On the avoidance of anger

SULLA: Fundanus, I think the painters' practice of periodically examining their paintings before adding the finishing touches is commendable. Continuous familiarity hides the ways in which something might vary slightly from what is required; so by interrupting their viewing, they use repeated discrimination to keep the viewing fresh and more likely to catch minor variations. But it is impossible for a person to apply himself to himself only periodically, by separating himself and interrupting the continuity of his self-awareness - and this is the main reason why everyone is a poorer judge of himself than of others. Therefore, a second-best course is for him periodically to inspect his friends and to make himself available to them for the same purpose, which is not to see if he has suddenly grown old or if his body is in a better or worse condition, but for them to examine his habits and character, to see if over a period of time any good features have been added or bad ones subtracted.

Anyway, I've come back to Rome after over a year away, and I've been with you for over four months now. I don't find it particularly surprising that the good points you were already innately endowed with have developed and increased so much; but when I see how much more amenable and submissive to reason that strong, fiery temper of yours has become, I am inclined to comment on your impetuosity by quoting the line, 'It is amazing how much more gentle he is.'

Nevertheless, this gentleness has not made you ineffective or languid, but it has replaced your notorious sudden changes of mood with a smooth surface and an effective, productive depth - like a cultivated field. It is also clear, therefore, that your temper is not waning because advancing age has made it start to decline, or because of any other automatic factor, but because it is being treated by good rational advice. But I must confess that when our mutual friend Eros told me this about you, I suspected that his warmth towards you was making him attribute to you qualities which truly good people ought to have, even though you didn't have them - and I thought this despite the fact that, as you know, he is the last person to renounce an opinion just in order to please anyone. But I now see that he is not guilty of perjury. Since we have nothing else to do while we're travelling, I wonder if you would explain how you made your temper so tame, moderate, and amenable and obedient to reason - what regimen you followed, so to speak.

FUNDANUS: You're too kind, Sulla. Are you sure that your warm friendship towards me is not blinding you to some aspects of my character? I mean, even Eros himself often fails to restrain his temper and 'keep it steadily compliant' (as Homer puts it); it is righteous indignation that makes it boil over. So it is possible that I seem amenable compared to him on these occasions, just as high notes can take the place of low notes, relative to other high notes, when one scale changes into another. SULLA: Neither of these are realistic possibilities, Fundanus. Please, as a favour to me, do what I asked.

FUNDANUS: All right. Musonius came up with some excellent suggestions, Sulla, and one of them, as I recall, was that a life of constant therapy guarantees immunity. The point is that when reason is the therapeutic agent, it should not - in my opinion - be flushed out of the system along with the illness, as hellebore is, but should remain in the mind and contain and watch over our decisions. In its effects, the analogy for reason is not medicine, but nourishing food, since anyone who becomes accustomed to it gains energy and well-being from it, whereas when emotions are at a peak of fermentation, advice and reproof struggle long and hard for slight gains, and exactly resemble smelling-salts, which arouse people who have a fit and fall unconscious, but don't get rid of the actual ailment.

Still, even at the time of their peak, all the other emotions do in a sense fall back and make way when reason with its reinforcements enters the mind from outside; but anger does not act in quite the way Melanthius says - 'It displaces intelligence and then commits criminal acts'; in fact, it does so after having replaced intelligence altogether, and shut it out of the house. And then the situation is similar to when people burn to death in their houses, in the sense that anger makes the inside full of chaos, smoke and noise, with the result that the mind is incapable of seeing or hearing anything beneficial. This is why it is easier for an abandoned ship to take on a helmsman from outside in the middle of a storm and in the open sea, than it is for someone who is being tossed in the sea of fury and anger to accept reason from an external source, unless he has made his own rationality ready. People who anticipate a siege and expect no help from outside accumulate and amass all the useful things they can; similarly, it is particularly important for people to gather from far and wide everything philosophy has to offer that will help combat anger, and to store it up in the mind - because the time when the need is crucial is also when they will not readily find it possible to introduce such assistance. I mean, the din stops the mind even hearing anything external, unless the mind has reason of its own, like an internal ship's boatswain who smartly picks up and understands every instruction; otherwise, even if the mind does hear anything, it despises quiet, gentle words and bridles at any which are more defiant. The point is that since a temper is arrogant, wilful and hard for an external agent to dislodge, it is like a secure tyranny which can be brought down only by an internal, inbred agent.

If anger becomes constant and resentment frequent, the mind acquires the negative condition known as irascibility, which results in prickliness, bitterness and a sour temper - that is, when the emotions become raw, easily distressed and hypercritical: think of a piece of iron which is already weak and thin being further filed. On the other hand, if rational discrimination immediately defies and bears down on any outburst of anger, it not only remedies the current situation, but also gives the mind energy and detachment for the future.

