Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
with whom we are angry: at present an overweening conceit of our
own importance makes us prone to anger, and we are quite willing
to do to others what we cannot endure should be done to ourselves.
No one will postpone his anger: yet delay is the best remedy for
it, because it allows its first glow to subside, and gives time for
the cloud which darkens the mind either to disperse or at any rate
to become less dense. Of these wrongs which drive you frantic, some
will grow lighter after an interval, not of a day, but even of an
hour: some will vanish altogether. Even if you gain nothing by your
adjournment, still what you do after it will appear to be the result
of mature deliberation, not of anger. If you want to find out the
truth about anything, commit the task to time: nothing can be
accurately discerned at a time of disturbance. Plato, when angry
with his slave, could not prevail upon himself to wait, but straightway
ordered him to take off his shirt and present his shoulders to the
blows which he meant to give him with his own hand: then, when he
perceived that he was angry, he stopped the hand which he had raised
in the air, and stood like one in act to strike. Being asked by a
friend who happened to come in, what he was doing, he answered: “I
am making an angry man expiate his crime.” He retained the posture
of one about to give way to passion, as if struck with astonishment
at its being so degrading to a philosopher, forgetting the slave,
because he had found another still more deserving of punishment.
He therefore denied himself the exercise of authority over his own
household, and once, being rather angry at some fault, said,
“Speusippus, will you please to correct that slave with stripes;
for I am in a rage.” He would not strike him, for the very reason
for which another man would have struck him. “I am in a rage,” said
{130} he; “I should beat him more than I ought: I should take more
pleasure than I ought in doing so: let not that slave fall into the
power of one who is not in his own power.” Can any one wish to grant
the power of revenge to an angry man, when Plato himself gave up
his own right to exercise it? While you are angry, you ought not
to be allowed to do anything. “Why?” do you ask? Because when you
are angry there is nothing that you do not wish to be allowed to
do.
XIII. Fight hard with yourself and if you cannot conquer anger, do
not let it conquer you: you have begun to get the better of it if
it does not show itself, if it is not given vent. Let us conceal
its symptoms, and as far as possible keep it secret and hidden. It
will give us great trouble to do this, for it is eager to burst
forth, to kindle our eyes and to transform our face; but if we allow
it to show itself in our outward appearance, it is our master. Let
it rather be locked in the innermost recesses of our breast, and
be borne by us, not bear us: nay, let us replace all its symptoms
by their opposites; let us make our countenance more composed than
usual, our voice milder, our step slower. Our inward thoughts
gradually become influenced by our outward demeanour. With Socrates
it was a sign of anger when he lowered his voice, and became sparing
of speech; it was evident at such times that he was exercising
restraint over himself. His friends, consequently, used to detect
him acting thus, and convict him of being angry; nor was he displeased
at being charged with concealment of anger; indeed, how could he
help being glad that many men should perceive his anger, yet that
none should feel it? they would however, have felt it had not he
granted to his friends the same right of criticizing his own conduct
which he himself assumed over theirs. How much more needful is it
for us to do this? let us beg all our best friends to give us their
opinion with the greatest freedom at the very time when we can bear
it least, and never to be compliant with us {131} when we are angry.
While we are in our right senses, while we are under our own control,
let us call for help against so powerful an evil, and one which we
regard with such unjust favour. Those who cannot carry their wine
discreetly, and fear to be betrayed into some rash and insolent
act, give their slaves orders to take them away from the banquet
when they are drunk; those who know by experience how unreasonable
they are when sick give orders that no one is to obey them when
they are in ill health. It is best to prepare obstacles beforehand
for vices which are known, and above all things so to tranquilize
our mind that it may bear the most sudden and violent shocks either
without feeling anger, or, if anger be provoked by the extent of
some unexpected wrong, that it may bury it deep, and not betray its
wound. That it is possible to do this will be seen, if I quote a
few of an abundance of examples, from which we may learn both how
much evil there is in anger, when it exercises entire dominion over
men in supreme power, and how completely it can control itself when
overawed by fear.
