Category: Stoicism

Depicting the philosopher armed and in armour

Depicting the philosopher armed and in armour

“[Socrates] was the first to go out as a soldier, when it was necessary, and in war he exposed himself to danger most unsparingly.” — Epictetus

Most people have heard of Socrates, the ancient Athenian philosopher. However, few of us visualize him as a soldier, despite the fact that it’s known for certain that he was one. Socrates served as a Greek hoplite or heavy infantryman. He was no ordinary soldier, though, as we’ll see.

I’m currently working on a graphic novel called Verissimus, about the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I’m also organizing a virtual conference called Stoicon-x Military, the first event of its kind. Individuals from different branches of the armed forces, in different countries, will be describing what Stoicism has taught them. The men and women I’ve worked with in the military are often fascinated by the fact that Socrates served as a hoplite but they’ve never actually seen this depicted. So I commissioned a team of artists to design a special poster for the event, showing Socrates in armour, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.

Athenian Military Training

Athens during the classical period of the 4th and 5th centuries BC did not have a standing army but rather a militia, like most other Greek city-states. Every able-bodied male citizen was expected to answer to the call to arms when ordered to do so by the ekklesia or political assembly. Most adult Athenian men therefore served as citizen-soldiers.

I will never bring reproach upon my hallowed arms, nor will I desert the comrade at whose side I stand…

All male Athenian youths, in a sense, became military cadets. Adolescent boys trained in the ancient martial arts of boxing, wrestling, and pankration, in the gymnasia, or sports grounds, of Athens, in order to prepare themselves for military service. When they reached the age of eighteen, and attained citizenship, they began two years of national service as a member of what’s called the ephebic college. This was effectively the basic training young warriors underwent to serve in future military campaigns. The oath that ephebes took has been preserved as follows:

I will never bring reproach upon my hallowed arms, nor will I desert the comrade at whose side I stand, but I will defend our altars and our hearths, single-handed or supported by many. My native land I will not leave a diminished heritage but greater and better than when I received it. I will obey whoever is in authority and submit to the established laws and all others which the people shall harmoniously enact. If anyone tries to overthrow the constitution or disobeys it, I will not permit him, but will come to its defense, single-handed or with the support of all. I will honor the religion of my fathers. Let the gods be my witness, Agraulus, Enyalius, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone.

On graduating from their first year each youth would be awarded a spear and shield, at public expense. Although there’s some debate about when this basic training began, there must surely have been some similar form of basic military training during Socrates’ youth as a degree of skill is required in order to fight competently with heavy weapons and armour in a phalanx formation — you can’t just grab a spear and join in!

Socrates in the Army

Like most other Athenian youths, Socrates would therefore have been prepared for active military service by the age of twenty. Indeed, he went on to become a hardened veteran who fought in at least three major battles of the Peloponnesian War. He continued to serve, intermittently, in the Athenian army until he was nearly fifty years old.

He would have been decorated for valour, if he hadn’t turned down the award. In 432 BC the Athenians sent an expeditionary force to besiege the rebellious city of Potidaea in the north of Greece. The siege went on for 2–3 years. It was one of the events triggering the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens and her allies, the Delian League, were pitted against the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. The siege ended in disaster for the Athenians. They were cut off from supplies and many died from starvation. The Plague of Athens had broken out back home and also spread into their camp, taking many lives.

Socrates reputedly stood over him and single-handedly defended him from the enemy,

During an enemy attack against the Athenians, Socrates’ friend and messmate, a young officer called Alcibiades, nearly lost his life. He was somehow unhorsed by the enemy, and lay wounded, having lost his armour, presumably his shield and perhaps also his helmet. Socrates reputedly stood over him and single-handedly defended him from the enemy. He not only saved his friend’s life but also recovered his armour, thereby salvaging his honour. Alcibiades was a ward of the leading statesmen Pericles and therefore a member of the most elite circle of Athenian society. He became devoted to Socrates, although later in life, as a maverick general, he became a highly-divisive and controversial figure at Athens.

