How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers)

by Seneca

Seneca brought all his formidable rhetorical powers to bear in On Anger, sometimes chilling his readers with tales of grotesque cruelty, other times uplifting them with exhortations toward mercy, and finally leaving them haunted by the specter of death, the grim absolute that was never far from his thoughts (see How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life in this series). He deploys his famously seductive prose style, rendered here only with very partial fidelity, to keep us hanging on every word. (The passages in this volume do not represent “every word” but constitute less than one-third of On Anger; the whole may be read in Robert Kaster’s translation in the University of Chicago volume Anger, Mercy, Revenge.)

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