How the Stoics dealt with anger

Try the Anger exercise now

This is the Anger exercise from I Need Perspective in the Stoic Practice app, where it is free. It has eight short steps and takes about three minutes: what happened, what a camera would have recorded, the story you added, what is under your control, a teaching from Epictetus, the virtue you want to act from and one thing to do next, then a short closing note. Every step is optional, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

The order is the point. Steps two and three pull the event apart from the story. The event is what a camera would record: he interrupted me twice in the meeting. The story is what you add: he’s trying to make me look stupid, this always happens, I can’t let it stand. The event may be annoying. The story is what makes you furious, and the story is yours to examine. The teaching in step five, Epictetus’s Enchiridion 20, makes the same point: what irritates you is your own opinion of the act.

Step four narrows things to what is actually under your control right now: your words, your response, your actions, your judgment and whether the conflict continues. Whether the other person apologizes, sees sense or gets what’s coming to them is not on that list. This is the idea modern writers call the dichotomy of control; our guide to things you can’t control goes further.

If you can’t do the exercise right now, do the first thing both Seneca and Epictetus recommend: wait. Don’t send the email, answer the text or say the sentence that is ready on your tongue. The rest of this page explains why waiting works and what to do with the time.

What Seneca meant by anger

The fullest Stoic account that survives is Seneca’s On Anger, three books addressed to his brother Novatus. He opens with a description he credits to wise men before him: anger is “a short madness.”

Most of that list is familiar to anyone who has been angry in traffic. Anger is “deaf to reason and advice” and “excited by trifling causes”: the driver who cut you off becomes, for ten minutes, the most important person in your life. Seneca’s last image is the one to keep. A falling rock breaks itself on whatever it hits. Anger damages the person who carries it, not only its target.

The Stoics defined anger more narrowly than we usually do. It is not just feeling hot or upset. In Seneca’s account it is a desire to punish someone who has injured you (On Anger 1.3, in our words). At the start of Book 2 he spells out the judgments that desire rests on: that a wrong was done to you, that it ought not to have been done, and that it is your duty to pay it back. None of that, he says, can happen without the mind agreeing to it (On Anger 2.1, in our words). The Stoics called this agreement assent (in Greek, synkatathesis), and it is the hinge of everything practical on this page: if anger needs your assent, assent can be delayed, questioned or withheld.

Is anger ever useful?

Seneca takes the objection seriously. Doesn’t anger rouse courage? Don’t we need it to stand up to wrongdoing? He gives three answers, here in our words. First, a passion is easier to keep out than to control once it is in, because once it has the mind it is stronger than reason (On Anger 1.7). Second, he reports Aristotle’s view that anger is needed in a fight but should serve as a soldier, not a general; Seneca replies that an anger which obeys reason has stopped being anger, and an anger that will not obey is a useless soldier (1.9). Third, a good person defends their parents, children and country because it is their duty, not because they are enraged (1.12).

None of this asks you to let wrongs pass. You can still report the harassment, end the friendship, refuse the unfair deal or defend someone being bullied. The Stoic claim is that you will do those things better, and more justly, without the heat. That is courage and justice at work, two of the four virtues, not anger.

Do Stoics get angry?

They feel the first jolt like anyone else, and Seneca says plainly that it is not up to us.

The flush in your face and the urge to reply belong to that involuntary first stage; the work happens at the second, while a thought like “It is my duty to avenge myself, because I have been injured” can still be examined. Our guide to Stoicism and emotions explains the three stages in full. Marcus Aurelius, in the list of things he thanks the gods for, admits that he was often irritated with his teacher Rusticus, and is grateful that he never did anything he later had to regret:

Delay: the greatest remedy

If the first jolt is involuntary and the third stage is out of control, the useful moment is the one in between. Seneca’s advice for it is simple.

Delay is not the same as forgiving. Seneca says so directly: you ask anger to wait so that it can form a right judgment, not so that it will pardon the offense. His comparison with a court is worth keeping in mind. You would not decide a dispute over a small sum on one person’s word, without witnesses or a hearing. Yet we condemn a friend on the strength of a forwarded screenshot, or a colleague on a report of what they supposedly said about us.

He returns to the point in Book 3, and adds something every angry person knows.