In my own case, at any rate, what happened is that once I had defied anger two or three times, I experienced what the Thebans did: once they had repulsed the apparently invincible Spartans for the first time, they were never subsequently defeated by them in battle. I mean, I gained the firm conviction that rationality can win. I saw that Aristotle's claim that anger ends when cold water is sprinkled on it is not the whole story: it is also quenched when faced with fear. Moreover, of course, the onset of happiness frequently causes the instantaneous 'melting', to use Homer's term, and dispersal of anger. The net result was that I became convinced that, provided the will is there, this emotion is not entirely irredeemable. You see, anger might well be aroused by something slight and meagre: often even a joke, a light-hearted remark, a laugh, a nod of assent, and so on and so forth, provoke anger. For example, when Helen addressed her niece as 'Electra, long-time spinster', she incited her remark, 'You have taken your time to see sense; in the past you left your home in disgrace.' And Callisthenes irritated Alexander by saying, when the large bowl was being passed around, 'I don't want to drink Alexander and then need Asclepius.'

Therefore, just as it is easy to control a flame which is starting to catch in hare's fur or on a wick or in a pile of rubbish (whereas if it catches in a solid object with depth, it quickly destroys and devastates 'with lively zest the lofty work of builders', as Aeschylus puts it), so anyone who pays attention to the early stages of anger and is aware of it gradually starting to smoulder and ignite as a result of some remark or rubbishy sarcasm doesn't need to exert himself a great deal, but often puts an end to it simply by keeping quiet and ignoring the remark. Anyone who doesn't fuel a fire puts it out, and anyone who doesn't feed anger in the early stages and doesn't get into a huff is being prudent and is eliminating anger.

I was accordingly not happy with Hieronymus, despite his useful comments and advice elsewhere, when he claims that because of its speed, anger is not perceptible when it is arising, but only when it has arisen and already exists. I mean, all the emotions go through the phase of gaining mass and movement, but in none of them is this arising and growth so obvious. So Homer's teaching on this is skilful: when he says, 'So he spoke; and dark clouds of anguish overshadowed Achilles', he is portraying Achilles as feeling sudden pain, when word reached him, with no lapse of time in between; but he portrays his anger at Agamemnon as slowly building up, and as gradually being ignited while a great number of words were being spoken. But if any of the people involved had withdrawn their words at the beginning and had resisted speaking them, their quarrel would not have escalated to such a degree and got so big. That is why whenever Socrates realized that he was getting too nasty to one of his friends, then because he was being driven 'as it were before a storm on the crest of an ocean wave', he used to lower his voice, smile and stop looking stern - and so keep himself upright and in control by counterbalancing the emotion and by moving instead in the opposite direction.

You see, my friend, there is a first-rate way to bring down our tyrant-like temper, which is not to listen or obey when it is ordering us to raise our voices, look fierce and beat our breasts, but to keep quiet and, as if the emotion were a disease, not aggravate it by thrashing and yelling. It may be that partying, singing and decorating doors - typical lovers' behaviour - do somehow afford an alleviation which is not unpleasing or inelegant ('I came, but did not call your name: I kissed your door. If this is a crime, I am a criminal'); and it may be that mourners eliminate a lot of their grief as well as their tears in the release of crying and weeping; but anger is made considerably more intense by the behaviour and speech of people in an angry state.

It is best, therefore, to keep calm, or alternatively to run away and hide and find refuge in silence, as though we realized that we were about to have a fit, and wanted to avoid falling, or rather falling on someone - and it is friends above all whom we most often fall on. We do not feel love or jealousy or fear for everyone, but anger leaves nothing alone, nothing in peace: we get angry at enemies and friends, at children and parents, and even at gods and animals and inanimate objects. For example, there is Thamyris, 'breaking the gilded frame, breaking the structure of the strung lyre'; and Pandarus swearing harm against himself, if he failed to burn his bow 'after shattering it with his bare hands'. And Xerxes even tried to brand and flog the sea, and sent a letter addressed to the mountain: 'Great Athos high as heaven, don't make huge, intractable rocks interfere with my actions, or else I will tear you to pieces and hurl you into the sea.' Anger can often be terrifying - but often ridiculous: that is why it is the most hated and despised of the emotions; and it is useful to be aware of both of these aspects.

In my case, at any rate - I don't know whether or not this is the correct way to go about it - I started my treatment as follows: just as the Spartans tried to understand drunkenness by watching their helots, I tried to understand anger by watching others. Hippocrates says that the severity of an illness is proportionate to the degree to which the patient's features become abnormal, and the first thing I noticed was a similar proportion between the degree of distraction by anger and the degree to which appearance, complexion, gait and voice change. This impressed upon me a kind of image of the emotion, and I was very upset to think that I might ever look so terrifying and unhinged to my friends, wife and daughters - not only fierce and unrecognizable in appearance, but also speaking in as rough and harsh a tone as I encountered in others of my acquaintance, when anger made them incapable of preserving their usual nature, appearance, pleasant conversation and persuasiveness and courtesy in company.

