator,” he says, “is sometimes better when angry.” No: when he imitates an angry man. Actors too move the audience in their delivery not by being angry but by playing anger well. So before judges, in the assembly, and wherever other people’s minds must be driven where we want them, we shall feign now anger, now fear, now pity, in order to strike these into others; and often the imitation of passions has achieved what real passions would not have.

“A mind without anger,” he says, “is slack.” True, if it has nothing stronger than anger. One should be neither robber nor prey, neither pitying nor cruel: the one has too soft a mind, the other too hard. Let the wise man be balanced, and when something must be done with force, let him use not anger but strength.

18 Since we have dealt with the questions about anger, let us move on to its remedies. There are two, I think: not to fall into anger, and not to do wrong in anger. As in the care of the body there are some precepts for keeping health and others for restoring it, so we must fight off anger in one way and check it in another. To avoid it, certain precepts will be given that concern the whole of life: these will be divided between upbringing and the years that follow.

Upbringing demands the greatest care, and it will do the most good; for it is easy to shape minds while they are still tender, but vices that have grown up with us are hard to cut back.

19 A hot nature of mind is the most liable to irascibility. There are four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, and matching powers: hot, cold, dry, and moist. And so the mixture of the elements accounts for the differences among places, animals, bodies, and characters, and natures lean more toward one thing or another according to which element is present in greater force. That is why we call some regions moist and others dry, some hot and others cold. The same distinctions hold among animals and men: it matters how much moisture and heat each contains; whichever element has the larger share in him will determine his character. A hot nature of mind will make men irascible, for fire is active and persistent; a mixture of cold makes them timid, for cold is sluggish and contracted. So some of our school hold that anger is stirred in the chest as the blood boils around the heart; the only reason this place in particular is assigned to anger is that the chest is the hottest part of the whole body. In those who have more moisture, anger grows little by little, because their heat is not ready to hand but has to be acquired by motion; so the angers of children and women are sharp rather than heavy, and lighter at the start. In the dry years of life anger is violent and strong, but it does not grow, not adding much to itself, because cold follows on heat as it begins to decline. Old men are difficult and querulous, like the sick and the convalescent and those whose heat has been drained by exhaustion or loss of blood; in the same condition are those wasted by thirst and hunger, and those whose bodies are bloodless, poorly nourished, and failing. Wine kindles anger, because it increases heat; according to their natures, some men boil over when drunk, others when only tipsy. And the only reason why blond and ruddy people are the most irascible is that their natural color is what other people’s becomes in anger; their blood is quick and restless.

20 But just as nature makes some people prone to anger, so many causes arise that can do the same as nature. Some have been brought to it by disease or bodily injury, others by toil, constant lack of sleep, anxious nights, longings, and love affairs; whatever else has harmed the body or the mind makes the ailing mind ready to complain. But all these are only beginnings and causes. Habit counts for most, and if it is heavy, it feeds the vice. To change nature is difficult, and one cannot alter the elements once they have been mixed at birth; but knowing it will help us at least to take wine away from hot natures. Plato thinks it should be denied to boys, and he forbids fanning fire with fire.12 They should not be stuffed with food either; their bodies will be distended, and their minds will swell along with their bodies. Let work exercise them short of exhaustion, so that their heat is reduced, not used up, and the excess of that boiling is skimmed off. Games will help too; for moderate pleasure relaxes the mind and balances it. For the moister, the drier, and the cold natures there is no danger from anger, but more sluggish vices are to be feared: fear, peevishness, despair, and suspicion. Such characters, then, must be softened and coddled and drawn out into gladness. And since some remedies must be used against anger and others against sorrow, and the two must be treated not just by different means but by opposite ones, we shall always meet whichever has grown stronger.

