a father who has devoured your half- brothers in a stew. Complicated
negotiations among intimates are rarely settled, and perhaps never fully
settled, by the law. But if some stranger from Sparta has hacked up your
father, there is no need to try to work out an appropriate future relation-
ship with him. What you had better do is to mourn your father and turn
the prosecution of the murderer over to the state.6
On the other hand, anger has a limited use as an attention- getter,
and therefore a potential deterrent. Although I’ve criticized people who
need the threat of anger to deter their friends’ bad behavior, the same
is not true of the virtual army of heedless, careless, and rude offenders
who assail us in the Middle Realm. I’ll argue that anger (or, even better,
a carefully controlled performance of anger) can be a useful attention-
getting device in many cases, perhaps deterring bad behavior. It may
also be useful, once again, as a signal (to oneself, and at times to others)
of a problem, and as a source of motivation to address it— albeit often
unreliably.
And forgiveness? In the Middle Realm what is needed above all is
to mourn and move on (if the damage is serious) or simply to move on
if it is not. Apology can be useful as a sign of what we can expect of the
offender in the future. But there’s a big difference between receiving an
apology and extracting one, and putting the offender through a forgive-
ness ritual is usually counterproductive. Unconditional forgiveness is
better, but, once again, it often retains a whiff of moral superiority that is all too common in this realm, as my examples will illustrate.
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II. Stoics on the Middle Realm
Seneca’s critique of anger sets itself in a long- established Stoic tradition.7
Although his is the only complete Stoic work we have on the subject, we
know that the great Stoic philosopher Chrysippus made anger a center-
piece of his four- volume work on the passions;8 and there were clearly
dozens of other philosophical books on the topic of anger, known to us
by title, and in some cases by brief extracts.9 Indeed, anger seems to have
occupied the Stoics more than any other individual passion. They have
relatively little to say, for example, about grief, compassion, and even
fear; and they are surprisingly, and perhaps not consistently, friendly to a
variety of passionate erotic love (carefully cabined, however, so as never
to be the basis of anger).10 The focus on anger is not surprising, given that they describe their societies (not implausibly) as obsessed with slights
and insults, boiling over at every imagined dishonor, destructively prone
to retribution.
The Stoic critique of anger rests on their sweeping disparagement of
the value of “external goods,” things not under the control of a person’s
reason and will. They insist that family and friends, health, bodily integ-
rity, work, and political standing have no intrinsic value; and they do not
even possess great instrumental value. Although, other things equal, it
is rational to pursue these “goods of fortune,” a person’s well- being is
complete without them: so if they are removed or damaged by chance
or another person’s bad behavior, one should not be upset. This means
that their critique of anger starts so far back that there would appear to
be nothing more to say about anger in particular: it’s just one of the many
ways in which people betray unwise attachments to external things. Since
I do not accept this account of value, it might seem that their critique has
little to offer to my own account.
The Stoics, however, are flexible persuaders, and they deal with inter-
locutors who do not share their own extreme position. They like to find
ways of appealing to such people, nudging them toward the Stoic con-
clusion long before the full position is unveiled. Seneca typically writes
in quasi- dialogue form, whether in the unanswered fictional letters to
Lucilius or in the “dialogues,” which all have some definite person (usu-
ally real, though used as a fictional character) as their addressee. Although that person says nothing directly, his or her responses are often imagined by Seneca. The addressee of On Anger is Seneca’s brother Novatus, an average sort of Roman gentleman, who begins the work by thinking
anger a very appropriate and useful emotion. Seneca nudges him gen-
tly out of that stance, presenting the full Stoic theory only in glimpses,
and tangentially, late in the work’s third book. So his arguments do not
depend very much on the extreme theory of value, and many are of
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143
interest to us. Most, furthermore, do not concern intimate relationships,
or, indeed, other important components of well- being (according to my
account)— so we may focus our attention on the “Middle Realm,” while
noting that the Stoics do not in fact separate that realm from the intimate
realm.
Seneca has several distinct arguments against anger. Anger, he
claims, is often focused on petty trivialities. Even when it concerns appar-
ently weightier matters, it is extremely likely to be distorted by exces-
sive concern with status and rank— and also with money, a common sign
of status and rank. Far from being helpful in promoting useful conduct,
anger is a very unstable and unreliable motivator. Far from being pleas-
ant, anger is extremely unpleasant and a cause of further unpleasant-
ness. Far from being a good deterrent, anger makes people look childish,
and childishness does not deter. And far from being lofty, anger is small-
minded and base, not worthy of the self- respect of a truly self- respecting
person. Let us address each of these in turn.
