Moral essays. With an English translation by J.W. Basore

ON ANGER, III. HI. 4-iv. lwhen it confounds the resolves without which virtueaccompUshes nothing ? Transient aiadhftneful, andpotent only for its o^\-n harm, is the strength whicha sicic man acquires" Itom the rising of Ixis fever.Therefore when I decry anger on the assumption thatmen are not agreed" in their estimate of it, you arenot to think that I am wasting time on a superfluousmatter ; for there is one, and he, too, a distinguishedphilosopher, who ascribes to it a function, and onthe ground that it is useful and conducive to energywould evoke it for the needs of battle, for thebusiness of state—for any undertaking, in fact, thatrequires some fervour for its accomplishment. Tothe end that no one may be deceived into supposingthat at any time, in any place, it will be profitable,the unbridled and frenzied madness of anger mustbe exposed, and there must be restored to it thetrappings that are its very own—the torture-horse,the cord, the jail, the cross, and fires encircling Uvingbodies implanted in the ground, the drag-hook thatseizes even corpses, and all the different kinds ofchains and the different kinds of punishment, therending of limbs, the branding of foreheads, thedens of frightful beasts—in the midst of these herimplements let anger be placed, while she hissesforth her dread and hideous sounds, a creature moreloathsome even than all the instruments throughwhich she vents her rage.Whatever doubt there may be concerning angerin other respects, there is surely no other passionwhose countenance is worse—that countenancewhich we have pictured in the earher books ''—nowharsh and fierce, now pale by reason of the backwardflow and dispersing of the blood, now flushed261