Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
or Phalaris. This is not anger, it is ferocity: for it does not do
hurt because it has received injury: but is even willing to receive
injury, provided it may do hurt. It does not long to inflict stripes
and mangle bodies to avenge its wrongs, but for its own pleasure.
What then are we to say? This evil takes its rise from anger; for
anger, after it has by long use and indulgence made a man forget
mercy, and driven all feelings of human fellowship from his mind,
passes finally into cruelty. Such men therefore laugh, rejoice,
enjoy themselves greatly, and are as unlike as possible in countenance
to angry men, since cruelty is their relaxation. It is said that
when Hannibal saw a trench full of human blood, he exclaimed, “O,
what {81} a beauteous sight!” How much more beautiful would he have
thought it, if it had filled a river or a lake? Why should we wonder
that you should be charmed with this sight above all others, you
who were born in bloodshed and brought up amid slaughter from a
child? Fortune will follow you and favour your cruelty for twenty
years, and will display to you everywhere the sight that you love.
You will behold it both at Trasumene and at Cannae, and lastly at
your own city of Carthage. Volesus, who not long ago, under the
Emperor Augustus, was proconsul of Asia Minor, after he had one day
beheaded three hundred persons, strutted out among the corpses with
a haughty air, as though he had performed some grand and notable
exploit, and exclaimed in Greek, “What a kingly action!” What would
this man have done, had he been really a king? This was not anger,
but a greater and an incurable disease.
VI. “Virtue,” argues our adversary, “ought to be angry with what
is base, just as she approves of what is honourable.” What should
we think if he said that virtue ought to be both mean and great;
yet this is what he means, when he wants her to be raised and
lowered, because joy at a good action is grand and glorious, while
anger at another’s sin is base and befits a narrow mind: and virtue
will never be guilty of imitating vice while she is repressing it;
she considers anger to deserve punishment for itself, since it often
is even more criminal than the faults which which it is angry. To
rejoice and be glad is the proper and natural function of virtue:
it is as much beneath her dignity to be angry, as to mourn: now,
sorrow is the companion of anger, and all anger ends in sorrow,
either from remorse or from failure. Secondly, if it be the part
of the wise man to be angry with sins, he will be more angry the
greater they are, and will often be angry: from which it follows
that the wise man will not only be angry but irascible. {82} Yet
if we do not believe that great and frequent anger can find any
place in the wise man’s mind, why should we not set him altogether
free from this passion? for there can be no limit, if he ought to
be angry in proportion to what every man does: because he will
either be unjust if he is equally angry at unequal crimes, or he
will be the most irascible of men, if he blazes into wrath as often
as crimes deserve his anger.
VII. What, too, can be more unworthy of the wise man, than that his
passions should depend upon the wickedness of others? If so, the
great Socrates will no longer be able to return home with the same
expression of countenance with which he set out. Moreover, if it
be the duty of the wise man to be angry at base deeds, and to be
excited and saddened at crimes, then is there nothing more unhappy
than the wise man, for all his life will be spent in anger and
grief. What moment will there be at which he will not see something
deserving of blame? whenever he leaves his house, he will be obliged
to walk among men who are criminals, misers, spendthrifts, profligates,
and who are happy in being so: he can turn his eyes in no direction
without their finding something to shock them. He will faint, if
he demands anger from himself as often as reason calls for it. All
these thousands who are hurrying to the law courts at break of day,
how base are their causes, and how much baser their advocates? One
impugns his father’s will, when he would have done better to deserve
it; another appears as the accuser of his mother; a third comes to
inform against a man for committing the very crime of which he
himself is yet more notoriously guilty. The judge, too, is chosen
to condemn men for doing what he himself has done, and the audience
takes the wrong side, led astray by the fine voice of the pleader.
VIII. Why need I dwell upon individual cases? Be assured, when you
see the Forum crowded with a multitude, {83} the Saepta[4] swarming
with people, or the great Circus, in which the greater part of the
people find room to show themselves at once, that among them there
are as many vices as there are men. Among those whom you see in the
garb of peace there is no peace: for a small profit any one of them
will attempt the ruin of another: no one can gain anything save by
another’s loss. They hate the fortunate and despise the unfortunate:
they grudgingly endure the great, and oppress the small: they are
fired by divers lusts: they would wreck everything for the sake of
a little pleasure or plunder: they live as though they were in a
school of gladiators, fighting with the same people with whom they
live: it is like a society of wild beasts, save that beasts are
tame with one another, and refrain from biting their own species,
whereas men tear one another, and gorge themselves upon one another.
They differ from dumb animals in this alone, that the latter are
tame with those who feed them, whereas the rage of the former preys
on those very persons by whom they were brought up.
