If Anger Seizes You, Take Seneca’s Advice

“There is no proof of greatness so sure as when nothing can occur to provoke you.” Seneca

I’ve been mad a few times in my life…like a couple of months ago when a man right in front of my eyes put an Italian cookbook back in the Inorganic Chemistry section of the library. “What are you doing?!” I said in no uncertain words. “No one ever comes to this part of the library and the book could be lost for months!”

“Well, who knows,” he said nonchalantly, “maybe someone wants information on pepperoni isotopes,” and with that he turned around and walked away. 

I was fuming…to say the least…but now looking back, it was nothing compared to what I witnessed the other day when I went to the ER with a torn ligament.

As I sat, holding an ice pack to my shoulder, a woman walked up to the nurses station and went into a complete rage because she had to wait to be seen. “I’ve been here for over an hour,” she screamed. “What kind of a place is this?! The last 2 people you called…both came in after me!”

“We take patients with the most serious issues first,” the nurse explained, “those that are most important,” but before she could continue, the woman started yelling even louder. “I’m more important than any of those asshats you just took in!” 

“Go have a seat,” the nurse told her, “and we’ll call you when your turn arrives.” 

“Don’t tell me what to do!…you”...well, at this point the next slew of words—other than “mother”—would probably not be found in the Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary. “I’m staying right here and I’m not moving!” 

Guards arrived, then more guards arrived and surrounded the woman who screamed “Don’t You Dare Touch Me….Keep Away!”

After several more minutes of this vocal vitriol the standoff was finally resolved with the arrival of a Crisis Manager who calmed the woman down and then escorted her into the inner sanctum of the emergency room. 

“She needs to read some Seneca,” I said to myself half under my breath, but apparently loud enough for the man sitting next to me to overhear.

“I was thinking more in the line of Prozac,” he said. “One day she’s gonna yell at the wrong person and it could get nasty.”

I was about to inform him that Seneca was not a medication but rather a Stoic philosopher who wrote the world’s first in depth study of anger, but my name was called and I left to have my arm tended to.

Later that night though, at home with my arm in a sling, I did some research on Anger and found that the emotion has been contemplated and written about for thousands of years.

It is referenced many times in the Bible, written about in Homer’s “Iliad,” and “Odyssey,” elaborated on by Aristotle, and was the subject of a meditation by Buddha—to name a few. But it wasn’t until the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote “De Ira” (On Anger), sometime around 52 AD that the emotion was fully scrutinized. 

“De Ira,” is ultimately a formative work, where the philosopher attempts to define anger—no easy task—as he writes of “the thousand different varieties of this polymorphous evil.” Is it bitterness, rage, frenzy,  fury, hatred or scorn…one is trying to describe?

For the most part, Seneca settles on a mixture of  vengeance and rage, that comes about as a desire “to punish…after having been harmed…or having been harmed unjustly.”

“It is the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions,” Seneca writes of anger in “De Ira,” and when it is expressed (the kind of anger he focuses on) it is like being taken over by “a brief kind of madness.” 

He writes of someone in the throws of anger where “their eyes burn, their whole face reddens with blood, their lips tremble, their teeth clench…and they are agitated all over their body,” many times brought about by something as frivolous as an injury to their self importance. 

According to Seneca, there are no circumstances whatsoever where anger is appropriate. Even under the extreme situation, as he most famously writes in “De Ira,” of seeing his father murdered. He would not become angry, but rather pursue “swift justice.”

Seneca was a prominent Stoic philosopher, whose written works and thoughts adhered to the Stoic principle that while we have no control over outside events, we have 100% control over our thoughts and reactions. 

From a Stoic standpoint, anger is a voluntary emotion, meaning it involves assent and because of this—in Seneca’s view—it is within one’s personal power to obliterate or override this “hateful and monstrous” evil. This is accomplished by a number of “remedies,” he provides in “De Ira,” that came about at the request of his brother Novatus, who asked Seneca to shed his philosophical insights on “how to soften anger.”

“Delay is the greatest remedy to anger,” he writes as a reply. “Ask your anger at the outset…to exercise judgement. Its first impulses are harsh ones; it will relent if it waits.” Things said in anger, can never be taken back, and when recalled at a later date can bring about what he calls the “torture of regret.”

He then advises us to look at anger as a cascade that leads to rage and insane outbursts and to “repel instantly the first prickings of anger…to stamp out its very seedlings…and to take pains not to be drawn in.” He relates this to “bodies in free fall, who have no power, once it begins, to stop their descent.”

Much of this “destructive emotion” Seneca writes about in “De Ira,” is a volatile type of anger that comes about after “the feeling of being wronged,” such as an insult—as opposed to the slow burning anger that lasts over vast periods of time, and he suggests at that time “to rise up and let the insults pass unnoticed.”

As to other remedies, Seneca writes, “work to give up self-importance,” as it leads to a constant feeling of being offended, and to also “put the anger in perspective,” usually to find, “it’s a high price to pay for a worthless thing.”

And then “Sometimes,” he writes, “it’s best to stand back and laugh,” and it that fails…take a look in the mirror at your “angry face.” 

He ends by writing of the physical ramifications of an outburst: “how many people have been injured by anger’s very nature. Many have burst their veins with excessive fury…and their shouts have brought up blood.” 

Today we know that an episode of anger can cause the adrenal glands to flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol, both stress hormones that can cause a variety of symptoms such as high blood pressure along with the release of inflammatory cells by the immune system that can lead to the rupturing of plaque inside a coronary artery. 

Seneca must be given credit for being the first philosopher to originate the idea that there are remedies to curb or “contain anger”—making “De Ira” unquestionably the world’s first book on anger management.

Seneca, also known as Seneca the Younger, was born in Corduba, Spain, around 5 BC and trained in rhetoric and philosophy in Rome.  He was a prolific thinker and writer who wrote 12 philosophical essays, 124 letters dealing with moral issues, and nine tragedies with Greek subjects including Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon.

He was committed to using philosophy as a way to self improvement both for himself and others.

“What is required of any man, he wrote toward the end of his life, “is that he should be of good use to other men and if possible to many, failing that, to a few, failing that, to those nearest him and failing that to himself.”