21 It will do the most good, I say, to give children a healthy training from the start; but the guiding is difficult, because we must take care neither to nourish anger in them nor to blunt their native spirit. The matter needs careful watching; for both what must be encouraged and what must be checked are fed by similar things, and similar things easily deceive even an attentive observer. Spirit grows with freedom and is crushed by servitude; it rises when it is praised and led to hope well of itself, but these same things breed insolence and irascibility. So the child must be guided between the two, using the bridle at one time and the spur at another. Let him suffer nothing humiliating, nothing servile; let him never have to beg humbly, nor gain anything by begging; let him rather be granted things for the merits of his case, for his past conduct, and for good promises for the future. In contests with his peers let us not allow him to be beaten or to get angry; let us see to it that he is friendly with those he usually competes with, so that in competition he grows used to wanting not to hurt but to win. Whenever he has come out on top and done something worthy of praise, let us allow him to be lifted up but not to exult; for joy is followed by exultation, and exultation by swelling and too high an opinion of oneself. We will give him some relaxation, but we will not let him dissolve into idleness and leisure, and we will keep him far from contact with luxuries; for nothing makes people more irascible than a soft and coddling upbringing. That is why the more an only child is indulged, and the more an orphan is allowed, the more corrupt the mind becomes. He will not stand up to offenses who has never been refused anything, whose tears an anxious mother has always wiped away, who has had his way against his tutor. Do you not see how a greater anger goes with every greater fortune? It shows most in the rich, the nobly born, and magistrates, when whatever was light and empty in the mind has been carried up on a favoring wind. Prosperity feeds irascibility, when a crowd of flatterers has gathered around proud ears: “Is he to answer you back? You do not measure yourself by your rank; you are selling yourself short,” and other things that even sound minds, well founded from the start, have scarcely resisted. So childhood must be kept far from flattery: let the child hear the truth. Let him feel fear at times, respect always, and let him rise for his elders. Let him get nothing by a fit of temper: what was refused him while he cried should be offered when he is calm. Let him have his parents’ wealth in view, not in use. Let him be reproached for what he does wrong. It will be to the point to give children calm teachers and tutors: everything tender attaches itself to what is nearest and grows into its likeness, and young men soon reproduce the characters of their nurses and tutors. A boy brought up in Plato’s house, when he was taken back to his parents and saw his father shouting, said, “I never saw this at Plato’s.” I have no doubt he imitated his father sooner than Plato. Above all, let his food be plain, his clothes not costly, and his way of life like that of his peers: he will not resent being compared with someone if from the start you have made him the equal of many.

22 But these things concern our children; in our own case, the lot of our birth and our upbringing leave no more room either for fault or for precept: what follows must be set in order. So we must fight against the first causes. The cause of irascibility is the opinion that we have been wronged, and this should not be readily believed. We should not give in at once even to what looks open and plain; for some false things bear the look of truth. We must always allow time: the day reveals the truth. Let our ears not be open to accusers; let us recognize and distrust this flaw in human nature, that we readily believe what we do not want to hear, and that we get angry before we judge. And what of this: we are driven not only by accusations but by suspicions, and, reading the worst into someone’s look or smile, we get angry with the innocent? So we must plead the absent man’s case against ourselves and keep anger in suspense; for a punishment that has been put off can be exacted, but one that has been exacted cannot be recalled.

23 Everyone knows of the tyrant-slayer who, caught before he had finished the job and tortured by Hippias to make him reveal his accomplices, named the tyrant’s friends who were standing around, and all those to whom he knew the tyrant’s safety was most dear. When the tyrant had had each of them killed as he was named, and asked whether anyone was left, the man said, “Only you; I have left no one else to whom you were dear.”13 Anger made the tyrant lend his hands to the tyrant-slayer and cut down his own guards with his own sword. How much more spirited was Alexander! When he had read his mother’s letter warning him to beware of poison from his doctor Philip, he took the draught and drank it undeterred. He trusted his own judgment of his friend more. He deserved to have an innocent friend; he deserved to make him one. I praise this in Alexander all the more because no one was so prone to anger; and the rarer moderation is in kings, the more it deserves praise. Julius Caesar did the same, the man who used his victory in the civil war with the greatest clemency. When he had seized boxes of letters sent to Pompey by men who seemed to have been either on the other side or on neither, he burned them.14 Though he was usually moderate in his anger, he preferred not to be able to be angry at all; he thought the most gracious kind of pardon was not to know what each man’s offense had been.

24 Credulity does the most harm. Often we should not even listen, since in some matters it is better to be deceived than to distrust. Suspicion and conjecture, the most deceptive of provocations, must be removed from the mind: “That man greeted me rather coldly; that one cut short my kiss; that one broke off a conversation he had begun; that one did not invite me to dinner; that one’s face seemed rather unfriendly.” Suspicion will never lack arguments: what we need is simplicity and a kindly way of judging things. Let us believe nothing except what strikes our eyes and is plain; and whenever our suspicion proves empty, let us scold our credulity, for this correction will build the habit of not believing easily.

