Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
become harmless after repeated bites have exhausted their poison.
Consequently those who are {70} equally guilty are not equally
punished, and often he who has done less is punished more, because
he fell in the way of anger when it was fresher. It is altogether
irregular; at one time it runs into undue excess, at another it
falls short of its duty: for it indulges its own feelings and gives
sentence according to its caprices, will not listen to evidence,
allows the defence no opportunity of being heard, clings to what
it has wrongly assumed, and will not suffer its opinion to be wrested
from it, even when it is a mistaken one.
XVIII. Reason gives each side time to plead; moreover, she herself
demands adjournment, that she may have sufficient scope for the
discovery of the truth; whereas anger is in a hurry: reason wishes
to give a just decision; anger wishes its decision to be thought
just: reason looks no further than the matter in hand; anger is
excited by empty matters hovering on the outskirts of the case: it
is irritated by anything approaching to a confident demeanour, a
loud voice, an unrestrained speech, dainty apparel, high-flown
pleading, or popularity with the public. It often condemns a man
because it dislikes his patron; it loves and maintains error even
when truth is staring it in the face. It hates to be proved wrong,
and thinks it more honourable to persevere in a mistaken line of
conduct than to retract it. I remember Gnaeus Piso, a man who was
free from many vices, yet of a perverse disposition, and one who
mistook harshness for consistency. In his anger he ordered a soldier
to be led off to execution because he had returned from furlough
without his comrade, as though he must have murdered him if he could
not show him. When the man asked for time for search, he would not
grant it: the condemned man was brought outside the rampart, and
was just offering his neck to the axe, when suddenly there appeared
his comrade who was thought to be slain. Hereupon the centurion in
charge of the execution bade the guardsman sheathe his sword, and
led the condemned {71} man back to Piso, to restore to him the
innocence which Fortune had restored to the soldier. They were led
into his presence by their fellow soldiers amid the great joy of
the whole camp, embracing one another and accompanied by a vast
crowd. Piso mounted the tribunal in a fury and ordered them both
to be executed, both him who had not murdered and him who had not
been slain. What could be more unworthy than this? Because one was
proved to be innocent, two perished. Piso even added a third: for
he actually ordered the centurion, who had brought back the condemned
man, to be put to death. Three men were set up to die in the same
place because one was innocent. O, how clever is anger at inventing
reasons for its frenzy! “You,” it says, “I order to be executed,
because you have been condemned to death: you, because you have
been the cause of your comrade’s condemnation, and you, because
when ordered to put him to death you disobeyed your general.” He
discovered the means of charging them with three crimes, because
he could find no crime in them.
XIX. Irascibility, I say, has this fault—it is loth to be ruled:
it is angry with the truth itself, if it comes to light against its
will: it assails those whom it has marked for its victims with
shouting and riotous noise and gesticulation of the entire body,
together with reproaches and curses. Not thus does reason act: but
if it must be so, she silently and quietly wipes out whole households,
destroys entire families of the enemies of the state, together with
their wives and children, throws down their very dwellings, levels
them with the ground, and roots out the names of those who are the
foes of liberty. This she does without grinding her teeth or shaking
her head, or doing anything unbecoming to a judge, whose countenance
ought to be especially calm and composed at the time when he is
pronouncing an important sentence. “What need is there,” asks
Hieronymus, “for you to bite your own lips when you want to strike
some one?” What {72} would he have said, had he seen a proconsul
leap down from the tribunal, snatch the fasces from the lictor, and
tear his own clothes because those of others were not torn as fast
as he wished. Why need you upset the table, throw down the drinking
cups, knock yourself against the columns, tear your hair, smite
your thigh and your breast? How vehement do you suppose anger to
be, if it thus turns back upon itself, because it cannot find vent
on another as fast as it wishes? Such men, therefore, are held back
by the bystanders and are begged to become reconciled with themselves.
But he who while free from anger assigns to each man the penalty
which he deserves, does none of these things. He often lets a man
go after detecting his crime, if his penitence for what he has done
gives good hope for the future, if he perceives that the man’s
wickedness is not deeply rooted in his mind, but is only, as the
saying is, skin-deep. He will grant impunity in cases where it will
hurt neither the receiver nor the giver. In some cases he will
punish great crimes more leniently than lesser ones, if the former
were the result of momentary impulse, not of cruelty, while the
latter were instinct with secret, underhand, long-practised craftiness.
The same fault, committed by two separate men, will not be visited
by him with the same penalty, if the one was guilty of it through
carelessness, the other with a premeditated intention of doing
mischief. In all dealing with crime he will remember that the one
form of punishment is meant to make bad men better, and the other
to put them out of the way. In either case he will look to the
future, not to the past: for, as Plato says, “no wise man punishes
any one because he has sinned, but that he may sin no more: for
what is past cannot be recalled, but what is to come may be checked.”
