A guide to Seneca’s On Anger

What the book is

On Anger is a prose essay in three books by Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), the Roman statesman, dramatist and Stoic. It opens by addressing his older brother Novatus, who had asked how anger can be calmed. Novatus later took the name Gallio on his adoption (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)), and as governor of Achaea around 51 he is the Gallio before whom the apostle Paul was brought in Acts 18 (Britannica (opens in a new tab)).

The essay survives in the collection that its principal manuscript, the Codex Ambrosianus, calls Seneca’s Dialogues: twelve books making up ten works (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). On Anger fills books 3 to 5, more than any other work in the set. Like most of Seneca’s writing it can’t be dated precisely. It is later than 41 CE, since Book 1 mentions the conspirators who killed the emperor Gaius (Caligula) that year (1.20), and probably earlier than about 51, since Seneca still calls his brother Novatus.

The plan is looser than the table suggests. Book 3 announces a fresh three-part scheme (3.5) that goes over some of Book 2’s ground again, and Seneca repeats his best points more than once.

The argument

Seneca’s claim is simple to state: anger is never useful, and it should be removed, not kept in moderation. That puts him against Aristotle and Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, whom he names and answers several times (1.9, 1.12, 1.14, 3.3). On the view he attributes to them, anger is a spur to courage and virtue that should be kept within limits, not uprooted. Seneca thinks a passion can’t be trusted to stay within limits, and that a little of a bad thing is still bad.

Keep “a moderate passion is nothing but a moderate evil” (On Anger 1.10) in mind through all three books. Much of the work answers one version or another of “but surely a little anger helps.”

The argument rests on a definition. For Seneca, anger is a desire to punish someone for an injury you believe they did you (1.3, 1.5, 2.22). The place where he first stated the definition is damaged: a leaf or more of the manuscript is lost partway through 1.2. Stewart’s note there supplies it from the Christian writer Lactantius (On the Anger of God 17), who reports Seneca’s wording as, in substance, the desire to avenge an injury. In 1.3 Seneca says Aristotle defined anger in much the same way, as wanting to pay back pain with pain.

A desire to punish involves judgments: that you were wronged, that the wrong matters, that the other person should pay. Judgments need the mind’s agreement, and agreement can be withheld. That is the Stoic center of the book, set out in 2.1–2.4: the first jolt of feeling is involuntary, and anger proper is not. Those chapters are explained on Stoicism and anger and Stoicism and emotions. Everything practical in On Anger follows from them. If anger needs your consent, you can refuse it at the door, which is easier than throwing it out once it is inside (1.7–1.8), and you can give your judgment time to work, which is why delay is Seneca’s greatest remedy (2.29).

Book 1: what anger is, and why it is never useful

Book 1 opens with a portrait of the angry person, flushed, shaking and deaf to advice, and with the description of anger as a brief madness that Seneca credits to wise men before him (1.1; quoted on Stoicism and anger). Then he counts the cost in ruined cities and murdered rulers (1.2). Animals, he argues, don’t really get angry, because anger belongs to a creature with reason (1.3). He separates anger from irascibility, in our words, the way you would separate someone who is drunk from a drunkard: one is a state, the other a habit (1.4).

The first big argument is from human nature:

“Mankind is born for mutual assistance, anger for mutual ruin” (On Anger 1.5). If human beings are made for one another, a passion whose aim is to hurt them can’t be natural to us. Seneca doesn’t conclude that wrongdoing should go uncorrected. Correction is like medicine, he says: gentle words first, sterner ones next, and punishment last, only as much as the case needs (1.6). What he denies is that the person correcting needs to be angry to do it.