25 From this it also follows that we should not be exasperated by the smallest and most trivial things. A slave is too slow, or the water too lukewarm for drinking, or the couch rumpled, or the table set carelessly: to be roused by such things is madness. A man is sick and in poor health if a light breeze makes him shiver; his eyes are diseased if white clothing dazzles them; he is undone by luxury if his side aches at someone else’s labor. They say there was a man from the city of the Sybarites, Mindyrides, who, seeing a man digging and raising his mattock rather high, complained that it made him tired and forbade the man to work within his sight; he also complained that he felt worse because he had lain on rose petals that were folded double. When pleasures have corrupted mind and body together, nothing seems bearable, not because what is endured is hard but because the one who endures it is soft. Why else should someone’s cough or sneeze, or a fly not chased off carefully enough, drive us into a rage, or a dog getting under our feet, or a key slipping from a careless slave’s hands? Will a man bear calmly the abuse of public life and the curses hurled at him in the assembly or the senate house when the screech of a bench being dragged offends his ears? Will the man who gets angry with a slave for doing a poor job of melting the snow for his drink endure hunger and the thirst of a summer campaign? So nothing feeds irascibility more than a luxury that knows no restraint and can bear nothing: the mind must be treated hard, so that it feels no blow but a heavy one.

26 We are angry either with things from which we could not even have received a wrong, or with those from which we could. Among the first are some things without feeling, like a book we have often thrown aside because it was written in letters too small, or torn up because it was full of mistakes, or clothes we have ripped because we did not like them. How foolish to be angry with these, which neither deserved our anger nor feel it! “But of course it is the people who made them who offend us.” First, we often get angry before we draw this distinction in our minds. Second, perhaps the craftsmen themselves will offer just excuses: one could not have done better than he did, and it was not to insult you that he learned too little; another did not do it in order to offend you. Last of all, what is more insane than to pour out on things the bile collected against men? But just as it is insane to be angry with things that have no life, so it is to be angry with dumb animals, which do us no wrong because they cannot will it; for there is no wrong unless it proceeds from intent. So they can harm us, like iron or stone, but they cannot do us a wrong. Yet some people think themselves despised when the same horses are obedient to one rider and stubborn with another, as though it were by judgment, and not through habit and skill in handling, that some animals are more submissive to certain people. Yet just as it is foolish to be angry with these, so it is with children and with those whose sense is not much beyond a child’s; for before a fair judge, in all these offenses ignorance counts as innocence.

27 Some things cannot do harm and have no power except what is beneficent and saving, like the immortal gods, who neither wish to do harm nor can; for their nature is mild and gentle, as far removed from wronging others as from being wronged. So it is madmen, ignorant of the truth, who blame them for the savagery of the sea, excessive rains, the stubbornness of winter, when in fact none of the things that harm or help us is aimed at us in particular. We are not the reason the universe brings back winter and summer; these things have their own laws, by which divine affairs are carried on. We think too highly of ourselves if we consider ourselves worthy of having such great things set in motion on our account. So none of these things happens to wrong us; on the contrary, everything happens for our good. Some things, we said, cannot do harm, and others will not. Among the latter will be good magistrates, parents, teachers, and judges, whose correction we must take as we take the scalpel, a fast, and other things that torment us for our good. We have been punished: let us think not only of what we are suffering but of what we have done; let us sit in judgment on our own life. If only we are willing to tell ourselves the truth, we shall assess the damages in our own case higher.

