Seneca’s focus on the leader’s responsibility to control his emotion has a clear political resonance at this period of the early Roman empire. Rome had, after all, only recently made the transition from a republic—a constitution in which power was shared between multiple people in particular ruling groups, including the tribunate, the military, and the Senate—to a principate, in which ultimate power lay with the emperor. Political and cultural habits of mind had not caught up with the new reality.37 The members of the Roman elite were still, culturally and ideologically, attuned to thinking of themselves as members of a truly governing class, even though, in terms of real political power, they were subject to the emperor. Moreover, the power of the emperor himself, to a frightening degree, actually depended on maintaining the goodwill of the army. Law was no longer the final call of appeal, as it had been under the republic; the emperor, with the backing of the army, had the final word. This made it more important than ever that the emperor should be able to negotiate between the twin poles of anger and clemency. Seneca cites with horror and condemnation Caligula’s dreadful words: “Let them hate, as long as they fear”: oderint, dum timeant.38 His central point is that this degree of aggression goes beyond appropriate expression of authority into the merely monstrous.
But it is not only emperors who need to beware of being angry. The essay deals with that central concern of Seneca’s writings: how to achieve a position of safety in an uncertain world and how to get genuine power, not merely false promises of control that prove, in the end, illusory. Anger is, for Seneca, tempting to everybody because it may seem akin to genuine goods, such as justice and a safe position. But like all the other passions that tempt one to go against Virtue, anger is a false friend: “Only Virtue is lofty and sublime; nothing is great that is not also calm” (1.20.4).
One of Seneca’s most original contributions to the Stoic study of the emotions is his emphasis on involuntary feelings.39 This allows him to give a much more nuanced, and more plausible, account both of anger and of the other “passions.” Seneca insists that there is a distinction to be made between “impulses” (motus), which are preconscious responses and do not require the assent of the mind, and real “passions” (affectus), which necessarily imply a particular set of beliefs.40 If somebody pours a bucket of cold water on your head, you will shiver; if somebody says bad words, you may blush; if you watch a play, you may feel anger, pity, and grief for the characters, despite the fact that you know they are not real. But for Seneca, none of these are real “passions,” unless you then give your consent to a (false) belief about them.
Seneca’s metaphors in his discussion of anger constantly come back to medicine. Being angry is incompatible with human happiness and is therefore like a sickness, to be cured by philosophy. If we are healthy, in moral and psychological ways, we will be happy: “being joyful is the distinctive and natural characteristic of virtue” (2.6.2). Conversely, the wise person will not be enraged when he sees other people behaving idiotically. If he started being angry every time he saw other people behaving badly, it would never end (2.7–8), so the wise person sees himself as a doctor, surrounded by the sick (2.10.7). He feels pity and a desire to cure their disease, but he is never angry, because he knows he is never injured by their behavior.
The treatise is particularly interesting in its depiction of the formation, development, and training of behavior. Seneca acknowledges that some people will think that it is too difficult to eliminate anger altogether rather than simply control its expression. But he insists that in fact, the Stoic way is easier and more practical than the alternatives, since it is “easier to exclude dangerous things altogether, than to moderate them” (1.7.2). Other critics may suggest that in some circumstances, it is right to be angry—in order, for instance, to exact righteous punishment against somebody who really has done wrong. But the best thing, Seneca suggests, is to pretend to be angry rather than really feel angry: a theatrical performance can be controlled; real anger cannot (2.16.ff).
Seneca discusses the proper way to educate not only oneself but also children and young men into the correct approach to anger. Presumably Agrippina, mother to Nero, read these early books of On Anger; perhaps they were part of her reason for appointing Seneca as the tutor to the young prince. On Anger is suggestive about Seneca’s own commitment to education, especially education of the young. He argues that “education calls for the greatest attentiveness, and attention in this time will also prove most useful; it is easy to train minds that are still young, but difficult to curb faults which have grown up with us” (2.18.2).
Seneca is largely very pessimistic about the overwhelming, corrupting, debilitating, and brutalizing effects of anger (and other negative emotions) on human life. But he is also highly optimistic about the possibility that one can, with the appropriate kinds of training, make progress toward eliminating the passions altogether. We have only to look at ourselves when angry to see that rage is a hideous disease, which any person who wants to be healthy and happy must expunge entirely.
The largely optimistic depiction of the passions as something readily curable, in Seneca’s prose philosophical works, contrasts sharply with how he represents violent emotion in the tragedies. We do not know when Seneca composed the eight tragedies that have come down to us under his name: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Phaedra, Medea, Hercules Furens, Trojan Women, Thyestes, and the unfinished Phoenissae.41 But it is likely that they were written over many years; internal stylistic considerations suggest that some are relatively early and may have been composed under Caligula or during the years of exile, while others (Thyestes and probably Phoenissae) could be Neronian. The relationship of the tragedies to the philosophical works has long been controversial. One possible approach is to argue that the tragedies show us what happens to people who fail to control their passions: they are Stoic morality plays depicting the downfall of non-Stoics who become overwhelmed by anger, lust, and fear.
But this seems unfaithful to the experience of reading or watching the plays, since the depiction of passion seems so vigorous, so vivid, and indeed, so pleasurable. This is not to say that the tragedies have nothing to do with Seneca’s philosophical meditations on passion and its negative effects, but rather, that they are more like dark mirror-images of the prose than illustrations of it. Writing tragedy allowed Seneca to imagine himself into the minds and voices of characters who are mad with unsatisfiable desire, and to relish their bombastic rhetoric.
Seneca probably spent some of his time in exile composing the first books of On Anger, but he may well also have spent time composing such plays as the Medea. Based on the same myth as Euripides’ play by the same name, the drama shows us a Jason who has already retrieved the Golden Fleece, with the help of the native princess of Colchis, Medea. They have been married for several years and have children together; now they are living in Corinth, and Jason plans to marry again, to the Corinthian princess Creusa, in an attempt to consolidate his position in Greece. Medea is, understandably enough, enraged by this plan, and, like the angry person of the treatise, longs to take revenge. She devises a plan to kill first the princess, with a poisoned dress and crown, and then her own children by Jason. After committing the murders, she flies off in a chariot drawn by dragons, conveniently provided by her grandfather, the Sun God Helios.