IX. The wise man will never cease to be angry, if he once begins,
so full is every place of vices and crimes. More evil is done than
can be healed by punishment: men seem engaged in a vast race of
wickedness. Every day there is greater eagerness to sin, less
modesty. Throwing aside all reverence for what is better and more
just, lust rushes whithersoever it thinks fit, and crimes are no
longer committed by stealth, they take place before our eyes, and
wickedness has become so general and gained such a footing in
everyone’s breast that innocence is no longer rare, but no longer
exists. Do men break the law singly, or a few at a time? Nay, they
rise in all quarters at once, as though obeying some universal
signal, to wipe out the boundaries of right and wrong.
{84}
“Host is not safe from guest, Father-in-law from son; but seldom
love Exists ’twixt brothers; wives long to destroy Their husbands,
husbands long to slay their wives, Stepmothers deadly aconite
prepare And child-heirs wonder when their sires will die.”
And how small a part of men’s crimes are these! The poet[5] has not
described one people divided into two hostile camps, parents and
children enrolled on opposite sides, Rome set on fire by the hand
of a Roman, troops of fierce horsemen scouring the country to track
out the hiding-places of the proscribed, wells defiled with poison,
plagues created by human hands, trenches dug by children round their
beleaguered parents, crowded prisons, conflagrations that consume
whole cities, gloomy tyrannies, secret plots to establish despotisms
and ruin peoples, and men glorying in those deeds which, as long
as it was possible to repress them, were counted as crimes—I mean
rape, debauchery, and lust . . . . . Add to these, public acts of
national bad faith, broken treaties, everything that cannot defend
itself carried off as plunder by the stronger, knaveries, thefts,
frauds, and disownings of debt such as three of our present law-courts
would not suffice to deal with. If you want the wise man to be as
angry as the atrocity of men’s crimes requires, he must not merely
be angry, but must go mad with rage.
X. You will rather think that we should not be angry with people’s
faults; for what shall we say of one who is angry with those who
stumble in the dark, or with deaf people who cannot hear his orders,
or with children, because they forget their duty and interest
themselves in the games and silly jokes of their companions? What
shall we say if you choose to be angry {85} with weaklings for being
sick, for growing old, or becoming fatigued? Among the other
misfortunes of humanity is this, that men’s intellects are confused,
and they not only cannot help going wrong, but love to go wrong.
To avoid being angry with individuals, you must pardon the whole
mass, you must grant forgiveness to the entire human race. If you
are angry with young and old men because they do wrong, you will
be angry with infants also, for they soon will do wrong. Does any
one become angry with children, who are too young to comprehend
distinctions? Yet, to be a human being is a greater and a better
excuse than to be a child. Thus are we born, as creatures liable
to as many disorders of the mind as of the body; not dull and
slow-witted, but making a bad use of our keenness of wit, and leading
one another into vice by our example. He who follows others who
have started before him on the wrong road is surely excusable for
having wandered on[6] the highway. A general’s severity may be shown
in the case of individual deserters; but where a whole army deserts,
it must needs be pardoned. What is it that puts a stop to the wise
man’s anger? It is the number of sinners. He perceives how unjust
and how dangerous it is to be angry with vices which all men share.
Heraclitcus, whenever he came out of doors and beheld around him
such a number of men who were living wretchedly, nay, rather perishing
wretchedly, used to weep: he pitied all those who met him joyous
and happy. He was of a gentle but too weak disposition: and he
himself was one of those for whom he ought to have wept. Democritus,
on the other hand, is said never to have appeared in public without
laughing; so little did men’s serious occupations appear serious
to him. What room is there for anger? Everything ought either to
move us to tears or to laughter. The wise man will not be angry
with {86} sinners. Why not? Because he knows that no one is born
wise, but becomes so: he knows that very few wise men are produced
in any age, because he thoroughly understands the circumstances of
human life. Now, no sane man is angry with nature: for what should
we say if a man chose to be surprised that fruit did not hang on
the thickets of a forest, or to wonder at bushes and thorns not
being covered with some useful berry? No one is angry when nature
excuses a defect. The wise man, therefore, being tranquil, and
dealing candidly with mistakes, not an enemy to but an improver of
sinners, will go abroad every day in the following frame of mind:—”Many
men will meet me who are drunkards, lustful, ungrateful, greedy,
and excited by the frenzy of ambition.” He will view all these as
benignly as a physician does his patients. When a man’s ship leaks
freely through its opened seams, does he become angry with the
sailors or the ship itself? No; instead of that, he tries to remedy
it: he shuts out some water, bales out some other, closes all the
holes that he can see, and by ceaseless labour counteracts those
which are out of sight and which let water into the hold; nor does
he relax his efforts because as much water as he pumps out runs in
again. We need a long-breathed struggle against permanent and
prolific evils; not, indeed, to quell them, but merely to prevent
their overpowering us.
XI. “Anger,” says our opponent, “is useful, because it avoids
contempt, and because it frightens bad men.” Now, in the first
place, if anger is strong in proportion to its threats, it is hateful
for the same reason that it is terrible: and it is more dangerous