28 If we want to be fair judges of all things, let us first convince ourselves that none of us is without fault; for this is where the greatest indignation comes from: “I have done nothing wrong,” and “I have done nothing.” No: you admit nothing. We are indignant at being corrected by some warning or restraint, when at that very moment we are doing wrong by adding arrogance and defiance to our misdeeds. Who is this man who declares himself innocent before every law? Suppose he is: how narrow an innocence it is to be good by the letter of the law! How much more widely the rule of duty extends than the rule of law! How many things are demanded by devotion, humanity, generosity, justice, and good faith, all of which lie outside the public statutes! But we cannot measure up even to that narrowest formula of innocence. Some things we have done, others we have thought, others wished, others favored; in some things we are innocent only because they did not succeed. Thinking of this, let us be fairer to wrongdoers and believe those who rebuke us; above all let us not be angry with good men (for with whom will we not be angry, if with good men too?), and least of all with the gods; for it is not by their fault but by the law of mortality that we suffer whatever trouble befalls us. “But diseases and pains attack us.” Of course: those who have been allotted a crumbling dwelling must move out of it somehow. Someone will be said to have spoken ill of you: consider whether you did it first; consider how many people you speak of. Let us consider, I say, that some do not do us a wrong but pay one back, others do it for our sake, others under compulsion, others in ignorance; and that even those who do it willingly and knowingly are not seeking the wrong itself in wronging us. One slipped, carried away by the charm of a witticism; another did something not to hurt us but because he could not get what he was after without pushing us aside; flattery often offends while it fawns. Whoever recalls how often he himself has fallen under false suspicion, how many of his good offices fortune has dressed up as wrongs, how many people he began to love after hating them, will be able not to get angry at once, especially if he says to himself silently, at each thing that offends him, “I have done this too.” But where will you find so fair a judge? The man who lusts after everyone’s wife and thinks it reason enough to love her that she belongs to someone else will not have his own wife looked at; the faithless man is the sternest exactor of good faith; the perjurer prosecutes lies; the trumped-up litigant bitterly resents a lawsuit brought against himself; the man who did not spare his own chastity will not have his slaves’ tampered with. Other people’s vices are before our eyes, our own behind our backs. That is why a father worse than his son rebukes the son’s banquets for starting early, why the man who denied himself no luxury forgives no one else’s, why the tyrant is angry with a murderer and the temple robber punishes thefts. A great part of mankind is angry not with sins but with sinners. Looking at ourselves will make us more moderate, if we ask ourselves: “Have we ourselves done something like this? Have we gone wrong in this way? Is it in our interest to condemn these things?”

29 The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Ask this of it at the start, not that it pardon but that it judge: its first onrushes are heavy; it will subside if it waits. Do not try to remove it all at once: it will be wholly conquered if it is picked off piece by piece. Of the things that offend us, some are reported to us, others we hear or see ourselves. What is told us we should not be quick to believe: many lie to deceive, many because they have been deceived; one seeks favor by accusing and invents a wrong so as to seem upset that it was done; another is malicious and wants to split close friendships; another is a mischief-maker who wants to watch the show and observe from a safe distance those he has set at each other. If you were about to judge a case over a tiny sum, you would not accept the matter as proved without a witness, a witness would count for nothing without an oath, you would give both parties a hearing, give them time, hear them more than once; for the truth shines out more clearly the more often it is handled. Do you condemn a friend on the spot? Before you hear him, before you question him, before he is allowed to know either his accuser or the charge, are you angry? Have you already, already heard what is said on both sides? This very man who brought you the report will stop talking if he has to prove it. “There is no reason,” he says, “to drag me in; if I am brought forward, I’ll deny it; otherwise I’ll never tell you anything again.” In the same breath he goads you on and withdraws himself from the contest and the fight. A man who will tell you something only in secret is hardly telling you at all: what is more unfair than to believe in secret and be angry in public?

30 Some things we witness ourselves: in these we shall examine the nature and the intention of those who do them. It is a child: let us make allowance for his age; he does not know whether he is doing wrong. It is a father: either he has done us so much good that he has a right even to wrong us, or perhaps the very thing that offends us is a service he is doing us. It is a woman: she errs. He was ordered to: who but an unfair man resents necessity? He was wronged: it is no wrong to suffer what you did first. It is a judge: trust his verdict more than your own. It is a king: if he punishes you when you are guilty, yield to justice; if when you are innocent, yield to fortune. It is a dumb animal, or something like one: you imitate it if you are angry. It is a disease or a calamity: it will pass over you more lightly if you bear it. It is a god: you waste your effort as much in being angry with him as in praying for him to be angry with someone else. It is a good man who did you the wrong: do not believe it. A bad man: do not be surprised; he will pay someone else the penalty he owes you, and a man who has done wrong has already paid it to himself.

