Seneca rebuffs all possible insults to his own status in the On Constancy by insisting that the truly wise person cannot be harmed by any such thing. Offering a rare glimpse of his actual physical appearance, he insists that he cannot be hurt even by mockery of the “baldness of my head, the weakness of my eyes, the thinness of my legs, and my height. Where’s the insult, in hearing what is obvious?” (16.4). Seneca was obviously not a physically impressive specimen, but he manages to turn even that to his own (rhetorical, literary, and philosophical) advantage.
Where Anger Leads
The various writings Seneca composed during his time on Corsica may not have had the immediate effect of securing his recall, but they did have some effect, collectively, on the opinions of the elite public, back in Rome. They allowed him to continue to accrue honor and admiration for his rhetorical skills and learning, thus laying the groundwork for his appointment as the tutor of Nero. Just as importantly, Seneca’s writing during his time of exile allowed him to work through the feelings of grief, boredom, powerlessness, and—perhaps especially—rage that must have felt at times overwhelming in his forced exclusion from the world of the capital.
Anger is a topic about which Seneca writes particularly well. His treatise On Anger cannot be dated with certainty.33 It is possible that On Anger was composed immediately before Seneca’s exile, but far more probable that he wrote it after he was sentenced. Most likely the first two books were composed in exile on Corsica and the third soon after his return to Rome, since this last book seems to be later and was clearly written in the city.34
Presumably the topic of anger had a particular personal resonance for Seneca. It was a useful subject for him to meditate on during his time of relegation. He was surely conscious of an impulse to feel incandescent anger at being accused, condemned, having his property taken, and being sent away from Rome. Perhaps he was enraged at being punished for a crime he did not commit. Even if he was guilty of plotting or adultery or both, such public punishment, humiliation, and deprivation must have been deeply irritating. But in his written discussion of anger, Seneca deals with his emotions in an entirely sidelong, displaced fashion. The essay has nothing that deals in any specific way with the author’s own experiences of anger and its cures.
Whose anger, then, is at stake in the treatise? The addressee is Seneca’s older brother, Novatus, who has supposedly urged Seneca to write about how anger may be calmed. Perhaps Novatus saw Seneca himself as a particularly grumpy person, or perhaps Novatus himself was prone to fits of rage that disrupted his general peace of mind. More likely, one of Seneca’s aims was to persuade the emperor to stop being angry with him and bring him back to Rome. The essay focuses on the anger of those in positions of power over others. The piece begins with the hyperbolic claim that “no plague has been more costly to the human race.” Anger, we are assured, is the root cause of bloodshed, poison, arson, slavery, cities cast down from their foundations, violent death and assassination, and war in which “whole peoples have been condemned to death in common ruin” (1.2.3). This analysis gives huge weight to the causal power of human emotions and little to economics or political ideology. Seneca sidesteps the big political picture in favor of a limited focus on the individual. We can associate this with the position of the Roman elite of the time, deprived of real political power, but we can also trace it fairly directly to Seneca’s own position, as the victim of a single man’s anger.
But it would be reductive to see On Anger as solely designed to persuade the emperor for pardon, or to impress the general public and increase the author’s popularity at Rome. A more satisfying approach is to see it as an address to all those who are tempted to submit to their excessive emotions—that is, to all of us. Seneca here, as very often in his writing, is able to transcend the details of his specific situation (exiled on Corsica) and take a view from above, addressing the human condition. The topic of the “passions,” or negative, excessive kinds of emotions, was important for all the various schools of Roman philosophy, as for their earlier models in Hellenistic philosophy; the Stoics were not the only ones interested in emotional disturbance. After Alexander the Great’s annexation of Greece and the demise of the old Greek polis in the fourth century BCE—in which all elite male citizens had an active role to play in government—intellectual life became increasingly focused on the individual, and the ethical philosophy often became closely allied to what we would call psychology. Philosophers in the Hellenistic period had become interested in working out how a person might be able to achieve a consistently calm state of mind—the Greek word is ataraxia, or “untroubledness.” The Stoics were distinctive in this context in the depth with which they investigated and catalogued the various ways in which a person might become troubled by false thoughts, which lead, according to the theory, to negative emotions, or “passions.”35
The Stoics categorized the bad kinds of emotion into four general types: pleasure, pain, desire, and fear. Excessive emotions of these types are, they thought, the most important reason why people may fail to achieve appropriate spiritual tranquility. It is important to remember here that the Stoics did not believe that all feelings of every kind are bad: feelings that line up perfectly with reality, defined in Stoic terms, are a positive good. For example, the truly wise person will feel “joy” at her awareness of her own goodness.36 But these feelings are sharply distinguished from the “passions,” which are emotions based on false ideas about reality and are characterized by their capacity to overwhelm right thinking. So, for example, a person who is anxious through fear of death has a belief that death really is a bad thing rather than merely indifferent (albeit sometimes nonpreferable).
Seneca suggests that anger is the worst of all such passions because it is so utterly aggressive and destructive: “All other emotions have an element of peace and quiet. Anger is entirely violent, and exists in a rush of pain, raging in an almost inhuman desire for weapons, blood and punishment. Anger does not care about itself, as long as it harms somebody else” (1.1). Seneca defines anger, following an older philosophical tradition, as “the desire to avenge an injury,” including injuries which the person believes has been, or will be, imposed: “anger is aroused by the direct impression of an injury” (2.1.3). He argues, in classic Stoic fashion, that all anger is wrong, an enemy to inner peace, and useless for any good political or social purpose, even government or war. There may be times when a soldier has to fight and kill, or when a ruler has to pass sentence on a criminal, but these things should always be done according to the dictates of reason, never at the whims of hot passion. Law, not anger, should be the primary weapon of the state.