On Anger

Aristotle's followers held that anger in proportion is useful: it is what puts a soldier into the fight and a decent man on the side of the wronged, and a virtue with the anger taken out of it is one nobody can act on. Theophrastus had made that case, and it is the case these three books set out to break. Seneca's counter is that anger is not an excess of a good impulse but a judgement — the mind agreeing to two propositions at once: that a wrong has been done, and that hitting back is right. That matters practically. A judgement can be refused at the door; it cannot be steered once admitted, because by then the mind is not steering. So the treatment is preventive and unglamorous — scrutinise what a man is willing to believe about other people, slow the interval between the affront and the reply, arrange a life that gives anger fewer occasions. Nothing about it is theoretical. Caligula had been assassinated in January of 41 — the earliest the book can have been written — and the dead emperor runs through it as the standing example of what an unchecked temper does with an empire attached. The addressee is Seneca's elder brother, and the name used for him settles only an outer limit: here he is Novatus, not the Gallio he became on adoption, and the adoption was behind him by the time he governed Achaia in 51. The essay itself is placed in the 40s, the decade Seneca spent in exile. Book III then opens as though nothing had preceded it, with its own preface and its own address, and whether it was written as part of the essay or joined to it afterwards has never been settled.