31 There are two things, as I said, that rouse irascibility: first, if we seem to have received a wrong (enough has been said about this); second, if we seem to have received it unjustly (this must now be discussed). Men judge some things unjust because they ought not to have suffered them, others because they did not expect them. We think unexpected things outrageous; so what happens against our hopes and expectations upsets us most. That is precisely why the smallest things offend us at home, and why with friends we call carelessness a wrong. “How is it, then,” someone says, “that the wrongs our enemies do upset us?” Because we did not expect them, or at least not so great. This comes of our excessive self-love: we judge that we ought to be inviolable even to our enemies. Each of us carries a king’s mind inside him: he wants license given to himself but not used against himself. So it is either ignorance or inexperience that makes us irascible. For what is surprising in bad men doing bad deeds? What is new if an enemy harms you, a friend offends you, a son slips, a slave does wrong? Fabius15 used to say that the most shameful excuse for a general was “I didn’t think it would happen”; I think it the most shameful for a man. Think of everything, expect everything: even in good characters something rough will come out. Human nature produces treacherous minds, ungrateful ones, greedy ones, impious ones. When you judge one man’s character, think of men’s in general. Where you most rejoice, you will most fear; where everything seems calm to you, things that will harm you are not missing, only asleep. Always reckon that something will happen to offend you. No helmsman ever spread his sails so fully, so free of care, that he did not keep his tackle ready to take them in.

Above all, think of this: the power to do harm is foul and accursed and utterly alien to man, by whose kindness even savage creatures grow tame. Look at elephants with their necks bowed to the yoke, bulls whose backs boys and women leap on and trample unharmed, snakes gliding harmlessly among the cups and in and out of people’s clothes, and, inside houses, bears and lions with their jaws gentle to those who handle them, and wild beasts fawning on their master: you will be ashamed to have traded characters with the animals. It is a crime to harm one’s country; therefore to harm a citizen too, for he is part of the country (the parts are sacred if the whole is to be revered); therefore to harm a man too, for he is your fellow citizen in the greater city. What if the hands wanted to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? Just as all the limbs agree among themselves, because it is in the interest of the whole that each be preserved, so men will spare each individual because they were born for fellowship, and society cannot be safe except by the protection and love of its parts. We would not even kill vipers and water snakes and whatever harms by bite or sting if we could tame them for the future or make them no danger to us or to others; so neither will we harm a man because he has done wrong, but so that he will not do wrong, and punishment will never look to the past but to the future; for it is not angry but cautious. For if everyone with a depraved and evil character is to be punished, punishment will except no one.

32 “But anger has some pleasure in it, and it is sweet to pay back pain.” Not at all. With benefits it is honorable to repay service with service; with wrongs it is not so. There it is shameful to be outdone, here to outdo. Revenge is an inhuman word, and yet it has been accepted as just. The man who pays back pain differs little from the one who caused it, except in the order; he only does wrong with a better excuse. Someone struck Marcus Cato16 in the baths without knowing who he was; for who would knowingly do him a wrong? When the man later apologized, Cato said, “I don’t remember being struck.” He thought it better not to acknowledge it than to avenge it. “Did nothing bad,” you say, “happen to the man after such insolence?” On the contrary, something very good: he came to know Cato. It belongs to a great mind to despise wrongs; the most insulting kind of revenge is to seem not worth taking revenge on. Many have taken slight wrongs too deeply to heart by avenging them. That man is great and noble who, like a great beast, listens unconcerned to the yapping of little dogs.

33 “We shall be less despised,” someone says, “if we avenge a wrong.” If we come to it as to a remedy, let us come without anger, not as if revenge were sweet, but as if it were useful. Yet it has often been better to pretend not to notice than to take revenge. The wrongs of the powerful must be borne with a cheerful face, not just patiently: they will do it again if they believe they have done it. Minds made insolent by great fortune have this worst trait: they hate those they have wronged. Well known is the remark of the man who had grown old in the service of kings: when someone asked him how he had achieved the rarest thing at court, old age, he said, “By accepting wrongs and giving thanks.” Often it is so far from expedient to avenge a wrong that it is not even expedient to admit it. Gaius Caesar17 had put the son of Pastor, a distinguished Roman knight, in custody, offended by his elegance and his too carefully dressed hair. When the father begged him to spare his son’s life, Gaius, as though he had been reminded to punish him, ordered him led off to execution at once; yet, so as not to treat the father with complete inhumanity, he invited him to dinner that same day. Pastor came with a face that reproached nothing. The emperor drank his health in a half-pint of wine and set a guard over him: the wretched man held out, as if he were drinking his son’s blood. The emperor sent him perfume and garlands and ordered someone to watch whether he put them on: he put them on. On the day he had buried his son, or rather the day he had not buried him, he lay at table as the hundredth guest, a gouty old man downing drinks hardly decent at a child’s birthday, and all the while he did not shed a tear or let his grief break out by any sign; he dined as though he had won his son’s pardon. You ask why? He had another son. What of the famous Priam? Did he not hide his anger and clasp the king’s knees, raise to his lips that deadly hand stained with his son’s blood, and dine?18 Yes, but without perfume, without garlands, and his most savage enemy urged him with many words of comfort to take food, not to drain enormous cups with a guard standing over his head. I would have despised the Roman father if he had been afraid for himself; as it was, devotion held his anger in check. He deserved to be allowed to leave the banquet to gather his son’s bones; but not even this did that kindly and courteous young man allow. He kept plying the old man with toasts, urging him to lighten his cares. The old man, for his part, showed himself cheerful and forgetful of what had been done that day. The other son would have perished if the guest had not pleased the executioner.

