“There can be no doubt,” you say, “that such a force is powerful and pernicious; show, therefore, how it is to be cured.” And yet, as I said in my earlier books,1 Aristotle stands forth as the defender of anger, and forbids us to cut it out; it is, he claims, a spur to virtue, and if the mind is robbed of it, it becomes defenseless and grows sluggish and indifferent to high endeavor. Therefore our first necessity is to prove its foulness and fierceness, and to set before the eyes what an utter monster a man is when he is enraged against a fellow-man, with what fury he rushes on working destruction destructive of himself as well and wrecking what cannot be sunk unless he sinks with it. Tell me, then, will anyone call the man sane who, just as if seized by a hurricane, does not walk but is driven along, and is at the mercy of a raging demon, who entrusts not his revenge to another, but himself exacts it, and thus, bloodthirsty alike in purpose and in deed, becomes the murderer of those persons who are dearest and the destroyer of those things for which, when lost, he is destined ere long to weep? Can anyone assign this passion to virtue as its supporter and consort when it confounds the resolves without which virtue accomplishes nothing? Transient and baneful, and potent only for its own harm, is the strength which a sick man acquires from the rising of his fever. Therefore when I decry anger on the assumption that men are not agreed2 in their estimate of it, you are not to think that I am wasting time on a superfluous matter; for there is one, and he, too, a distinguished philosopher, who ascribes to it a function, and on the ground that it is useful and conducive to energy would evoke it for the needs of battle, for the business of state — for any undertaking, in fact, that requires some fervor for its accomplishment. To the end that no one may be deceived into supposing that at any time, in any place, it will be profitable, the unbridled and frenzied madness of anger must be exposed, and there must be restored to it the trappings that are its very own — the torture-horse, the cord, the jail, the cross, and fires encircling living bodies implanted in the ground, the drag-hook that seizes even corpses, and all the different kinds of chains and the different kinds of punishment, the rending of limbs, the branding of foreheads, the dens of frightful beasts — in the midst of these her implements let anger be placed, while she hisses forth her dread and hideous sounds, a creature more loathsome even than all the instruments through which she vents her rage.