The orator Gaius Gracchus had a brusque personality and used to speak rather too passionately, so he had one of those little pipes made for himself which musicians use to guide their voices gradually note by note in either direction. His slave used to hold this and stand behind him while he was speaking, and sound a moderate, gentle keynote which enabled Gracchus to revoke his stridency and get rid of the harshness and anger of his tone. Just as the cowherd's 'wax-joined reed pipes in clear tones a sleep-inducing tune', so Gracchus' slave mollified and allayed the orator's anger.

If I had an ingenious attendant who was attuned to me, however, I would not be displeased if he employed a mirror during my outbursts of anger - as is occasionally done, though for no useful purpose, for people who have just bathed - since to see oneself in an unnatural state, all discomposed, plays a not unimportant part in discrediting the emotion. Indeed, there is an amusing story that once when Athena was playing the pipes, a satyr told her off by saying, 'This expression doesn't suit you. Put down your pipes, take up your weapons and compose your cheeks.' She paid no attention, however, but when she saw in a river how her face looked, she got upset and threw away the pipes.

At least art is tasteful, and this distracts one's attention from the ugliness. (Marsyas apparently used a kind of halter and a mouthpiece to channel the force of his breath, and to rectify and conceal the irregularity of his features - 'gleaming gold joined the hair of one temple to the other and thongs, bound behind, he attached to his hard-working mouth'.) Anger, on the other hand, not only disfigures the features by inflating and distending them, but also makes one's voice even more ugly and unpleasant, and 'moves the unmoved strings of the heart'. I mean, when the sea has been whipped up by winds and disgorges kelp and seaweed, people say that it is being purified; but the undisciplined, harsh and snide remarks which anger casts ashore from a mind in turmoil pollute primarily the speakers, and contaminate them with the opprobrium of having always had these remarks inside them, bursting to get out, and of being exposed by their anger. That is why, as Plato says, they pay the heaviest of penalties for the lightest of things - a word - since they give the impression of being antisocial, slanderous and malicious.

So when I observe and notice all this, I end up committing to memory and reminding myself pretty constantly of the fact that although when feverish it is good to have a soft, smooth tongue, it is even better when angry. I mean, if the tongue of someone with a fever is unnatural, it is a bad sign, but it does not cause any further problems; but if the tongue of someone in a temper has become rough and offensive and inclined towards abnormal language, then it manifests an insolence which causes an incurable breakdown of relationships and which betrays festering unsociability. Anger is worse than undiluted wine at producing undisciplined and disagreeable results: wine's results are blended with laughter, jokes and singing, while anger's results are blended with bitter gall; and anyone who is silent while drinking is irritating and annoying to his companions, whereas there is nothing more dignified than silence while angry, as Sappho recommends: 'When anger takes over your heart, guard your babbling tongue.'

However, constant attention to people who have been trapped by anger affords more than these reflections: it allows one to understand the nature of anger in other respects too, to see that it is not magnificent or manly, and that it has neither dignity nor grandeur. Nevertheless, most people mistake its turmoil for effectiveness, its menace for courage, its inflexibility for strength; and some people even call its callousness prowess, its stubbornness energy and its asperity righteous indignation. But this is wrong, because the actions, behaviour and conduct it prompts betray its pettiness and weakness. It is not just that angry people viciously assault little children, treat women harshly and think they should punish dogs, horses and mules (as Ctesiphon the pancratiast felt obliged to return his mule's kick); it is also that the narrow intolerance of tyrants is obvious in their cruelty, and their state is betrayed by their behaviour, so that their bloodthirstiness resembles the bite of a snake which, when enraged and in agony, directs its extreme inflammation at anyone who has hurt it. When flesh is hit hard, a swelling occurs; likewise, the most infirm minds are most liable to pain, and consequently their anger is greater because their weakness is greater.

This is also why women are more irascible than men, and sick, old or unlucky people are more irascible than healthy, middle-aged or successful people. An avaricious person is very likely to get angry with his business manager, a glutton with his cook, a jealous man with his wife, a vain person when something bad has been said about him; but the worst of all are, as Pindar says, 'political men who court ambition too much: they stir up open grief'. So it is from mental pain and suffering that anger arises, thanks above all to weakness; and whoever said that anger is, as it were, the mind's sinews was wrong: it is the straining and spraining of a mind being unduly dislocated in the course of its defensive impulses.

