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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 communicable disease. 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 those who don’t know, even wild animals become gentle in the company of the calm.

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.

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. 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.

For Seneca, “anger is a short-lived madness” (in the original Latin, ira furor brevis est) and differs from other vices in that “whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it.” The angry person, he adds, is “like a collapsing building that’s reduced to rubble even as it crushes what it falls upon.”

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, the Stoic should never get angry. She might feel the beginnings of anger, but then reject this passionate impression that threatens to overthrow her reason and the tranquillity and dignity that follows in its train.

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.”

Read more in Stoic Stories.

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The Stoic Seneca 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 fourteen 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.

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 might those three things have been?

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.

Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life (the secret of Silenus). 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.

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 that you have 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 come into it.

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Shutterstock/Amnat Phuthamrong

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. Indeed, although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluids concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma. But the similarities do not end there.

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 an 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.

God, Fate and Evil

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 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 17th 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 echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as “duty”. When Krishna addresses Prince 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.

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 Samkyha-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls by providing them with experience, and, in time, with 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, the Stoic 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.

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.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories and Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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Why the tyrant is the unhappiest of people, and three things to guard against tyranny.

Nero and Seneca, by Eduardo Barrón (1904).

Tyranny is back on the table, but the ancients thought hard about how to avoid it. One of their most interesting arguments is that the one who suffers most in a tyranny is… the tyrant himself.

When Lydia was conquered by Persia in around 540 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia were ruled by tyrants nominated by the Persian satrap in Sardis, the former Lydian capital. These tyrants, backed by the Persian power, had no need to moderate their rule, and began to give tyranny, and Persia, a bad name to the Greeks.

The definition of “tyrant” is malleable, and has shifted many times over the centuries. All in all, a tyrant is an absolute ruler who is illegitimate and/or unrestrained by law. To maintain himself in such a precarious position, he (for it is invariably a “he”) usually resorts to oppression and cruelty. Even then, “the strangest thing to see is an aged tyrant”—as the philosopher Thales of Miletus noted more than 2,500 years ago.

In On Clemency, written for the emperor Nero, the Roman philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that clemency is the quality that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant: “A tyrant differs from a king in his behaviour, not his title … It’s because of clemency that there’s a big difference between a king and a tyrant.” For Seneca, a ruler’s glory depends not on his power, but on its proper exercise. Moreover, if people can see that their ruler is “for them as much as he is above them,” they will be loyal to him and act as his eyes and ears. Clemency, then, not only ennobles rulers but keeps them safe: “It is at one and the same time an adornment of supreme power and its surest security.”

The calm and deliberate exercise of power, says Seneca, is like a clear and brilliant sky, but when the ruler is unrestrained all becomes murk and shadows: “People on every side tremble and start at sudden sounds, and not even the one who causes all the alarm is left unshaken.” The tyrant is then caught in a vicious circle: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. For everyone he kills, there are fathers and sons, brothers and friends, who will rise up in their stead. 

In 68 CE, Nero preferred to commit suicide than let himself be killed.

Socrates on tyranny

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often thought, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are really all one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But in the longer term, their actions undermine both their and our happiness—and never more so than if they happen to be a tyrant.

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates makes the case that the tyrant is the most miserable of men because he is in a stronger position to harm himself and others—which is why those whom Homer has in Hades suffering eternal torment are not ordinary people but potentates such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Tityus.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates ranks people according to how much of the ideal Forms their souls are supposed to have seen, with philosophers, artists, and true lovers in the first class, followed by kings and generals in the second class … and tyrants in the ninth and final class.

Elsewhere, Socrates calculates that the king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant.

Plato and Aristotle on tyranny

The best rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, and the most eager the worst—said Plato.

Plato did not care for Athenian democracy, but the tyranny of his own aristocratic relatives had proven much worse. In the Republic, he claims that the degeneration of the ideal state ends in democracy, followed by tyranny.

In Book 9 of the Republic, Plato gives a detailed account of the origins, mindset, and modus operandi of the tyrant, thereby demonstrating that this most unjust of men is also the most slavish and unhappy. The soul of the tyrant is so disordered that he is unable to do, or even know, what it truly desires—which is, of course, to be happy, and therefore good.

The life of the political tyrant is even more wretched than that of the private tyrant, first, because the political tyrant is in a better position to feed his disordered desires, and, second, because he is everywhere surrounded and watched by his enemies, of whom he is, in effect, the prisoner.

The Republic ends with the Myth of Er, according to which the souls of tyrants and murderers are barred from reincarnation and condemned to an eternity in the underworld.

Aristotle too suggested that there is no worse criminal than the tyrant: “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence honour is bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant…”

In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle says that the Carthaginian constitution is so superior to any Greek one that the Carthaginians have never suffered a rebellion or been ruled by a tyrant.

How to protect against tyrants

So, what might the ancient philosophers have to say about today’s democracies?

First, we need to ensure that a life spent in politics remains an attractive prospect, or at the very least a tolerable one, or else sensible people will be put off from going into politics, hollowing out the center and leaving us to be governed, or misgoverned, by disturbed and power-hungry fanatics.

Second, we need to think more carefully about education, and what it means to be educated. Unless we transform ourselves by carrying out the work of the mind, we could be rich, powerful, and famous, like Nero, or Putin, and still be utterly miserable. Playing the tyrant, and taking everyone down with us, is not, as Seneca reminds us, what human beings are for.

Third, a country’s constitution or political settlement must contain sufficient safeguards to prevent or arrest the rise of a potential tyrant, or simply of a less than decent or competent leader. This is not the case in the U.S. and no longer the case in the U.K. where recent changes to how the main political parties select their leaders have enabled the rise of such improbable figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, who, as prime minister, purged his party of competent moderates and attempted to prorogue Parliament.

Since the time of Plato, humanity has made great strides in science and technology, but far less progress in politics. The world, now armed with nuclear weapons, is still crying out for fail-safe systems of government.

That, surely, is not beyond us.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.