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The Stoic Seneca on Anger

A study of anger, after Lebrun.
Ira furor brevis est.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

After his brother Novatus asked him ‘how anger may be soothed’, the Stoic philosopher Seneca penned his famous treatise, On Anger (c. 45 CE).

Anger, says Seneca, is a bad habit that people tend to pick up from their parents. When a child who was raised at Plato’s house was returned to his parents and witnessed his father shouting, he said, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’

Anger is like a virus. If we are around angry people, it is hard not to lose our temper, however temperate we may normally be. For this reason alone, we ought to prefer the company of mild, level-headed people. For my urban readers, even wild animals become gentle in the company of the calm (though I wouldn’t rely on it).

Anger Is a Loss of Perspective

We should also resist our egocentric tendency to believe the worst about others. Often, the people at whom we are most liable to get angry are those who are in fact trying to help us—although, of course, not as much as we would like. In their minds, they are only trying to do what they think is best for them, and we, by our anger, are trying to thwart them—which is why they tend to return our anger. If what they are doing is not in their best interests, then we should calmly explain this to them, rather than losing our temper and, with it, their ear.

As for the things that anger us, they are often mere slights or annoyances that do not do us any real harm. Luxury debilitates the mind and undermines our sense of perspective, so that pampered people (like us) are more prone to anger over trivial things.

Events are events. It is we who attach emotion to them. And it is far easier to adjust our expectation of the world than to change the world itself.

Anger Does Us More Harm than Good

Even if someone murders our father or child, anger is not required to honour their memory, obtain justice, and, more generally, do the right and honourable thing. Recognising an injustice and becoming angry about it need not be one and the same thing—and, in fact, superadded anger may impair our ability to address the injustice. Many people think that anger is a show of virtue or, at least, a spur to virtue; at most, it can substitute for virtue in those who are lacking it.

Anger and grief only add to our existing pain, and often do more harm than the things out of which they arise. It is out of anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who had saved his life—that great conqueror of kings, himself brought down by anger. And it is also out of anger that Medea slaughtered her innocent children. Will you suffer a stroke or die from a heart attack because someone said something out of place?

In Norse myth, Angrboða—the mother of Fenrir, Jörmungandr, and Hel—means ‘she who brings grief’. The same angr, meaning grief or distress, gave us our word anger. The name preserves a psychological truth: beneath anger there is often grief—and grief indulged may give birth to monsters.

As Horace put it, anger is a short-lived madness (ira furor brevis est). Whereas other vices bend the mind, anger overthrows it. The angry person is like a collapsing building that destroys itself in the very act of bearing down upon others.

Anger Is Contrary to Our Nature

Being social animals, like ants, bees, and wolves, human beings are born to provide and receive assistance. Anger, which, on the contrary, seeks to arrogate and annihilate, is so inimical to our nature that some angry people have benefited simply from looking in a mirror. 

Those who are unwilling to check their anger and work with others for the common good are like wasps in a beehive, gorging on the honey of others without contributing any of their own.

For all these reasons, we should never get angry. We might feel the beginnings of anger, but then reject this passionate impression that threatens to overthrow our reason and the tranquillity and dignity that follows in its train. We may not be able to prevent the first flash of irritation, any more than we can prevent ourselves from flinching at a sudden noise. Our freedom begins with what we do next, as we recognise anger for what it is: irrational and, often, unfair.

Now Here’s Your Answer

To regain perspective when angry, to reclaim our sanity, we might ask ourselves:

  • Am I expecting too much out of the world?
  • How is getting angry going to help me?
  • Who will remember this in a day or in a year, or in a hundred years?

But the surest cure for anger is delay, because it gives us a much better chance of rejecting our passionate impression.

Before rising into the first emperor of Rome, Augustus—then Octavian—was taught by the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananites at Apollonia, in modern-day Albania, where he received the news of Julius Caesar’s demise. Athenodorus followed Octavian back to Rome and remained by his side as he deftly achieved that which his great uncle Caesar could or did not. When, on account of his old age, Athenodorus begged to be dismissed and was at last taking leave of Augustus, he reminded him, ‘Whenever you get angry, Caesar, do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.’

At this, the emperor seized Athenodorus by the hand and said, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’

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Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. Through the lives of Zeno, Cleanthes, Cato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many others, Stoic Stories introduces the philosophy not through abstract theory, but through the memorable stories that have kept it alive for more than two thousand years.