Anyway, observing these despicable cases was not pleasant, but simply necessary. But because I regard people who cope with fits of anger in a calm and composed manner as outstanding both to hear about and to witness, my starting-point is to despise those who say, 'You wronged a man: should a man put up with this?', and 'Tread him underfoot, tread on his neck, force him to the ground!', and so on: these are provocative things to say, and some use them improperly to transpose anger from the women's quarters to the men's. I think that manly courage is compatible with morality in all other respects, but incompatible only where gentleness is concerned, because gentleness is more self-contained. It is possible for worse men to overcome better men, but to set up in one's mind a trophy of victory over anger (which Heraclitus claims makes 'a difficult opponent, since it purchases whatever it wants at the expense of the mind') is a sign of great, overwhelming strength - a strength based on the faculties of rational judgement, which are the real sinews and muscles in the fight against the emotions.

That is why I constantly try to get hold of and read this kind of case, and not only when they are provided by philosophers (whom intelligent people regard as not being liable to gall), but even more when they are provided by kings and tyrants. For example, there is Antigonus' behaviour towards some of his soldiers who were cursing him near his tent, and didn't know he could hear them: 'Oh dear,' he said, poking his staff out of the tent and on to the ground, 'can't you go somewhere further away to criticize me?'

Arcadion the Achaean was always criticizing Philip and recommending escaping 'to a place whose inhabitants are ignorant of Philip'. Then he happened to turn up in Macedonia, and Philip's friends thought that he should punish him and not let him get away with it. Philip dealt with him kindly, however, and sent him presents and gifts; later he told his people to find out what report Arcadion had given to the Greeks. They all vouched for the fact that he had become an outstanding advocate of Philip, and Philip remarked, 'So I am a better doctor than you!' And once in Olympia some slander was being spread about him, and some people suggested that the Greeks ought to be made to suffer, since they were criticizing him despite his good treatment of them. 'What will they do, then,' he asked, 'if I treat them badly?'

Also fine was Pisistratus' behaviour towards Thrasybulus, Porsenna's towards Mucius and Magas' towards Philemon. Philemon made fun of Magas in one of his comedies, publicly in the theatre, with the lines: 'Here's a letter from the king for you to read, Magas ... Poor Magas, what a pity you can't read!' Later, Philemon was forced into Paraetonium by a storm, and fell into Magas' hands. Magas told a soldier to unsheathe a sword and simply touch Philemon on the neck with it, and then politely leave; and he sent him dice and a ball, as if he were a witless child, and then let him go.

Ptolemy was once mocking a scholar for his ignorance and asked him who Peleus' father was; the scholar replied that he would tell him, if Ptolemy told him first who Lagus' father was. His remark was a mocking reference to the king's low-class birth, and everyone was offended, feeling that the remark jarred and was uncalled for. Ptolemy said, 'If a king can't take mockery, then he shouldn't mock either.'

Alexander had been more harsh than usual in the affairs involving Callisthenes and Clitus. So when Porus was taken prisoner by Alexander he entreated him to deal with him as a king should. 'Is that all?' asked Alexander. '"As a king should" covers everything,' replied Porus. That is why 'the benevolent' is an epithet of the king of the gods (though the Athenians call him 'the tempestuous', I think): punishment is the work of the Furies and demigods - it is not divine and Olympian.

When Philip had levelled Olynthus, someone remarked, 'But rebuilding an equivalent city will be beyond his capabilities'; likewise one might say to anger, 'You're good at demolition and destruction and ruination, but construction, preservation, mercy and patience require gentleness, forgiveness and moderation of passion: they require Camillus, Metellus, Aristides and Socrates, whereas plaguing and biting are what ants and mice do.'

Moreover, when I also consider vindictiveness, I find that anger's version of it is ineffective, by and large: it exhausts itself in lip-chewing, tooth-grinding, empty assaults and curses consisting of mindless threats, and the result is as ridiculous as when children in a race fall down before they reach the goal for which they are striving, because they are not in control of themselves. It follows that the Rhodian put it nicely when he said to the Roman general's servant, who was yelling and coming on strong, 'I'm not bothered by your words, but by his silence.' And once Sophocles has Neoptolemus and Eurypylus equipped with weapons, he says, 'Without making boasts, without hurling insults, the two of them smashed into the massed bronze weaponry.'

The point is that although some savages treat their weapons with poison, courage has no need of bitter gall, since it is imbued with reason, whereas anger and rage are brittle and unsound. At any rate, the Spartans play pipes to quell anger in their men while they are fighting, and before a battle they sacrifice to the Muses to ensure the stable presence of reason; and if they rout the enemy, they do not set off in pursuit, but revoke their passion, which is like those handy-sized knives in that it is retractable and manageable. Anger, however, has caused many, many people to die before exacting their revenge: Cyrus and Pelopidas of Thebes are just two examples. Agathocles, on the other hand, good-temperedly put up with insults being hurled at him by the inhabitants of a city he was besieging, and when one of them asked, 'Potter, where will you get the money to pay your mercenaries?', he replied with a laugh, 'Here, if I raze your city!' Once some people mocked Antigonus for his deformity from their city walls, and he said to them, 'But I thought I was good-looking!' But when he had taken the city, he sold the mockers into slavery, and swore that he would keep in touch with their masters, to see if they ever insulted him again.