“Anger often comes to us, but we often go to it” (On Anger 3.12). We reread the email, replay the conversation in the shower, tell the story to three people and get angrier each time. Delay works partly because it interrupts that. And Seneca’s estimate is modest: some wrongs grow lighter after an interval “not of a day, but even of an hour.”

Practical ways to delay:

• Set a rule in advance. No reply to anything that made you angry until you have slept on it, or at least until after your next meal.
• Write the reply somewhere it can’t be sent. A note on your phone, not the email draft.
• Leave the room. A short walk is a delay your body can carry out even when your mind won’t.
• Say “Let me think about that.” It is honest, and it buys time without conceding anything.

Seneca adds one more benefit in the same passage, here in our words: even if waiting changes nothing, whatever you do afterward will look like a considered decision rather than a fit of temper (On Anger 3.12). Epictetus ends Enchiridion 20, the teaching in step five of the exercise, with the same advice: buy yourself time, and mastering yourself gets easier.

Marcus Aurelius’s reminders (Meditations 11.18)

Marcus Aurelius kept a numbered list of things to consider when someone has offended him. In Meditations 11.18 he calls them nine rules, received as if they were gifts from the Muses, and then adds a tenth. Here they are in our own words:

1. People are made for one another, and that includes you and the person who offended you.
2. Think about what they are like in private, at the table and in bed, and what opinions are driving them.
3. If they were right, you have no complaint. If they were wrong, they acted from ignorance, not by choice.
4. You do wrong too. You are capable of the faults you avoid, and you may avoid them only out of cowardice or worry about your reputation.
5. You may not even know that they did wrong. Much depends on circumstances you can’t see.
6. Life is short. Soon all of you will be dead.
7. Their act is not what disturbs you. Your opinion about it is. Drop the judgment that it is something terrible, and the anger goes with it.
8. Anger costs you more than the thing you are angry about.
9. Genuine kindness can’t be beaten. Correct them gently, ideally when they are alone, without double meanings or reproach and without lecturing.
10. To demand that bad people never do wrong is to demand the impossible.

The eighth and tenth, in George Long’s 1862 translation:

The eighth is the quickest to use in the moment. Weigh the cost of the act against the cost of the anger. Someone takes your parking space: the act costs you two minutes; the anger can cost you the afternoon and the mood you bring home. The tenth works on the expectation underneath. A lot of anger is surprise that people behave the way people sometimes behave.

If you know the eighth reminder as a line beginning “How much more grievous…”, you have met it in different English. That line is not in Long. It looks like a trimmed version of older translations such as C. R. Haines’s 1916 Loeb edition, which also says “how much more grievous” and speaks of the consequences of our anger where Long speaks of pain. Recent translations, such as Gregory Hays’s of 2002, put it in shorter, plainer English; they are still under copyright, so we don’t quote them. All of them make Long’s point: the anger costs more than the act. We quote Long because his translation is public domain and every word can be checked against the text. For lines attributed to Marcus that he never wrote at all, see fake Stoic quotes, and for the book itself, our guide to the Meditations.

When someone really has wronged you

Some anger is about real wrongs. Seneca doesn’t ask you to pretend otherwise. He asks you to judge fairly, and to start with yourself.

“I have done this very thing myself” (On Anger 2.28) is not an excuse for the other person. It is a way of putting both people on the same scale. Your colleague missed a deadline that made you look bad; you missed one in the spring, and you had reasons. In the same spirit Seneca asks us to consider intention: whether they did it on purpose or by accident, under pressure or by mistake, out of hatred or to gain something for themselves (On Anger 3.12, in our words). Marcus learned a similar habit from Rusticus: to be easily reconciled with people who had offended him, as soon as they showed they were willing (Meditations 1.7, in our words).

Fair judgment can still end in action. You can name the problem, set a limit, take it to someone with the authority to fix it, or walk away. The Stoic difference is the reason you act: because it is right, not because you want them to hurt. If the wrong was an insult, see how the Stoics answered insults; the same guide covers people you have to deal with every week.

After the anger: review it tonight

If you lose your temper anyway, Seneca’s answer near the end of On Anger (3.36) is a short review of the day before sleep, a habit he took from the Roman philosopher Quintus Sextius: his questions, and a free version of the review to do tonight, are on our Evening Examination page.