To one man you will say, “See to it that you do not by your anger give pleasure to your foes”; to another, “See to it that you do not lose your greatness of mind and the reputation you have in the eyes of many for strength. By heavens, I myself am indignant and I angry beyond measure, but we must await our time. He shall pay the penalty; keep that well in mind. When you can, you will make him pay for the delay as well.” To reprove a man when he is angry and in turn to become angry at him serve only to increase his anger. You will approach him with various appeals and persuasively, unless you happen to be an important enough person to be able to quell his anger by the same tactics the deified Augustus used when he was dining with Vedius Pollio.20 When one of his slaves had broken a crystal cup, Vedius ordered him to be seized and doomed him to die, but in an extraordinary way he ordered him to be thrown to the huge lampreys, which he kept in a fish-pond. Who would not suppose that he did this merely for display? It was really out of cruelty. The lad slipped from his captors and fled to Caesar’s feet, begging only that he might die some other way — anything but being eaten. Caesar, shocked by such an innovation in cruelty, ordered that the boy be pardoned, and, besides, that all the crystal cups be broken before his eyes and that the fish-pond be filled up. It was so that it befitted Caesar to rebuke a friend; he employed his power rightly: “Do you order men to be hurried from a banquet to death, and to be torn to pieces by tortures of an unheard-of kind? If your cup was broken, is a man to have his bowels torn asunder? Will you vaunt yourself so much as to order a man to be led to death in the very presence of Caesar?” Thus if any man’s power is so great that he can assail anger from an eminent position, let him deal with it harshly, but only such anger as that I have illustrated — fierce, inhuman, and bloodthirsty, and now quite incurable unless it is made to fear something more powerful.