I also notice that anger makes lawyers and orators commit great mistakes; and Aristotle records that the friends of Satyrus of Samos blocked his ears with wax when he was in court, in case he messed things up by getting angry at being abused by his opponents. As for ourselves, don't we often bungle the punishment of a slave who is misbehaving, because they get frightened at our threats and at what we are saying, and run away? Nurses say to children, 'Stop crying and you can have it', and we could usefully address anger in the same way: 'Simmer down, shut up, slow down, and you will improve the chances and the probability of getting what you want.' I mean, if a father sees his child trying to cut or carve something with a knife, he takes the knife himself and does it; and if the rational mind takes over from anger the job of retribution, then the person who deserves it receives the punishment, and the rational mind remains safe and sound and valuable, instead of being punished itself, which is what often happens thanks to anger.

All the emotions need schooling, to tame (so to speak) and discipline by training the part of oneself that is irrational and recalcitrant; but one's servants provide a better training ground for anger than for any other emotion. The point is that our dealings with servants contain no element of envy, fear or rivalry, and constantly getting angry with them causes a lot of conflict and error and, because we have power over them, our anger puts us on a slippery downward slope, as it were, with no one to stand in our way and restrain us. I mean, absolute control cannot fail to be liable to error when emotion is involved: the only solution is to use considerable restraint to restrict your power and to resist the frequent complaints of wife and friends, as they accuse you of being weak and feeble.

I myself used to get very needled at my servants because of these accusations, and used to believe that by not punishing them I was spoiling them. But eventually I realized, first, that it is better to make them worse by patiently tolerating their badness than to concentrate on correcting others while allowing harshness and anger to corrupt oneself. And second, I saw plenty of cases where, precisely because they were not being punished, they were ashamed of being bad, let forbearance rather than retaliation initiate change in them and, I assure you, more enthusiastically served those who quietly sanctioned their actions than those who used flogging and branding: all this convinced me that reason is more authoritative than passion. The poet got it wrong when he said, 'Where there is fear, respect follows too.' It is actually the other way round: respect engenders in people the kind of fear which entails self-restraint, while non-stop, relentless flogging does not instil remorse for past misdeeds, but rather the intention to get away with it in the future.

In the third place, I constantly remind myself and bear in mind that when we were learning archery, we were not told not to shoot, but not to miss; likewise, learning how to punish in a well-timed, moderate, beneficial and appropriate way will not stop one punishing altogether. So I try to quell my anger above all by not denying the defendants the right to justify themselves, but by listening to what they have to say. This helps because time checks emotion and gives it space to dissolve, and also because rationality finds what method of punishment is appropriate, and how much is fitting. Moreover, the person who gets his just deserts has no excuse left for resisting correction, given that he is being punished not in anger, but because he has been convicted; and the most shameful factor is excluded, which is when the servant has a more just case than the master.

After Alexander's death, Phocion tried to stop the Athenians revolting too soon, or too readily trusting the news, by saying, 'If he is dead today, citizens of Athens, then he will be dead tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.' In the same way, in my opinion, anyone being driven headlong towards retaliation by anger ought to whisper to himself, 'If he is guilty today, then he will be guilty tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; and no harm will be done if he gets his just deserts later rather than sooner, but if he goes through it quickly, there will always - it has often happened in the past - be uncertainty as to his guilt.' I mean, which of us is horrible enough to flog and punish a slave for having five or ten days ago burned a savoury or knocked over a table or been rather slow to obey an order? But these are the things which make us upset and harsh and pitiless when they have just occurred and when they are still in the recent past. Solid objects seem bigger when it is misty, and the same happens to things when one is angry.

Our first reaction, therefore, should be to remember facts like this; and if in the clear, steady light of reason the deed still seems bad, when there is no doubt that we are free of the emotion, then we should attend to it: we should not at this later date neglect or abandon the punishment, as we do food when we have lost our appetite. Nothing is so conducive to doling out punishment when anger is upon us as having failed to punish, having let the issue drop, when anger had left us: the experience is identical to that of lazy rowers, who lie at anchor when the weather is calm and then run the risks of a voyage when the wind is up. We too accuse rationality of being weak and feeble when it comes to punishment, and so rush on recklessly before the wind of anger when it comes.