Seneca gets a foothold with Novatus by pointing to the evident fact
that anger often concerns either things in themselves ridiculously trivial,
or things that can’t possibly involve any wrongdoing. In the second cat-
egory are frustrations caused by the behavior of inanimate objects, non-
human animals, small children, forces of nature, or the inadvertent acts
of well- intentioned people who seek our good. In none of these cases
is anger conceptually appropriate, because the intent to harm is absent
(II.26). (Seneca is clearly assuming that the benign people have not been
culpably negligent.) And yet, people do get worked up over all of these
things. Novatus is expected to grant quickly that such people are foolish.
In the first category are all sorts of actions that may involve some wrong-
doing, but are so trivial that Novatus will immediately see that it is not
worth getting upset about them. They are “empty shadows” that no more
make our anger reasonable than a bull is reasonable when he charges at
the color red (III.30). Among the trivia are
A clumsy slave or luke- warm water to drink, the couch in a
mess or the table carelessly laid— to be provoked by such things
is lunacy. It takes a sickly invalid to get goose- bumps at a light
breeze. … Only someone out of shape from overindulgence will
get a stitch in his side a
t the sight of another person’s physi-
cal effort… . Why should someone’s coughing or sneezing …
drive you crazy, or a dog who crosses your path, or a servant
who carelessly drops your key? Can you expect a man to put up
calmly with public abuse, with slanders heaped upon him in the
Assembly or the Senate House, if his ears are hurt by the grating
of a dragged bench? (II.25)
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These vivid examples suggest a personal set of pet peeves and an all-
too- lively propensity to irritation: who, for example, could invent that
dragged bench?11 Seneca adds a point he emphasized in Letter 12: anger is
often the result of a mistaken imputation of hostile intent. We’re inclined
to believe people when they tell us we have been insulted or otherwise
wronged, or to believe this on slender evidence (II.22). Instead, we should
be very skeptical. He adds an interesting point: often people mistake sur-
prising conduct for wrongful conduct (II.31)— presumably because we
are creatures of habit, and are jolted by any deviation from routine.
In keeping with this observation, and a thread running throughout
Seneca’s advice, is the canonical Stoic recommendation of praemeditatio
malorum: if you keep thinking about all the bad things that can hap-
pen, you avoid forming unwise dependencies on things of fortune. If,
by contrast (turning to present- day reality) you expect every sales clerk
to be intelligent, polite, and helpful, you set yourself up for a life of
disappointment.
But Seneca knows that Novatus, while agreeing with Seneca when he
makes fun of the hypersensitive and excessively credulous, will be reluc-
tant to agree with him when he urges non- anger in areas that a Roman
gentleman prizes greatly: honor, reputation, and rank. Seneca’s own real
position is that these are not matters that a good person should take very
seriously; and in writing to Lucilius he often makes that position clear.
But Lucilius, unlike Novatus, is a serious student of Stoic doctrine. By
writing On Anger as a pseudo- dialogue with Novatus, Seneca commits
himself to the more slippery task of arguing against anger in these cases
central for a mainstream Roman— without putting the extreme theory of
value on the table.
One strategy he uses is the assimilation of insults and reputational
damage to cases that Novatus will clearly admit to be either silly or
base: thus, when he finally does approach dishonor, abuse, and alien-
ation of affection, he surrounds these cases with some of the trivia that he
has mentioned before (rude servants, ill- behaved animals), and he also
focuses on money, which is certainly a powerful symbol of status and
rank, and yet one that a proud Roman may think unworthy as a rea-
son for intense emotion. By making comedy out of litigation over inheri-
tances and other financial matters (III.33), he strongly suggests that all
concern with rank is just this silly. A typical passage begins:
“How,” you ask, “are we to keep in mind, as you urge, the pet-
tiness, the wretchedness, the childishness of what we take to be
harm done to us? I would advise nothing more, indeed, than to
acquire a lofty mind and to see how base and sordid are all the
things for which we bring lawsuits, run around, and lose our
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breath. They should not be considered at all by anyone who has
ever had a single deep and lofty thought! (III.32)
But Seneca uses, simultaneously, a complementary strategy: he thinks
up all the arguments Novatus is likely to make for the utility of anger,
and rebuts them one by one. Novatus’s first argument— introduced very
early in the work and oft repeated— is that anger is a useful, perhaps
a necessary motivator of appropriate conduct. Seneca replies, first, by
pointing to people who behave in an appropriately manly way but are
not angry— hunters, gladiators, dutiful soldiers (I.7, 8, 11)— and, second,
by showing that the addition of anger makes behavior less stable and less
well calibrated to achieve the desired result. Northern tribes such as the
Germani are full of rage, but they are not effective in a prolonged military
campaign; far more credit goes to notable Romans (such as Fabius the
Delayer) who won precisely by knowing how to withhold their troops
strategically. In civic contexts, moreover, anger leads to excess, in punish-
ment (Seneca cites the use of torture and capital punishment)12 and in
personal conduct with others.
