The ancient obsession with anger has been much-studied and would be hard to overstate. Of course ancient thinkers, like modern ones, were broadly interested in the emotions and took these as objects of analysis. Of all the ancient affects, though, by far the largest number of monographs were dedicated to the study of anger. We can appreciate why this was: anger is a distinctly other-oriented emotion, and in a time before the police state it tended to entail dangerous social consequences. One also had the sense (then as now, although people don’t like to admit it) that, however dangerous anger could be, it was effective: in war, for instance, where it seemed impossible to some observers that you could fight effectively without being angry at your enemy.
I should say that scholars have come to understand that the words people use to talk about anger in Greek and Latin don’t exactly overlap with the modern terminology. Latin ira, for instance, seems to have been much more performative than at least a lot of what we’d call anger: “The eyes grow red and glossy,” writes Seneca; “the whole face, filled with blood from the bottom of the heart, turns red; the lips shake, teeth are clenched, hairs stand on end, breathing grows loud and heavy; there’s a sound of limbs twisting, a sigh and a mooing and a broken speech with words hardly articulated; frequent clapping, feet stamping; the whole body stirred upand making great threats of anger.” Seneca likens the physical performance to that of a madman but also to that of certain animals (the foaming boar, the rutting bull), which raises a question: can animals get angry?
This is a pressing enough concern that Seneca feels the need to address it close to the beginning of the first book of De ira, where he’s giving definitions. He answers in the negative because he’s already defined anger as standing in opposition to reason, which, as a Stoic, he needs to assert that animals don’t have. Lacking ratio, they also lack its opposite, so it doesn’t make sense to say that animals get angry. However, if anger is, as Seneca claims, a momentary loss of reason, then it does make sense to say that an angry person becomes like an animal, perhaps even becomes an animal in the sense that’s meaningful for ancient philosophy. A particularly salient symptom of this, visible in the passage just quoted, would be the abandonment of semiotically meaningful speech (Pierce’s symbols) in favor of inarticulate sounds that do no more than indicate one’s own emotional state (Pierce’s indices). That gap was felt by most ancient schools of thought (the cynics excepted) to be one that separated humans and animals.
The conundrum here is obvious: the angry person becomes something incapable of anger, something of which iratum cannot be predicated. One way to resolve it would be to extend Seneca’s metaphor to a definition: anger is just the state of becoming an animal which, since animals are already animals, can only be attributed to humans. Seneca probably wouldn’t be satisfied with this definition, which demotes ratio to a secondary status in explaining anger, but it has the advantage of accounting for the physicality of ira in a way that Seneca’s approach does not.
Seneca wants anger to be something you can control. That’s where all the bullshit about ratio comes in. The animal subtext that runs throughout book 1 is by way of a confession: Seneca knows there’s no controlling anger, probably knows already that anger – ira Neronis – is going to be what gets him in the end. Hey, I sympathize. Anger in myself: I can choke it down every time. I’m a reasonable man. Anger in someone else: well, that’s something different, they’re an animal, using reason here would be like trying to distract a lion with a chew toy. And seeing that reminds me that I’m choking down anger and not refuting it, so we’re back to square one.
The right approach is different: you don’t try to reason with anger, you despise it. That, actually, is what Seneca’s really trying to teach you, if you can see past the syllogisms. Everything about anger belongs to a lower order. You can be violent if you want to, you can punish people and beat your servants, but don’t do it angry like some kind of clown. Something else about ira that’s hard to get: on stage, the Romans thought it was hilarious. Plautus is full of people blowing their tops over nothing. Anger is the pratfall of Roman comedy.
Do we see it that way now? We do not. Even in comedies, we take anger very seriously. It’s the place where earnestness leaks into the script: how you know that the joke’s gone too far, that Adam Sandler’s going to have to make a sincere apology.* But it’s on stage, it’s not sincere, that’s the point of a comedy. So why do we pretend it’s real?
There’s a continuity with how we respond to anger offstage, too: as the ultimate token of emotional sincerity. You can’t fake it, so it must be real, so it deserves to be treasured in a world where every other emotion has been co-opted by the artificial come-on of advertising. That’s fair enough – yelling at me won’t get me to Drink Coke – but it’s also insane. Taking anger seriously removes what should be the biggest check on it, embarrassment. If you can laugh at anger (and at angry people), that proves you’ve mastered it.
*Trainspotting‘s Begbie is an exception to this high-functioning generalization. Wikipedia tells me, though, that we’re supposed to laugh at him because he’s a sociopath and not because he’s angry.