On the Control of Anger (6)

FUNDANUS. As for me - whether rightly I do not know - I made this start in the treatment of my anger: I began to observe the passion in others, just as the Spartans used to observe in the Helots[*] what a thing drunkenness is. And first, as Hippocrates[*] says that the most severe disease is that in which the countenance of the sufferer is most unlike itself, so I observed that those who are transported by anger also change most in countenance, colour, gait, and voice,[*] and thus formed for myself a picture of that passion and was exceedingly uncomfortable to think that I should ever appear so terrible and deranged to my friends and my wife and daughters, not merely savage and unfamiliar to their sight, but also speaking with so harsh and rough a voice as were others of my intimate friends whom I used to meet at times when anger had made them unable to preserve their character or bearing or grace of speech or their winning and affable manners. The ease of Gaius Gracchus[*] the orator will serve as illustration. He was not only severe in his disposition, but spoke too passionately; so he caused a pitch-pipe to be made of the sort which musicians use to lead the voice up and down the scales to the proper note; with this in hand his servant used to stand behind him as he spoke and give him a decorous and gentle tone which enabled Gracchus to remit his loud cries and remove from his voice the harsh and passionate element; just as the shepherds’

Wax-joined pipe, clear sounding,

Drones a slumberous strain,[*]

so did he charm and lay to rest the rage of the orator. But as for me, if I had some attentive and clever companion, I should not be vexed if he held a mirror[*] up to me during my moments of rage, as they do for some persons after bathing, though to no useful purpose. For to see oneself in a state which nature did not intend, with one’s features all distorted, contributes in no small degree toward discrediting that passion. In fact, those who delight in pleasant fables tell us that when Athena[*] played on the pipes, she was rebuked by the satyr and would give no heed:

That look becomes you not; lay by your pipes

And take your arms and put your cheeks to rights[*];

but when she saw her face in a river, she was vexed and threw her pipes away. Yet art makes melody some consolation for unsightliness. And Marsyas,[*] it seems, by a mouthpiece and cheek-bands repressed the violence of his breath and tricked up and concealed the distortion of his face:

He fitted the fringe of his temples with gleaming gold

And his greedy mouth he fitted with thongs bound behind[*];

but anger, which puffs up and distends the face in an unbecoming way, utters a voice still more ugly and unpleasant,

Stirring the heart-strings never stirred before.[*]

For when the sea is disturbed by the winds and casts up tangle and seaweed, they say that it is being cleansed; but the intemperate, bitter, and vulgar words which temper casts forth when the soul is disturbed defile the speakers of them first of all and fill them with disrepute, the implication being that they have always had these traits inside of them and are full of them, but that their inner nature is now laid bare by their anger. Hence for a mere word, the lightest of things, as Plato[*] says, they incur the heaviest of punishments, being esteemed as hostile, slanderous, and malicious.