34 So we must refrain from anger, whether the one we would provoke is our equal, our superior, or our inferior. To quarrel with an equal is risky, with a superior mad, with an inferior degrading. It is the mark of a petty and wretched man to bite back at what bites him: mice and ants turn their mouths on you if you put your hand near them; weak creatures think themselves hurt if they are touched. It will make us gentler if we think how much the man we are angry with has helped us at one time or another; his services will buy off the offense. Let this occur to us as well: how much credit a reputation for clemency will bring us, how many useful friends pardon has made. Let us not be angry with the children of our personal and public enemies: among the examples of Sulla’s cruelty is that he barred the children of the proscribed from public life; nothing is more unjust than to make someone heir to his father’s hatred. Whenever we find it hard to forgive, let us consider whether it would be good for us if everyone were inexorable. How often the man who refused pardon asks for it! How often he has fallen at the feet of a man he spurned from his own! What is more glorious than to change anger into friendship? What allies does the Roman people have more loyal than those who were once its most stubborn enemies? What would our empire be today if a healthy foresight had not mingled the conquered with the conquerors? Someone will get angry with you: you, on the other hand, challenge him with benefits. A quarrel drops at once when one side abandons it; only equals fight. But if anger fights on both sides and they clash, the better man is the one who steps back first; the winner is the loser. He hit you: back off. By hitting back you will give him both the occasion and the excuse to hit you again; you will not be able to pull yourself away when you want to.

35 Would anyone want to strike an enemy so hard that he leaves his hand in the wound and cannot pull himself back from the blow? Yet anger is a weapon of that kind: it can hardly be drawn back. We look for handy weapons, a convenient and manageable sword: shall we not avoid these heavy, cumbersome, irrevocable impulses of the mind? The only speed we like is the kind that stops in its tracks when ordered, does not run past the mark, and can be turned and brought down from a run to a walk. We know the sinews are diseased when they move against our will; it is an old man or someone with a weak body who runs when he wants to walk. Let us consider those movements of the mind the soundest and strongest that go at our discretion and are not carried off at their own. Nothing, however, will help so much as to look first at the ugliness of the thing, then at its danger. No passion has a more disordered face: it has disfigured the most beautiful features and makes the most peaceful faces fierce. All grace deserts the angry. If their dress was arranged as it should be, they will let their clothes trail and throw off all care for themselves; if their hair, by nature or by art, lay in a not unbecoming style, it bristles along with the mind; the veins swell; the chest heaves with rapid breathing; a frenzied outburst of the voice strains the neck; then the limbs tremble, the hands are restless, the whole body pitches and tosses. What do you think the mind is like within, when its image outside is so foul? How much more terrible is its face within the breast, how much fiercer its breathing, how much more intense its onrush, ready to burst itself if it does not burst out! Like the look of enemies or wild beasts dripping with slaughter or going to slaughter, like the monsters of the underworld the poets have imagined, girt with snakes and breathing fire, like the most hideous goddesses who come out of the underworld to stir up wars, spread discord among peoples, and tear peace to pieces: so let us picture anger. Her eyes blaze with flame; she roars with hissing and bellowing, moaning and screeching, and any sound more hateful than these; she brandishes weapons in both hands (for she has no care to protect herself); she is grim and bloody, scarred and bruised from her own blows, wild in her gait, wrapped in thick darkness, charging, laying waste, putting to flight, tormented by hatred of everything, and most of all of herself, longing, if she can do harm no other way, to bring down lands, seas, and sky, as hostile as she is hated. Or, if you like, let her be as she is in our poets:

“Bellona, shaking the bloody scourge in her right hand,”

or

“Discord goes rejoicing in her torn mantle,”19

or any face still more dreadful that can be devised for this dreadful passion.