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Three ancient mind exercises for processing and subliming bad news.

Imagine: Your house has been burgled. You’ve been fired. Your partner cheated or walked out on you. You’ve been diagnosed with a life-changing condition…

Bad news can leave us in a state of dread and despair. It seems like our whole world is falling apart, almost as if we’re being driven into the ground. We fear the very worst and cannot get it out of our mind, or gut. Often, there are other emotions mangled in, like anger, guilt, despair, betrayal, and love.

Bad news: we’ve all had it, and the worst is yet to come.

So, how best to cope?

I’m going to give you three cognitive strategies, or mind exercises, that I picked up from the Stoic philosophers—who, in the second century, could count the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among their followers.

All three strategies aim, in one way or another, at generating perspective. While reading, hold a recent piece of bad news in the front of your mind, and consider how the strategies might or might not apply to your bad news.

Contextualization

Try to frame the bad news, to put it into its proper context. Think about all the good things in your life, including those that have been and those that are yet to come. Remind yourself of all the strengths and resources—the friends, facilities, and faculties—that you can draw upon in your time of need. Imagine how things could be much, much worse—and how for some people they actually are. Your house may have been burgled. Yes, you lost some valuables and it’s all such a huge hassle. But you still have your health, your job, your partner… Bad things are bound to hit us now and then, and it can only be a matter of time before they hit us again. In many cases, they are just the flip side of the good things that we enjoy. You got burgled, because you had a house and valuables. You lost a great relationship, because you had one in the first place. In that much, many a bad thing is no more than the removal or reversal of a good one.

Negative visualization

Now focus on the bad news itself. What’s the worst that could happen, and is that really all that bad? Now that you’ve got the worst out of the way, what’s the best possible outcome? And what’s the most likely outcome? Imagine that someone is threatening to sue you. The worst possible outcome is that you lose the case and suffer all the entailing cost, stress, and emotional and reputational hurt. Though it’s unlikely, you might even do time in prison (it has happened to some, and a few, like Bertrand Russell, did rather well out of it). But the most likely outcome is that you reach some sort of out-of-court settlement. And the best possible outcome is that you win the case, or better still, it gets dropped.

Transformation

Finally, try to transform your bad news into something positive, or into something that has positive aspects. Your bad news may represent a learning or strengthening experience, or act as a wake-up call, or force you to reassess your priorities. At the very least, it offers a window into the human condition and an opportunity to exercise dignity and self-control. Maybe you lost your job: time for a holiday and a promotion, or a career change, or the freedom and fulfilment of self-employment. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Even so, you feel sure that he or she still loves you, that there is still something there. Perhaps you can even bring yourself to look at it from his or her perspective. Yes, of course it’s painful, but it may also be an opportunity to forgive, to build a closer intimacy, to re-launch your relationship—or to go out and find a more fulfilling one. You’ve been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Though it’s terrible news, it’s also the chance to get the support and treatment that you need, to take control, to fight back, to look at life and your relationships from another, richer perspective.

A Taoist story for the road

There’s a Taoist story about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. “Such terrible news!” said a neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned with six wild horses. “Such wonderful news!” exclaimed the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The day after that, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses but got thrown off and broke a leg. “Such terrible news!” cried the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, biting into a peach. A week later, war broke out: thanks to his broken leg, the farmer’s son managed to escape military conscription. “It all worked out really well in the end,” said the neighbour, “such great luck!”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, rolling his eyes.

Neel Burton is author of Growing from Depression, which is currently free to download from his website bookstore.

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What the Stoics Knew About Grief and Loss

The Angel Standing in the Sun, by JMW Turner (cropped)

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

The Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) is the master of the ‘consolation’, a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcia, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on ‘losing’ him to exile—an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least 14 children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad:

Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.

The image is deliberately impersonal. To a parent, the death of a child is a profound loss; but to nature, it is no more extraordinary than the falling of a leaf. The Stoic challenge is, somehow, to hold both perspectives at once.

Marcus was a Stoic, and would have known, at least in principle, how to cope with grief, loss, and bereavement. But if Seneca could have consoled Marcus on the loss of his children, and could only have told him three things, what would he have told him?

A Life Can Be Sufficient

First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die—indeed, they often do—and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence. Since a life can never be long or great enough, the most that it can be is sufficient, and we would do better to concentrate on what that might mean. A short life may be complete, just as a long life may be squandered, or drag on for far too long. It is not how many years we have, but what we make of those years, or the shape of those years.