This was not an isolated act of bravery. Five years later, Socrates took part in the Battle of Delium, in Boeotia, a hostile territory neighbouring Athens. This is believed to have been the first full-scale hoplite battle of the Peloponnesian War, and there were many casualties. Once again, the Athenians were defeated, and forced to withdraw under attack from the enemy. During the retreat, Socrates bravely defended the Athenian general Laches, who had apparently also been unhorsed. Plato portrayed Laches saying of Socrates:

He was my companion in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if others had only been like him, the honour of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred. — Plato, Laches

We’re told Socrates also took part, years later, in the Battle of Amphipolis, far from home in northern Greece. No details of his role are known. It’s possible that military service into one’s fifties was the norm during Socrates’ lifetime. However, centuries later, Diogenes Laertius seems impressed that, at forty-eight, Socrates was still in good enough physical condition to fight in close-quarters combat alongside, and against, men half his age.

Indeed, Socrates appears to have become quite famous among Athenians as a war hero. Over time, he became an experienced veteran, knowledgeable about military training, strategy, and tactics. The evidence strongly suggests that he performed a function akin, in some ways, to that of a Roman centurion or a modern-day NCO. Indeed, both Plato and Xenophon depict him liaising with, and advising, senior officers, including well-known generals, such as Laches.

Designing the Poster

One of my strategies for writing the script for my graphic novel about Marcus Aurelius was to repeatedly ask myself what amazing things I could find written about by ancient historians which nobody had actually seen depicted before.

For example, several sources tell us that the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus, the wayward (adoptive) brother of Marcus Aurelius, uncovered a gigantic skeleton encased in stone, while his men were digging a canal in Syria, during the Parthian War. Some scholars believe, quite plausibly, that it was the fossil of a dinosaur. Nobody, I presumed, had ever really seen a Roman Emperor standing over the fossilized remains of a dinosaur. So I asked my illustrator to draw it, and it’s a full page splash now in Verissimus.

By chance, I’ve been asked to speak about Socrates and Stoicism several times to the military. One of my favourite moments was getting to deliver a workshop at the US Marine Corps University in Quantico. I realized that there was something we kept talking about, again and again, that fascinated everyone, but nobody had ever seen — Socrates as a soldier or, if you like, Socrates in armour. So I thought it would be a great idea to get some artists to create a poster depicting precisely that image.

I wanted to choose a dramatic setting. Sunrise over the hills always looks good. Conveniently, one of the most famous passages concerning Socrates’ military service describes him meditating at daybreak. In Plato’s dialogue called The Symposium, Alcibiades is portrayed recounting a peculiar anecdote. He begins by saying that Socrates, early on, earned a reputation for exceptional toughness and self-discipline among the other soldiers. One morning, at sunrise, he became fixed on some philosophical problem, and stood rooted to the spot in silent contemplation, refusing to budge until he’d fully-grasped whatever he was trying to understand. By nightfall, he’d become a curiosity. A unit of Ionian soldiers, who had been fighting alongside the Athenians, and were camped nearby, carried their camp-beds out of their tents and slept near Socrates so as to observe him. He remained motionless for 24 hours altogether, until sunrise the following morning, when he said a prayer to Apollo, the sun god, and finally went on his way.

This scene is so memorable that I decided to quote the passage from Plato’s Symposium on the poster. I wanted to make it accessible so I consulted several translations, and the original Greek, and produced a slight paraphrase, which I hope captures Plato’s intention in simpler language. My friend, a classicist, Lalya Lloyd, helped me check it against the original to make sure the text’s meaning wasn’t changed much but rather conveyed more clearly to modern readers.

Kasey Pierce of Red Pen Media and Source Point Press, our freelance editor for Verissimus, supervised the design of the poster and helped coordinate the three artists involved. Her input on the overall design helped to make sure it would be very striking. Several of the military personnel who are into Socrates and Stoicism told us they love movies like Gladiator, 300, and books like Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. We tried to create a design inspired by similar movie posters and comic book covers in terms of its overall look and feel.

The illustrator Stan Yak penciled the draft, which went through many revisions based on my feedback and input from others, especially our historical authenticity advisor for Verissimus, Leszek Kalka. I wasn’t too concerned about making everything look exactly as it would have been but we were careful to base the general design fairly closely on authentic details. First of all, we know this scene took place at Potidaea in northern Greece. So the landscape is loosely based on the beaches there, with hills in the background. We also know what Socrates looked like, from countless statues, and we know what an Athenian hoplite looked like. So we just had to put those two images together to make one — Socrates as a hoplite.