The middle of the book takes the case for anger one objection at a time. Anger is needed in war: Seneca answers that Fabius beat his own anger before he beat Hannibal, by playing for time instead of rushing into battle (1.11). A good person should be angry when his father is attacked: no, he will defend his father out of duty (1.12). His answers on usefulness are set out on Stoicism and anger. The question of punishment gets the most memorable reply, a story about Socrates:

“I would strike you, were I not angry” (On Anger 1.15) turns the usual logic around. The anger is the reason not to act yet. Seneca’s model is the law, which defines offenses and sets penalties without hating anyone (1.16). His warning example is the general Gnaeus Piso. In a rage, Piso ordered a soldier executed because he came back from leave without his comrade, on the assumption that he must have killed him. When the comrade turned up alive, Piso sentenced the pair of them to death, and added the centurion who had led them to him (1.18). Book 1 ends by denying that anger is a sign of a great mind. What looks lofty in it is swelling, not size (1.20–1.21).

Book 2: how anger starts, and how to stop it early

Book 2 opens with Seneca warning Novatus that the ground is drier now. The question is whether anger starts by choice or by impulse, and his answer, that anger can do nothing without the mind’s approval (2.1), is the account of assent described above. Cruelty is something else: it harms for pleasure rather than in return for a wrong, though anger indulged for long enough can harden into it (2.5).

Should a good person at least be angry at wrongdoing? Seneca’s reply is that he would never stop (2.6–2.9). Look at a crowded public square, he says, and you are looking at as many vices as people (2.8). The alternative is to pardon the whole human race, since nobody is born wise, and to look on wrongdoers the way a doctor looks on patients (2.10; see Stoicism and difficult people). Then come the last defenses of anger. It earns respect and frightens bad people, but whoever is feared lives in fear himself (2.11). It can’t be removed from human nature, but people train themselves to walk tightropes and go without sleep, so the mind can train itself out of anger (2.12). Orators speak better angry, but only when they are acting angry (2.17).

At 2.18 Seneca turns to remedies, of two kinds: those that keep us from becoming angry, and those that keep us from doing wrong when we are. He begins with temperament (hot natures, wine, hunger and fatigue all feed anger, 2.19–2.20) and with the way children are raised.

Most of this still works for a parent. Don’t let a tantrum pay, give later and calmly what was refused while the child screamed, and remember that children copy the adults they live with more readily than any lesson.

For adults, Seneca says, education is over, so the work starts at the belief that we have been wronged:

To “plead the cause of the absent against ourselves” (On Anger 2.22) is a good use of a delay. A friend cancels dinner by text, with no reason given. Before deciding you are being dropped, argue their side: a sick child, a bad week at work, a phone about to die. Often the suspicion turns out to be wrong, and “time discloses the truth” (2.22).

The rest of this stretch is Seneca’s best-known practical advice. Don’t be quick to believe gossip or suspicion (2.24), and don’t let small things like lukewarm water set you off (2.25); both passages are on Stoic quotes on anger. Don’t be angry with objects: his example is a reader who throws away a book because the letters are too small (2.26), the ancient version of shouting at a printer. Remember that you have done the same thing yourself (2.28), and wait (2.29), both explained on Stoicism and anger. Expect people to behave badly, so that it doesn’t arrive as a surprise (2.31), the idea behind premeditatio malorum.

Book 2 ends on revenge. When a stranger struck Cato in the public baths and later apologized, Cato said he didn’t remember being struck (2.32). If you refuse to answer an angry person in kind, the quarrel has nowhere to go, since a fight needs two people (2.34). And anger is ugly: Seneca reports Sextius’s remark that some angry people were helped by catching sight of themselves in a mirror (2.36).

Book 3: remedies for your own anger and other people’s

Book 3 begins by restating anger’s force (unlike the other passions, it can seize whole nations at once, 3.2), then sets out its plan:

The last line, “If he be weaker, spare him: if he be stronger, spare yourself” (On Anger 3.5), covers most fights at work in either direction. Picking a fight with someone who reports to you is beneath you; picking one with someone you report to is unwise.