Those, too, whom he wishes to make examples of the ill success of
wickedness, he executes publicly, not merely in order that they
themselves may die, but that by dying they {73} may deter others
from doing likewise. You see how free from any mental disturbance
a man ought to be who has to weigh and consider all this, when he
deals with a matter which ought to be handled with the utmost care,
I mean, the power of life and death. The sword of justice is
ill-placed in the hands of an angry man.
XX. Neither ought it to be believed that anger contributes anything
to magnanimity: what it gives is not magnanimity but vain glory.
The increase which disease produces in bodies swollen with morbid
humours is not healthy growth, but bloated corpulence. All those
whose madness raises them above human considerations, believe
themselves to be inspired with high and sublime ideas; but there
is no solid ground beneath, and what is built without foundation
is liable to collapse in ruin. Anger has no ground to stand upon,
and does not rise from a firm and enduring foundation, but is a
windy, empty quality, as far removed from true magnanimity as
fool-hardiness from courage, boastfulness from confidence, gloom
from austerity, cruelty from strictness. There is, I say, a great
difference between a lofty and a proud mind: anger brings about
nothing grand or beautiful. On the other hand, to be constantly
irritated seems to me to be the part of a languid and unhappy mind,
conscious of its own feebleness, like folk with diseased bodies
covered with sores, who cry out at the lightest touch. Anger,
therefore, is a vice which for the most part affects women and
children. “Yet it affects men also.” Because many men, too, have
womanish or childish intellects. “But what are we to say? do not
some words fall from angry men which appear to flow from a great
mind?” Yes, to those who know not what true greatness is: as, for
example, that foul and hateful saying, “Let them hate me, provided
they fear me,” which you may be sure was written in Sulla’s time.
I know not which was the worse of the two things he wished {74}
for, that he might be hated or that he might be feared. It occurs
to his mind that some day people will curse him, plot against him,
crush him: what prayer does he add to this? May all the gods curse
him—for discovering a cure for hate so worthy of it. “Let them
hate.” How? “Provided they obey me?” No! “Provided they approve of
me?” No! How then? “Provided they fear me!” I would not even be
loved upon such terms. Do you imagine that this was a very spirited
saying? You are wrong: this is not greatness, but monstrosity. You
should not believe the words of angry men, whose speech is very
loud and menacing, while their mind within them is as timid as
possible: nor need you suppose that the most eloquent of men, Titus
Livius, was right in describing somebody as being “of a great rather
than a good disposition.” The things cannot be separated: he must
either be good or else he cannot be great, because I take greatness
of mind to mean that it is unshaken, sound throughout, firm and
uniform to its very foundation; such as cannot exist in evil
dispositions. Such dispositions may be terrible, frantic, and
destructive, but cannot possess greatness; because greatness rests
upon goodness, and owes its strength to it. “Yet by speech, action,
and all outward show they will make one think them great.” True,
they will say something which you may think shows a great spirit,
like Gaius Caesar, who when angry with heaven because it interfered
with his ballet-dancers, whom he imitated more carefully than he
attended to them when they acted, and because it frightened his
revels by its thunders, surely ill-directed,[9] challenged Jove to
fight, and that to the death, shouting the Homeric verse:—
“Carry me off, or I will carry thee!”
{75} How great was his madness! He must have believed either that
he could not be hurt even by Jupiter himself, or that he could hurt
even Jupiter itself. I imagine that this saying of his had no small
weight in nerving the minds of the conspirators for their task: for
it seemed to be the height of endurance to bear one who could not
bear Jupiter.
XXI. There is therefore nothing great or noble in anger, even when
it seems to be powerful and to contemn both gods and men alike. Any
one who thinks that anger produces greatness of mind, would think
that luxury produces it: such a man wishes to rest on ivory, to be
clothed with purple, and roofed with gold; to remove lands, embank
seas, hasten the course of rivers, suspend woods in the air. He
would think that avarice shows greatness of mind: for the avaricious
man broods over heaps of gold and silver, treats whole provinces
as merely fields on his estate, and has larger tracts of country
under the charge of single bailiffs than those which consuls once
drew lots to administer. He would think that lust shows greatness
of mind: for the lustful man swims across straits, castrates troops
of boys, and puts himself within reach of the swords of injured
husbands with complete scorn of death. Ambition, too, he would think
shows greatness of mind: for the ambitious man is not content with
office once a year, but, if possible, would fill the calendar of
dignities with his name alone, and cover the whole world with his
titles. It matters nothing to what heights or lengths these passions
may proceed: they are narrow, pitiable, grovelling. Virtue alone
is lofty and sublime, nor is anything great which is not at the
same time tranquil.
[1] Here a leaf or more has been lost, including the fragment cited
in Lactantius, _De ira dei_, 17 “Ira est eupiditas,” &c. The entire
passage is:—“But the Stoics did not perceive that there is a
difference between right and wrong; that there is just and unjust