Is Death Really Such an Evil?

Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life. Life is full of suffering, and grieving only adds to it, whereas death is the permanent release from every possible pain. Indeed, many people who have died—think only of our friend Cicero—would have died happier if they had died sooner. If we do not pity the unborn, why should we pity the dead, who at least had the benefit, if benefit it is, of having existed? The unborn cry out as soon as they are delivered into the world, but to the dead we never have to block our ears. If weep we must, it is not over death, but the whole of life, that we should weep. Marcus, you may find this bleak, or me brutal. But if death is a loss to those who remain, it does not follow that it is a misfortune to the departed—and we should not deepen our grief by assuming it is so. When King Midas compelled the wise Silenus to reveal what was best for human beings, he replied: ‘Not to be born; and, failing that, to die soon.’

The People We Love Are Only on Loan

Third, we should treat the people we love not as permanent possessions but as temporary loans from fortune. When, in the evening, you kiss your wife and children goodnight, reflect on the possibility that they, and you, might never wake up. In the morning when you kiss them goodbye, reflect on the possibility that they, or you, might never come home. That way you’ll be better prepared for their eventual loss, and, what’s more, savour and sublime whatever time you spend with them—and, in that way, lead them to love you more. 

If you do lose a loved one, do not grieve, or no more than is appropriate, or no more than they would have wanted you to, but be grateful for the moments that you shared, and consider how much poorer your life would have been if they had never entered into it.

Sometimes, like now, Marcus, our grieving is recent or prominent, but in truth we are permanently grieving. We accumulate losses—people, places, possibilities, former selves. Much of that grief simply recedes, only to resurface more softly in our quieter moments.

Everything leaves us, and if they do not, we leave them.

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10 Unexpected Benefits of Voluntary Hardship

Bread and olive oil
More enjoyable than any great banquet?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 26 July 2026.

We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves marginally more comfortable. The Stoics, Cynics, and Spartans believed that this pursuit of comfort could pose a trap. Their remedy was occasional voluntary hardship.

In the deep winter, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’

Like their predecessors the Cynics, and like the Spartans, the Stoics greatly valued hardship, albeit on a more modest or moderate scale. They believed that we should occasionally practise poverty or put ourselves through mild hardship, and this for several reasons:

First, to discover what we can do without, and reduce our fear of losing those things. In his Letters, Seneca advises Lucilius: ‘Set yourself a period of some days in which you will be content with very small amounts of food, and the cheapest kinds, and with coarse clothing, and say to yourself, ‘Is this what I was afraid of?’’

Second, to be reminded that simple things, such as bread and olive oil, or a good night’s sleep, can be just as enjoyable and profitable as any great banquet (if not more so), and thus that pleasure is both readily available and highly transferable.

Third, to better reflect upon our true goals, or to work towards them. ‘If you want to have time for your mind,’ says Seneca, ‘you must either be poor or resemble the poor… One cannot study without frugality, and frugality is just voluntary poverty.’

Here are six more advantages of self-imposed hardship, according to the Stoics:

  • To increase our appreciation and enjoyment of the things that we normally enjoy.
  • To break from our normal routine, and reinvigorate our minds while exercising our freedom.
  • To be prepared for future hardship, which, unless we are suddenly struck dead, is all but a certainty.
  • To be convinced that the greater part of our suffering lies not in fact but in our attitude towards it.
  • To practise self-discipline, or test our fortitude.
  • To empathise with less fortunate people, and people from the past.

In addition, self-imposed poverty and hardship can also have more mundane benefits, such as losing weight, saving time or money, and making yourself popular by seeming like one of the people.

Finally, all these motives are in themselves a source of pride and pleasure of a different kind. ‘Do not,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘lament misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of man who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you.’

Seneca does us the favour of putting self-imposed hardship into radical perspective when he says: ‘Armies have endured being deprived of everything for another person’s domination, so who will hesitate to put up with poverty when the aim is to liberate the mind from fits of madness?’

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Two Ancient Paths to the Same Human Truths

The Stoic dog and cart
The Stoic dog and cart: we can run willingly alongside the wheel of fate, or resist and be dragged along anyway.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

The Stoic revival has picked up pace in recent years, with people looking for something more substantial than the material hedonism that has come to fill the space vacated by the retreat of organised religion.

Although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluid concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma.

But the similarities do not end there.