XIV. King Cambyses[2] was excessively addicted to wine. Praexaspes
was the only one of his closest friends who advised him to drink
more sparingly, pointing out how shameful a thing drunkenness was
in a king, upon whom all eyes and ears were fixed. Cambyses answered,
“That you may know that I never lose command of myself, I will
presently prove to you that both my eyes and my hands are fit for
service after I have been drinking.” Hereupon he drank more freely
than usual, using larger cups, and when heavy and besotted with
wine ordered his reprover’s son to go beyond the threshold and stand
there with his left hand raised above his head; then he bent his
bow and pierced the youth’s heart, at which he had said that he
aimed. He {132} then had his breast cut open, showed the arrow
sticking exactly into the heart, and, looking at the boy’s father,
asked whether his hand was not steady enough. He replied, that
Apollo himself could not have taken better aim. God confound such
a man, a slave in mind, if not in station! He actually praised an
act which he ought not to have endured to witness. He thought that
the breast of his son being torn assunder, and his heart quivering
with its wound, gave him an opportunity of making a complimentary
speech. He ought to have raised a dispute with him about his success,
and have called for another shot, that the king might be pleased
to prove upon the person of the father that his hand was even
steadier than when he shot the son. What a savage king! what a
worthy mark for all his follower’s arrows! Yet though we curse him
for making his banquet end in cruelty and death, still it was worse
to praise that arrow-shot than to shoot it. We shall see hereafter
how a father ought to bear himself when standing over the corpse
of his son, whose murder he had both caused and witnessed: the
matter which we are now discussing, has been proved, I mean, that
anger can be suppressed. He did not curse the king, he did not so
much as let fall a single inauspicious word, though he felt his own
heart as deeply wounded as that of his son. He may be said to have
done well in choking down his words; for though he might have spoken
as an angry man, yet he could not have expressed what he felt as a
father. He may, I repeat, be thought to have behaved with greater
wisdom on that occasion than when he tried to regulate the drink
of one who was better employed in drinking wine than in drinking
blood, and who granted men peace while his hands were busy with the
winecup. He, therefore, added one more to the number of those who
have shown to their bitter cost how little kings care for their
friends’ good advice.
{133}
XV. I have no doubt that Harpagus must have given some such advice
to the king of the Persians and of himself, in anger at which the
king placed Harpagus’s own children before him on the dinner-table
for him to eat, and asked him from time to time, whether he liked
the seasoning. Then, when he saw that he was satiated with his own
misery, he ordered their heads to be brought to him, and asked him
how he liked his entertainment. The wretched man did not lose his
readiness of speech; his face did not change. “Every kind of dinner,”
said he, “is pleasant at the king’s table.” What did he gain by
this obsequiousness? He avoided being invited a second time to
dinner, to eat what was left of them. I do not forbid a father to
blame the act of his king, or to seek for some revenge worthy of
so bloodthirsty a monster, but in the meanwhile I gather from the
tale this fact, that even the anger which arises from unheard of
outrages can be concealed, and forced into using language which is
the very reverse of its meaning. This way of curbing anger is
necessary, at least for those who have chosen this sort of life and
who are admitted to dine at a king’s table; this is how they must
eat and drink, this is how they must answer, and how they must laugh
at their own deaths. Whether life is worth having at such a price,
we shall see hereafter; that is another question. Let us not console
so sorry a crew, or encourage them to submit to the orders of their
butchers; let us point out that however slavish a man’s condition
may be, there is always a path to liberty open to him, unless his
mind be diseased. It is a man’s own fault if he suffers, when by
putting an end to himself he can put an end to his misery. To him
whose king aimed arrows at the breasts of his friends, and to him
whose master gorged fathers with the hearts of their children, I
would say “Madman, why do you groan? for what are you waiting? for
some enemy to avenge you by the destruction of your {134} entire
nation, or for some powerful king to arrive from a distant land?
Wherever you turn your eyes you may see an end to your woes. Do you
see that precipice? down that lies the road to liberty; do you see
that sea? that river? that well? Liberty sits at the bottom of them.
Do you see that tree? stunted, blighted, dried up though it be, yet
liberty hangs from its branches. Do you see your own throat, your
own neck, your own heart? they are so many ways of escape from
slavery. Are these modes which I point out too laborious, and needing
much strength and courage? do you ask what path leads to liberty?
I answer, any vein[3] in your body.
XVI. As long, however, as we find nothing in our life so unbearable
as to drive us to suicide, let us, in whatever position we may be,
set anger far from us: it is destructive to those who are its slaves.
All its rage turns to its own misery, and authority becomes all the
more irksome the more obstinately it is resisted. It is like a wild
animal whose struggles only pull the noose by which it is caught
tighter; or like birds who, while flurriedly trying to shake
themselves free, smear birdlime on to all their feathers. No yoke
is so grievous as not to hurt him who struggles against it more
than him who yields to it: the only way to alleviate great evils
is to endure them and to submit to do what they compel. This control
of our passions, and especially of this mad and unbridled passion
of anger, is useful to subjects, but still more useful to kings.
All is lost when a man’s position enables him to carry out whatever
anger prompts him to do; nor can power long endure if it be exercised
to the injury of many, for it becomes endangered as soon as common
fear draws together those who bewail themselves separately. Many
kings, therefore, have fallen victims, some to single individuals,
others to entire peoples, {135} who have been forced by general
indignation to make one man the minister of their wrath. Yet many
kings have indulged their anger as though it were a privilege of
royalty, like Darius, who, after the dethronement of the Magian,