36 Some angry men, as Sextius20 says, have been helped by looking in a mirror. So great a change in themselves upset them; brought face to face with the thing itself, as it were, they did not recognize themselves. And how little of the real ugliness did that image reflected in the mirror give back! If the mind could be shown, if it could shine through any material, it would confound those who looked at it, black, spotted, seething, twisted, and swollen. Even now its ugliness is great as it seeps out through bones and flesh and so many obstacles: what if it were shown naked? You may be sure, of course, that no one has been frightened out of anger by a mirror. How so? The man who had come to the mirror to change himself had already changed. To the angry, in fact, no likeness is handsomer than a fierce and savage one, and they want to look as they are. We should rather consider how many people anger has harmed in itself. Some have burst their veins from too much heat; shouting raised beyond their strength has brought up blood; fluid forced too violently into the eyes has dimmed their sight; and the sick have fallen back into illness. There is no quicker road to madness. Many, then, have prolonged the frenzy of anger and never got back the mind they had driven out: frenzy drove Ajax to death, and anger drove him to frenzy. They call down death on their children, poverty on themselves, ruin on their house, and they deny that they are angry no less than madmen deny that they are mad. Enemies to their closest friends, to be avoided by those dearest to them, mindless of the laws except where they can do harm, stirred by the smallest things, hard to approach by word or courtesy, they do everything by force, ready both to fight with swords and to fall on them. For the greatest of evils has seized them, one that surpasses all the vices. Other vices enter little by little; the force of this one is sudden and total. In short, it subjects all the other passions to itself. It conquers the most ardent love: men have run through the bodies they loved and lain in the arms of those they had killed. Avarice, the hardest and least pliant of evils, anger has trampled underfoot, forcing it to scatter its wealth and to set fire to its house and all its goods heaped together. Well? Has not the ambitious man thrown away insignia he prized and refused an office that was offered him? There is no passion over which anger does not rule.

Notes

  1. 1. Lucius Annaeus Novatus, Seneca’s elder brother, later called Gallio after his adoptive father.

  2. 2. Publius Clodius, as tribune in 58 BC, drove Cicero into exile; Mark Antony had him killed in 43 BC. Gaius Marius and Sulla were the rival leaders of Rome’s first civil war; Sulla’s proscriptions (82 BC) published lists of citizens who could be killed for a reward.

  3. 3. Theodotus and Achillas, ministers of the boy king Ptolemy XIII of Egypt, had Pompey murdered when he landed there after his defeat in 48 BC.

  4. 4. A musician at Alexander’s court; other ancient writers tell the same story of Timotheus.

  5. 5. Apollodorus, tyrant of Cassandreia in Macedonia in the third century BC, and Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas in Sicily in the sixth, who was said to roast his victims alive in a bronze bull.

  6. 6. Lucius Valerius Messalla Volesus, proconsul of Asia about AD 11–12, later condemned by the senate for his cruelty there.

  7. 7. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.144–148, describing the Age of Iron.

  8. 8. The Roman Forum, the Forum of Julius Caesar, and the Forum of Augustus, all used for the law courts.

  9. 9. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BC) and Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–370 BC), Greek philosophers, known in later tradition as the weeping and the laughing philosopher.

  10. 10. Decimus Laberius (c. 105–43 BC), a Roman knight who wrote mimes; the line was taken as aimed at Julius Caesar.

  11. 11. The poet is unknown.

  12. 12. Plato, Laws 2.666a.

  13. 13. The tyrant is Hippias, ruler of Athens (527–510 BC); the story is usually told of Aristogeiton, who with Harmodius killed Hippias’s brother Hipparchus in 514 BC.

  14. 14. After his victory over Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BC.

  15. 15. Probably Quintus Fabius Maximus, called Cunctator (“the Delayer”), Hannibal’s opponent in the Second Punic War.

  16. 16. Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger (95–46 BC), Stoic statesman and opponent of Julius Caesar.

  17. 17. The emperor known as Caligula (reigned AD 37–41).

  18. 18. In Homer, Iliad 24, Priam goes to Achilles, who killed his son Hector, to ransom the body, and eats with him.

  19. 19. Adapted from Virgil, Aeneid 8.702–703, where the two lines stand in the opposite order.

  20. 20. Quintus Sextius, Roman philosopher of the time of Augustus, whose school Seneca admired.