Although Stoicism and Buddhism emerged at different times and a continent apart, they repeatedly arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about desire, attachment, suffering, and the good life.

Desire and Attachment

According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the cause of all suffering is desire, and the natural way to eliminate this suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The first division of the Noble Eightfold Path is ‘right view’, or maintaining perspective on reality.

Similarly, the Stoics taught that we ought at every moment to be rational. Unfortunately, we are too readily waylaid from reason by unwise attachments and the destructive emotions to which they give rise. These attachments dangle the promise of pleasure or happiness but really offer only slavery—whereas, if only we could see it, nothing leads to pleasure and happiness as surely as reason and self-control.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, which are all the more remarkable for coming from a Roman emperor:

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river… Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

The language differs, but the insight is much the same. We suffer not only because things change, but because we demand that they remain as they are. For both traditions, the path to freedom is not to exert greater control over the world, but to loosen the world’s hold over us.

God and Fate

Stoic physics is indebted to Plato’s Timaeus, in which the philosopher Timaeus claims that God’s creation is itself a god. Human souls, being fashioned from the inferior residue of the world soul, are aligned with the will of God. But once implanted into a body, they are overwhelmed by sensations and affections, which they can only overcome through appropriate nurture and education.

Like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, Stoicism rejects a separate divine sphere, arguing instead that God is infused in all things, including in us, who therefore share in His nature. We are, as the Stoic Epictetus often reminds us, a part or extension of God:

In conversation, exercise, discourse—do you remember that it is God you are feeding, God you are exercising? You carry God around with you and don’t know it, poor fool.

The Stoics were essentially pantheists, like Baruch Spinoza, who thought of God and creation as one and the same thing. And like that other great seventeenth-century philosopher, GW Leibniz, they believed that the universe is a rationally ordered whole and that everything that happens within it, if only we could see it, happens for the best of possible reasons.

Hence, our fate has already been determined: Instead of rebelling against it, we should be content to play the role that has been assigned to us. We are, said Zeno (the founder of Stoicism), like a dog tethered to a cart: the wise person runs smoothly alongside, whereas the fool struggles and strains but is dragged along anyway.

This is more subtle than simple fatalism. The dog cannot determine where the cart is going, but it can determine how it makes the journey. Its freedom consists in running willingly alongside the wheel of fate, instead of exhausting and injuring itself in futile resistance.

This echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as ‘duty’. When Krishna addresses the reluctant warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is not persuading him to fight so much as telling him that he is going to have to fight regardless:

Fettered by your own task, which springs from your nature, you will inevitably do what you in your folly do not want to do.

Evil and Liberation

Chrysippus, who succeeded Zeno and Cleanthes at the head of the Stoa, argued that evil is the inevitable consequence of nature’s goodness. For instance, many of the bones in the human skull are light and thin, improving it overall but by the same token leaving it vulnerable to blows. Evil presents us, as it did the hero Hercules, with opportunities to test and hone ourselves—and also a motive, for what would it mean to be good in a world without evil?

In Samkhya-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls and consciousness by providing them with experience and, in time, liberation. To put this more poetically, the world was created to show consciousness to itself. The doctrines of karma and moksha (liberation) could not hold in a world without evil.

Salvation, for the Stoic as for the Hindu, is to embrace life to the point of accepting fate, and so to become as one with the world. In Indian terms, it is to achieve moksha, that is, liberation from maya (illusion), dukkha (suffering), and samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth).

In the Encheiridion, Epictetus compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

For all their theoretical differences, the traditions keep arriving at the same practical conclusion: do not mistake the stopping place for the final destination.

Cosmopolitanism

Philosophers debate whether karma theory is a firm basis for morality or just an appeal to naked self-interest.

One way around this problem is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions so that the system becomes impossible to game. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome.

For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others—so that helping others is the same as helping oneself. 

The Stoics, too, believed that all human beings form part of a single organism. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we too each have a role to play in society, even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.

‘Remember,’ says Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’

To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.

Both Buddhism and Stoicism conclude that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone. Buddhism arrives at this conclusion through the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, Stoicism through the oneness of humanity. Although the working out is different, the conclusion is the same.

Time and again, Buddhists and Stoics begin from different assumptions, yet converge on the same human truths: that everything changes, that attachment enslaves us, that resistance compounds suffering, that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone, and that the boundaries we draw around ourselves are much more porous than they may seem.

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