WHEN SENECISM TURNS TO CYNICISM:

The Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca grappled with the relationship between anger and justice in both his thought and his life. A native of a far-flung province (modern-day Córdoba), Lucius Annaeus Seneca gained renown in Rome as an orator as well as a teacher of Stoicism. His eloquence and intelligence not only carried him to the highest ranks of imperial government, but also caught the attention of the empress Agrippina, who was particularly impressed by his essay "On Anger."

Although Agrippina was probably seduced by the essay's style, the substance is what counts. It is one of Seneca's longest writings--and for good reason. More than any other passion, anger challenged the practice of Stoicism. A school of philosophy that viewed the passions as unnatural obstacles to right-thinking and right-acting, Stoicism provided precepts or exercises that helped purge the passions and permitted reason to rule. Other philosophers, notably Aristotle, had argued that the passions--including anger--were natural and, if properly ordered, were the partners of reason, anger the helpmate of justice. Seneca asked: Is anger natural? Could the passion be put into the service sovereign reason? Is it necessary to prevent and punish injustice?

For Seneca, the answer was no thrice over. Unnatural, irrational, vicious, odious, and insane were just some of the ways he characterized the passion. Anger was by far the most corrosive and corrupting of all our emotions. Whereas most passions have at least an element of quiet, anger is "entirely violent and exists in a rush of pain, raging in an almost inhuman desire for weapons, blood and punishment." Gladiatorial games, Rome's favorite spectator sport, drew Seneca's censure for exhibiting--and exciting--the bestial in us. We ought never to act from anger, he believed, much less indulge or cultivate it.

This was especially true when anger was joined to justice. Punishment must always be spurred and steered by cool reason. When ire is indulged, especially by those wielding great power, cruelty rather than righteousness is the result. Yet Seneca also warns that anger employed with the best of intentions is the path to madness because of our very desire to see justice done. "If you want the wise man to be as angry as the atrocity of men's crimes requires," he wrote, "he must not merely be angry, but must go mad with rage."

Here is where Stoicism steps in. "Anger is put to flight by teachings," Seneca wrote, "for it is a voluntary vice of the mind." If it is voluntary, it is a vice that can be mastered by reason. Indeed, master is a misleading verb. For the Stoic sage, the aim is less to control the passions than to eradicate them in order to achieve apatheia--the state of being without passions. In "On Anger," as elsewhere, Seneca offers exhortations and examples intended to inculcate in his reader a therapy of desire.

Seneca soon had the opportunity to practice what he preached when Agrippina tapped him to be the tutor to her son Nero. Following the suspicious death of his stepfather Claudius, the teenaged Nero claimed the imperial title. The novice ruler's maiden speech to the Senate, written by Seneca himself, promised to chart a new path from that of his predecessors. As in "On Anger," Caligula served in the speech as a cautionary example.

No doubt Seneca congratulated himself for being the grownup in the room as he became Nero's principal advisor. But the honeymoon was brief. Nero soon found his footing as emperor, but those feet were steeped in the blood he shed. Scores were evened, rivals exiled or assassinated, culminating in the emperor's order for the murder of his overbearing mother. (A grotesquely farcical affair, it involved a ship with a lead ceiling meant to collapse and crush the empress, who managed to swim safely to shore, only to be stabbed to death by assassins sent by her son to finish the job.)

As Nero spiraled downward, Seneca stayed on. Perhaps he told himself he could restrain the emperor's worst impulses; perhaps he told himself that if he resigned, others less able would make the situation worse; perhaps, though a Stoic, he was simply frightened. 

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