Nor is anger pleasant, literary examples to the contrary (II.32): it is
like a fever, an illness (I.12), a gathering of wild beasts (II.8); and if once one gives way to it, it will fill up one’s whole day with unpleasantness,
since there is so much bad behavior at which one could be angry if one
were going in for anger (II.9).
Does anger deter bad behavior? Seneca addresses this issue together
with the motivation- question, by showing that anger is not very effica-
cious: the army that is effective as a deterrent force is the army that wins
repeated victories, not the army that makes a lot of noise.
Finally, Seneca addresses (repeatedly) the claim that anger is evi-
dence of a lofty or great- souled character (I.20, II.15, III.38), hence a way of avoiding contempt and commanding respect. Actually, he tells Novatus,
it is a sign of uncontrol, disease, and empty inflation. Just as it’s the out-of- shape or sick body that hurts at the slightest touch, so it is the weak
and ailing character that gets upset about everything (I.20). Indeed, the
shoe is on the other foot: the really stalwart, lofty, and admirable person
is able to endure insults and rise above them, making enemies look petty
by overlooking their provocations. Here, right at the end of the work,
Seneca finally brings out the stock Stoic hero, Cato, who is of course a
generally admired Roman hero as well:
[Cato] was pleading a case when Lentulus, that figure of uncon-
trollable factiousness (as our fathers recall him), worked up a
thick mass of spit and landed it right in the middle of his fore-
head. Cato wiped off his face, saying, “I will swear to anyone,
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Anger and Forgiveness
Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your
mouth.” (III.38)
Getting spat on is one of the most humiliating things that could hap-
pen to any Roman giving a public speech. Seneca, however, successfully
turns the tables on Novatus’s expectations by making the spitter, not his
target, look disgusting and base. To be able to rise above humiliation with
grandeur and even humor— the remark is actually quite funny in Latin,
since os habere means both “to have a mouth” and “to have proficiency as an orator”— shows much more class than to be baited by rivalry into a
low and unworthy display.
As we saw, Seneca depicts himself as having an anger problem that
focuses on status and insult. In On Anger, he offers a famous description of his own nightly practice of self- examination, revealing in the process
the interesting fact that a rejection of
self- anger is an integral part of his Stoic self- therapy:
A person will cease from anger and be more moderate if he
knows that every day he has to come before himself as judge.
What therefore is more wonderful than this habit of unfolding
the entire day! How fine is the sleep that follows this acknowl-
edgment of oneself, how serene, how deep and free, when the
mind has been either praised or admonished, and as its own hid-
den investigator and assessor has gained knowledge of its own
character! I avail myself of this power, and plead my cause daily
before myself. When the light has been removed from sight, and
my wife, long since aware of this habit of mine, has fallen silent, I
examine my entire day and measure my deeds and words. I hide
nothing from myself, I pass over nothing. For why should I
fear anything from my own errors, when I can say, “See that you
don’t do that again, this time I pardon you.” (III.36)
Seneca then offers a representative sample of this self- scrutiny: inappro-
priately harsh speech to one person, too much sensitivity to the insulting
jokes of some others, too much made of the rudeness of a doorman, anger
at a host who has given him a bad seat, and indeed at the guest who was
given the “good” place; coldness to someone who speaks ill of his talent.
In all of this, his stance is to reprove himself, but without self- anger: the self faces the self without fear, with a forward- looking determination
to be better prepared the next time. Not even Transition- Anger is pres-
ent: he is not outraged at his behavior, just patiently resolved to improve.
Seneca’s arguments remain to be evaluated. But they clearly make
a lot of good points that are independent of the extreme Stoic theory of
value. Seneca does not distinguish the Middle Realm from the intimate
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147
realm; nor does he securely distinguish it from the political realm,
although some remarks about the incompatibility of anger with the rule
of law early in the work are an Aeschylean beginning (I.16). But these
deficiencies do not remove the value of his arguments. The rejection of
Novatus’s various pro- anger claims will turn out to be a little one- sided;
beyond this, the view leaves no room for a type of Transition- Anger that
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