The point is that it is proper for someone who is hungry to engage in eating, but it is proper for someone who is neither hungry nor thirsty for it to engage in retribution. He should not need anger in order to punish, as he might need a savoury, but it is essential that he waits until he has greatly distanced himself from the appetite for punishment and introduced rationality instead. Aristotle records that in his time servants were flogged in Tyrrhenia to the accompaniment of pipes; but we should not follow suit and, for the sake of personal pleasure, be driven by a desire for satisfaction, as it were, to gorge ourselves with retaliation - to enjoy punishing (which is to behave like an animal), and then regret it later (which is to behave like a woman). Rather, we should wait until there is no trace of either pleasure or distress, and rationality is present, and then take reprisal without being motivated at all by anger.

Anyway, as may be obvious, this is not a cure for anger, but a means of postponing and protecting oneself against making mistakes while angry (despite the fact that, as Hieronymus says, although a swollen spleen is a symptom of fever, reducing the swelling alleviates the fever). But when I was trying to see how anger actually starts, I noticed that although different factors trigger its onset in different people, there is almost always present a belief that they are being slighted and ignored. It follows that we should help people who are trying to evade anger by putting the greatest possible distance between any given action and contempt or arrogance, by attributing the action instead to ignorance or necessity or emotion or accident. As Sophocles says, 'My lord, unfortunate people find that even their innate intelligence has no stability, but deserts them.' And Agamemnon attributes his theft of Briseis to his being possessed, but still says, 'I want to make amends and give you vast gifts of recompense.'

The point of this quote is that no one can make an appeal to someone if he despises him; and by being demonstrably humble, the offender gets rid of any impression of contempt. But anyone who is angry should not just wait for this to happen, but should of his own accord cling to what Diogenes said: 'Those people are laughing at you, Diogenes,' someone said; 'But I don't feel laughed at,' he replied. So anyone who is angry should not think that he is being despised, but should rather despise the other person, on the grounds that his offence was caused by weakness, impetuosity, laziness, meanness, old age or youth.

However, our dealings with servants and friends must be completely free of this impression, since contempt for us as powerless or as ineffective plays no part in their attitude towards us: our servants regard us as good, on the assumption that we are fair to them, and our friends regard us as their friends, on the assumption that we are affectionate towards them. In fact, however, it is not only wife, servants and friends that we behave harshly towards because we think we are despised by them, but the same idea often brings us into angry conflict with innkeepers, sailors and drunken muleteers, and makes us get cross with dogs for barking at us and donkeys for bumping into us. We are just like the man who wanted to hit a donkey driver, and then when he shouted, 'I'm an Athenian citizen', he said to the donkey, 'Well, you aren't', and began hitting it and raining blows on it.

Now, those continuous, constant feelings of anger which gradually gather in the mind like a swarm of bees or wasps are engendered in us above all by self-regard and discontent, coupled with a luxurious and enervating way of life. It follows that there is no more important means of promoting kind behaviour towards one's servants, wife and friends than being easy to please and having a simple lifestyle, as a result of the ability to adapt oneself to immediate circumstances and not to need a lot of extras. On the other hand, 'anyone whose discontent makes him critical, if his food is over-baked or over-boiled, or under- or over- or medium-seasoned', and who can't have a drink without ice, or eat shop-bought bread, or take a morsel of food served on plain or earthenware dishes, or sleep on a mattress unless it billows like the sea in a deep swell, and who flogs and beats his table servants, forcing them to hurry, making them rush about, create a hubbub and work up a sweat as if they were bringing poultices for boils - anyone like this is enslaved to a feeble, nit-picking, complaining way of life, and fails to realize that he is creating for his temper the kind of raw and oozing condition which a chronic cough or constantly bumping into things causes. So we must train the body, by means of frugality, to be self-sufficient and hence easily pleased, because people who want little are seldom disappointed.

Food should be our starting-point: it is no great hardship quietly to make do with what is to hand, and not worry and fuss about a considerable proportion of our food, which imposes upon ourselves and our companions the most disagreeable flavouring of all - anger. It is impossible to conceive of a less pleasant meal than when servants are beaten and wife is cursed because something is burned or smoky or has insufficient salt, or because the bread is too cold. Arcesilaus once had some visitors staying and he invited friends over to dinner, but when the meal was served, there was no bread, because the servants had forgotten to buy any - which would make anyone scream loud enough to crack the walls! But Arcesilaus smiled and said, 'It's a good thing that intellectuals like a drinks party!'

Socrates once brought Euthydemus home from the wrestling-school, and Xanthippe laid into them angrily, hurled insults at them and eventually overturned the table. Euthydemus was very upset, and got up to go, but Socrates said, 'When we were at your house the other day, a hen flew in and did exactly the same, but we didn't get cross, did we?'

