This point also must now be considered, whether those who are habitually cruel and rejoice in human blood are angry when they kill people from whom they have neither received injury nor think even themselves that they have received one; of such sort were Apollodorus4 and Phalaris4. But this is not anger, it is brutality; for it does not harm because it has received an injury, but it is even ready to receive one provided that it can harm, and its purpose in desiring to beat and to mangle is not vengeance but pleasure. And why does it happen? The source of this evil is anger, and when anger from oft-repeated indulgence and surfeit has arrived at a disregard for mercy and has expelled from the mind every conception the human bond, it passes at last into cruelty. And so these men laugh and rejoice and experience great pleasure, and wear a countenance utterly unlike that of anger, making a pastime of ferocity.
When Hannibal saw a trench flowing with human blood, he is said to have exclaimed, “O beauteous sight!” How much more beautiful would it have seemed to him if the blood had filled some river or lake! What wonder, O Hannibal, if you, born to bloodshed and from childhood familiar with slaughter, find especial delight in this spectacle? A fortune will attend you that for twenty years will gratify your cruelty, and will everywhere supply to your eyes the welcome sight; you will see it at Trasumennus and at Cannae, and last of all at your own Carthage! Only recently Volesus, governor of Asia under the deified Augustus, beheaded three hundred persons in one day, and as he strutted among the corpses with the proud air of one who had done some glorious deed worth beholding, he cried out in Greek, “What a kingly act!” But what would he have done if he had been a king? No, this was not anger, but an evil still greater and incurable.