Ancient & modern
'ANGER-management consultants' have been appearing all over the papers in the past few weeks discussing how the footballer Roy Keane might learn to control his foul temper. The papers could have saved the cost of their predictable services by reprinting selected chunks from Seneca (4 BC—AD 65) De Ira, 'On Anger'. and Plutarch (AD 46120) Pen Aorgesias, `On Negation of Anger', and following up with Aristotle's view that anger was an excellent thing.
Seneca gives a fine picture of the angry man: devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of loyalties, deaf to reason and advice, excited by trivialities, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, he wears a bold and threatening look and a fierce expression; his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with blood, his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched, his joints crack with writhing (when, in the delightful Keane's case, he is not cracking other people's), he groans and bellows, and so on. After which Seneca launches into a lengthy moral diatribe against anger in any of its forms.
Plutarch, meanwhile, couches his treatise in the shape of an account by the notoriously irascible Roman Fundanus of how he finally beat the bug.
It was a long exercise in behaviour therapy: first, observing how unhinged people looked when they became angry and seeing how ineffective anger was as means of achieving anything; and second, identifying the causes of it, usually in the belief that one is being slighted or ignored. As a result of this analysis, Fundanus adopts patterns of belief and behaviour which help him to avoid situations in which anger can bubble up.
At which point, enter Aristotle (384-322 BO. He will have none of this. For him anger was just another natural human 'passion' of which one can have too much or too little. The irascible man will fly off the handle at nothing or, even worse, suppress his anger and keep it warm over years, ruining his life in the process; the 'angerless' man, however, will not get angry at, for instance, injustice or wrongs done to his friends, and be equally miserable. One must learn to be angry for the right reasons, against the right people, in the right way, at the right time.
The first word of Western literature (Homer's Iliad) is 'anger'. Tragedy and satire ('indignatio makes my poetry', says Juvenal) depend on it; so do the minor prophets and that arch-exponent, the God of the Old Testament. Aristotle, as usual, was right.
Peter Jones
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