We should welcome friends gladly, with smiles and affection - without scowling and without instilling fear and trepidation in our servants. And we should also condition ourselves to be happy to use any utensils, and not to have preferences: some people (including Marius, we hear), having once chosen one particular goblet or cup, refuse to drink out of any other, even when they have plenty available; others are the same way about oil-flasks and strigils, and love one set above all others; and then, when any of these special things gets broken or lost, they can hardly bear it and they resort to punishment. So anyone whose weakness is anger should get rid of rare and unusual things like cups, rings and precious stones, since their loss is more unsettling than the loss of common, everyday things. That is why, when Nero had an amazingly beautiful and lavish octagonal tent made, Seneca said, 'You are a self-convicted pauper, because this tent is irreplaceable if lost.' And in fact the tent was lost, as it happened, when its ship went down; but Nero remembered what Seneca had said, and did not get too upset.

Being unfussy about mundane things makes one unfussy and gentle with one's servants; and if one is gentle with one's servants, then obviously one will also be gentle with one's friends and dependants. It is noticeable that the first thing slaves try to find out about their new owner, after they have been bought, is not whether he is liable to superstition or envy, but whether he has a temper. In fact, it is generally true that where anger is present, husbands cannot tolerate their wives' impassivity, or wives their husbands' passion, or friends one another's familiarity. So when anger is present, neither marriage nor friendship is endurable; but when anger is absent, even drunkenness is no burden. Dionysus' wand provides punishment enough for anyone who gets drunk, unless anger intrudes and imbues the wine with the god of cruelty and madness, rather than of ecstasy and dance. Anticyra cures straightforward insanity, but the combination of madness and anger is the stuff of tragedy and myth.

We should eliminate anger from our lighter moments, because it imposes enmity on affability; from our discussions, because it turns love of debating into love of disputing; from our decision-making, because it tinges authority with arrogance; when we are teaching, because it instils lack of confidence and a distaste for rationality; when we are doing well, because it promotes envy; when we are doing badly, because it deters sympathy by making people fight irritably with anyone commiserating with them. Priam is an example of this, with his 'Go away, you vile wretches! Haven't you got problems of your own? Why have you come to bother me?'

Being easy to please, on the other hand, is either a help or an embellishment or a delight, and its gentleness overcomes anger and discontent of all kinds. Consider Euclides, for instance: when his brother ended an argument by saying, 'I'll get my own back on you, if it's the last thing I do', Euclides replied, 'I'll win you over, if it's the last thing I do', and immediately made him alter course and change his mind. And Polemon was once being cursed by a man who was fond of precious stones and obsessed with costly rings; Polemon did not respond at all, but began to study one of the man's rings closely. So the man felt pleased and said, 'You'll get a far better impression of it, Polemon, if you examine it in sunlight rather than here.'

Once Aristippus was angry with Aeschines, and someone asked, 'What's happened to Aeschines', and your friendship, Aristippus?' He replied, 'It's sleeping, but I'll wake it up.' He went to Aeschines and said, 'Do you think there's absolutely no chance for me, no hope at all? Is that why you don't tell me off?' And Aeschines' response was: 'Given that you're inherently better than me in all respects, it's not at all surprising that you were the first to see what to do.'

It has been said that 'A new-born child, stroking a bristle-maned boar with his young hand, may - and so may a woman - bring him down more easily than any wrestler.' We, however, domesticate and tame wild creatures, and carry wolf and lion cubs around in our arms, but then under the influence of anger we reject children, friends and acquaintances; and we use our anger like a wild beast to assault our servants and fellow citizens, and misguidedly gloss over it as 'righteous indignation'. There is no difference, in my opinion, between this and calling other mental affections and afflictions 'foresight' or 'independence' or 'respect': it cannot free us from any of them.

Now, Zeno used to say that seed is a compound, a mixture of extracts from all the faculties which make up a person's nature; and analogously, anger seems to be a kind of conglomerate of emotional seeds. It contains elements extracted from pain and pleasure and arrogance; it has the gloating pleasure of spite, and also gets its method of grappling from spite, in the sense that the avoidance of its own suffering is not the purpose of its efforts, but it accepts harm to itself while destroying the other person; and one of its ingredients is the form of desire which is the most disagreeable of all, the longing to hurt someone else. When we approach reprobates' houses, we hear a pipe-girl playing at dawn and the sights that greet our eyes are, to quote, 'sediment of wine and shreds of garlands' and inebriated servants at the door; but the fact that the longing to hurt others is an aspect of anger explains why you will see the manifest signs of cruel and irascible people on the faces and in the identification tattoos and chains of their servants; and 'wailing is the only constant refrain to arise in the house' of an angry man - the wailing of estate-managers being flogged and serving-women having their arms twisted inside the house; and the consequence of all this is that anger is pitiful to anyone who can see that its desires and its pleasures involve pain.