Avoiding anger (3.6–3.13). Don’t take on more than you can carry. Seneca cites Democritus’s rule against overwork, and observes that anyone rushing through a crowded city will get jostled (3.6–3.7). Spend your time with calm people (3.8). His example is the orator Caelius, so quarrelsome that when a client dining with him agreed with everything he said, he demanded to be contradicted so that there might be two of them. And look after the body:

When someone is tired or hungry, Seneca says, “even a greeting, a letter, a speech, or a question” (On Anger 3.9) can set them off. Read “a letter” as an email, and most people can name one that would have sounded different after lunch. Seneca also tells you to learn your own sore spot, since one person is touchy about his ancestry and another about being thought learned (3.10). Then come three chapters quoted elsewhere on this site: don’t go looking for what people say about you (3.11), wait (3.12), and keep anger from showing while you work on it (3.13).

A gallery of rulers (3.14–3.23). The middle of Book 3 is a long run of examples, many of them grim. Cambyses, king of Persia, shoots the son of a friend who had urged him to drink less, to prove that wine hasn’t spoiled his aim (3.14). The emperor Gaius has senators flogged and tortured for his own amusement (3.18–3.19). Cyrus, after a river drowns one of his horses, spends his army’s time cutting it into 360 streams (3.21). On the other side are Antigonus, Philip of Macedon and Augustus, who put up with insults they could easily have punished (3.22–3.23). Seneca turns them into something to say to yourself:

The question is about self-importance. If kings and emperors could let an insult pass, it is hard to argue that a curt reply from a colleague is “a crime to shock my ears” (On Anger 3.24).

Seeing things at their size (3.25–3.35). Seneca asks for mutual forgiveness, since all of us do wrong (3.26), and points out that anger lasts longer than the hurt that caused it (3.27). He calls the anger of people who feel underrewarded a matter of bad bookkeeping: we value what we give too highly and what we receive too low (3.31). Most of what we fight over is trifling, and money is the loudest trifle of all (3.32–3.34).

The nightly review (3.36). Then comes the chapter many readers already know. Following the philosopher Sextius, Seneca reviews his whole day each night before sleep, hides nothing from himself, pardons himself and sets a rule for tomorrow. It is quoted and explained on our Evening Examination page, which also lets you do the review tonight.

Other people’s anger (3.39–3.40). Having dealt with his own anger, Seneca turns to calming someone else’s.

The first burst of anger “is deaf and frantic” (On Anger 3.39), so arguing with it fails. Let it run, then distract, delay or redirect. His great example is Augustus at the house of Vedius Pollio. When a slave broke a crystal cup, Pollio ordered him thrown to the huge eels he kept in a tank. Augustus had the slave let go, had all the crystal on the table broken, and had the tank filled in (3.40).

The ending (3.41–3.43). Seneca closes by repeating that anger should be rooted out, not moderated, and by reminding the reader that both parties to every quarrel will soon be dead (3.42–3.43). The final chapter is on Stoic quotes about death.

How to read it

On Anger runs to about 39,000 words in Stewart’s translation, which is an afternoon or two of reading. If you want the core in less time, read 1.1–1.12 for the case against anger, 2.1–2.4 for how it forms, 2.18–2.36 and 3.5–3.13 for the remedies, and 3.24–3.43 for the forgiveness chapters, the nightly review and the ending. The atrocities of 3.14–3.21 can be skimmed once you have the point.

Expect two kinds of friction. The style is heavy with rhetoric, and Stewart’s Victorian English adds to the weight. And this is a book from a slave-owning society: Seneca’s examples assume that masters beat slaves, and his remarks about women and foreign peoples carry the prejudices of his time. His main arguments don’t depend on them.

Translations

Which one depends on what you want. For the whole work in modern English, choose Kaster or Cooper and Procopé; both come with an introduction. For a short first taste, Romm’s selection is the easiest way in. If you read some Latin, Basore’s Loeb puts the original beside the English. Stewart costs nothing and every passage on this page comes from it, checked word for word against the digitized text.

References differ slightly between editions. Stewart prints books and chapters, which is how this site cites the work (3.36). Modern editions also number the sections within each chapter, so the same passage may be cited as 3.36.1 or 3.36.3. Lines from On Anger shared online often come from modern translations, so their wording may not match Stewart’s. For more verified passages, and for popular anger quotes the Stoics never wrote, see Stoic quotes on anger.