On the Control of Anger (8)

FUNDANUS. But it is not these considerations only that constant watching of those who are in the grip of anger furnishes us, but also an understanding of the general nature of ill temper - that it is not well-bred, nor manly, nor possessing any quality of pride or greatness. Yet most people think its turbulence to be activity, its blustering to be confident boldness, its obstinacy force of character; and some claim that even its cruelty is magnificence in action and its implacability firmness in resolution and its moroseness hatred of evil,[*] but they are wrong in this. For the actions and the motions and the whole demeanour of angry persons declare their utter littleness and weakness, not only when they rend little children and rage bitterly against women and think it proper to punish dogs and horses and mules, as Ctesiphon the pancratiast did, who thought it right to kick back at his mule; but also in the butcheries that tyrants perpetrate, their meanness of soul is apparent in their cruelty and their perverted state in their action, and is like the bites of vipers, which, when thoroughly inflamed with rage and pain, eject their excessive fiery passion upon those who have hurt them. For just as with the flesh a swelling results from a great blow, so with the weakest souls the inclination to inflict a hurt produces a flaring up of temper as great as the soul’s infirmity is great.[*] That is also the reason why women are more prone to anger than men, and sick persons than healthy, and old men than men in their prime, and the unfortunate than the prosperous. Most prone to anger, for instance, are the miser with his steward, the glutton with his cook, the jealous man with his wife, the conceited man when he has been maligned; but worst of all are

Men who court too eagerly

Ambition in the towns:

Manifest is the pain they bring,

as Pindar[*] has it. In like manner from the pain and suffering of the soul, caused generally by weakness, there arises the outburst of passion[*] which is not, as someone[*] has said, like sinews of the soul, but like the strainings and convulsions of the soul when it is stirred too vehemently in its impulse to defend itself.