Despite what has been said, anyone who is commonly susceptible to anger because of genuine righteous indignation must rid himself of the excessive, unmitigated part of his anger, along with his overconfidence in the people he comes across. This overconfidence is one of the chief causes of the aggravation of anger, which is what happens when someone assumed to be good turns out to be bad, or when a supposed friend gets cross or critical. In my own case, I'm sure you know how much I am naturally inclined towards thinking well of people and trusting them. It is like when you take a step, but there is nothing there to tread on: the more I commit myself to being friendly, the more I go wrong and get hurt by my mistakes. I might well not be able at this late stage to lessen this excessive susceptibility to and enthusiasm for friendship; but I can use Plato's words of warning to bridle my overconfidence. Plato says that his praise for the mathematician Helicon is couched the way it is because Helicon is a member of an inherently inconstant species; and he claims to be right to be wary of people brought up in his city, because since they are human and the offspring of humans, they might at any time reveal the weakness inherent in their nature.

However, Sophocles' assertion that 'Most aspects of humanity will be found on investigation to be contemptible' seems excessively harsh and restrictive. Still, the pessimistic, carping tone of this judgement does make us less liable to anger and its consequent disruptiveness; I mean, it is what is unexpected and unforeseen that throws us. We should (as Panaetius said at one point) make use of the attitude summed up in Anaxagoras' dictum: when his son died, he said, 'I knew that I had fathered a mortal.' Likewise, whenever we get irritated by someone's mistakes, we should comment, 'I knew that the slave I bought was unintelligent', or 'I knew that my friend was not flawless', or 'I knew that my wife was a woman.' And if one also keeps reiterating Plato's saying, 'Am I not like that too?', he will turn his thinking inward instead of outward, and will interrupt his complaining with caution, and will consequently not employ a great deal of righteous indignation towards others when he sees that he himself requires a lot of forbearance. But as it is, every one of us gets angry and lashes out, and sounds like Aristides and Cato: 'Stop stealing!', 'Don't tell lies!', 'Why are you slacking?' And the most despicable thing of all is that we angrily reprimand others for being angry, and we furiously punish others for mistakes made because they were infuriated: we do not behave like doctors who 'use bitter medicine to flush out bitter bile', but we aggravate and exacerbate the condition.

At the same time as bearing in mind these considerations, I also try to cut back a bit on my nosiness. I mean, knowing every single detail about everything, investigating and eliciting a slave's every occupation, a friend's every action, a son's every pastime, a wife's every whisper - this leads to many outbursts of anger, one after another every day, and these in turn add up to habitual discontent and surliness. Although Euripides is right to say that it is when things get out of hand that God 'intervenes, while leaving minor matters to chance', I still think that a sensible person ought to entrust nothing to chance, and ought to ignore nothing: he should trust and make use of his wife for some matters, his servants for others and his friends for others (just as a ruler trusts and makes use of overseers, accountants and managers), while being himself, by virtue of his rationality, in charge of the most far-reaching and important matters. For just as tiny writing irritates the eyes, so the extra strain of trivial matters chafes and unsettles one's temper, and it acquires a habit which is detrimental when more important matters are at stake.

All in all, therefore, I began to think that Empedocles' dictum 'Observe a fast from evil' is crucial and inspired; furthermore, not just because they are agreeable, but also because they are not irrelevant to the practice of philosophy, I began to commend those familiar pacts, pledged with devotion, such as to honour God with one's self-control, by keeping oneself for a year untainted by sex and alcohol; or again to refrain from lying for a prescribed period of time, by paying attention to oneself to make sure that one always tells the truth, in both unguarded and serious moments.

And then I compared my own pledge with these, and found it just as pleasing to God and just as sacred. My pledge was to begin by spending a few days doing the equivalent of going without drinking and alcohol - avoiding anger, and doing so as if I were pouring ritual libations of water and of honey, but not of wine; and then to spend a month, two months, doing this ... In this way, by experimenting on myself, the period of time gradually got longer and I progressed towards increased tolerance, by using self-control to pay attention to myself and to keep myself composed and imperturbable - maintaining a holy silence - and to remain untainted by pernicious speech, unnatural actions and emotion. Emotion leads, for the sake of a form of pleasure which is small in quantity and disagreeable in quality, to enormous mental confusion and the most despicable remorse. And this, I think, is why (with God's assistance too) my experience tends to clarify the meaning of the well-known view that this composure, calmness and charity is nowhere near as kind and considerate and inoffensive to those who come across it as it is to those who possess it. JvlCDQLPOUY9OlftwpBsBSWzNVbtZG5WPylEjtj0iaD7eewLSadN3rEF6F4DmiOq