Socrates had notoriously distinctive features — so much so that sculptures of him are usually easily identifiable. (Although his image also seems to have merged over time, in some cases, with that of the comedy character Silenus whom Plato says he resembled.) He had bulging eyes, thick lips, and a broad, stubby nose — not conventionally handsome by classical Athenian standards! We know Socrates was aged around thirty-eight by the Battle of Potidaea, when this incident took place. However, we’re used to seeing him depicted as an older man, so I asked the artists to compromise and show him nearing forty but greying.

We had a lot of debate about his weapons and armour. First of all, it’s important to understand that classical Athenian weapons and armour were by no means uniform. As we’ve seen, the Athenian army was a citizen militia not a standing army. Armour was quite expensive and probably sometimes handed down in families. Different Athenian tribes, or regiments, may have had slightly different equipment.

Some warriors, especially the poorer ones, probably fought without much armour, and perhaps even sometimes in the nude. The heaviest, highest-quality, armour, such as the bronze cuirass, probably restricted movement, and would mainly have been worn by officers, typically nobles, mounted on horseback. By the 5th century BC, the armour historians today call linothorax was common, which was made of layers of cotton glued together to form a cheap material harder than cured leather.

A hoplite of Socrates’ standing would probably have at least worn linothorax, although other body armour, such as greaves, were probably optional and varied. He would almost certainly have worn an Attic style helmet and would definitely have carried a hoplon or shield. Some of the emblems on Greek shields appear to have been associated with different city-states. We can see them depicted on ceramics, for example. However, several designs appear to have been used by Athenian hoplites. We don’t know what they signify — perhaps membership of a specific Athenian tribe or regiment. However, we chose the owl shield, attested in ceramics, because of its strong association both with Athens and with philosophy. We based it on the famous drachma design, although similar owl emblems were used on ancient shields. Socrates, like other hoplites, would have been armed primarily with a spear, although he may also have carried a sword for more close-quarters fighting.

The illustrator Robert Nugent coloured Stan’s draft. He transformed the penciled design into something that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a best selling graphic novel. Lettering was designed by Mira Mortal. At first, I wanted to have less text on the poster — maybe losing a sentence — but I thought Mira did such a great job of the comic-book style lettering and captions that I was persuaded not to abbreviate the passage used any further.

The Hymn

Plato tells us that Socrates concluded his meditation by praying to Apollo at daybreak. The Greeks had come to associate Apollo with the sun. So it’s appropriate that Socrates would have prayed to him while contemplating the rising sun. Apollo was the god of the arts, leader of the Muses. He was the god of healing, and of disease. He was also the patron god of Greek military cadets. Depicted as a beardless youth himself, the favourite divine son of Zeus, he was responsible for the training of young men in athletics and martial arts. However, Apollo was also a patron god of philosophy. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates mentions writing a paean or hymn to Apollo while in prison awaiting his execution.

There are many other associations between Apollo and philosophy, which would take us beyond the scope of this discussion. However, Apollo was also the god of prophecy, and his temple at Delphi, outside Athens, was the home of his priestess, the famous Pythia, or Oracle of Delphi. The pronouncements of the Oracle became famous. Today 147 of her maxims survive, virtually all of them consisting of only two words apiece.

Centuries later, the philosopher Plutarch, who was also a priest at Delphi, says that these maxims functioned like seeds from which philosophy grew, as they inspired complex discussions filling numerous lengthy treatises. Socrates himself was inspired by the two most famous Delphic maxims, engraved on a pillar at the entrance to Apollo’s temple: “know thyself” (gnothi seauton) and “nothing in excess” (meden agan). It’s tempting to imagine that he had these, his favourite pieces of Apollonian wisdom, in mind as he awaited the sunrise and said his prayers to Apollo that morning.

[Socrates] was the first to go out as a soldier, when it was necessary, and in war he exposed himself to danger most unsparingly. — Epictetus

Most people have heard of Socrates, the ancient Athenian philosopher. However, few of us visualize him as a soldier, despite the fact that it’s known for certain that he was one. Socrates served as a Greek hoplite or heavy infantryman. He was no ordinary soldier, though, as we’ll see.

I’m currently working on a graphic novel called Verissimus, about the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I’m also organizing a virtual conference called Stoicon-x Military, the first event of its kind. Individuals from different branches of the armed forces, in different countries, will be describing what Stoicism has taught them. The men and women I’ve worked with in the military are often fascinated by the fact that Socrates served as a hoplite but they’ve never actually seen this depicted. So I commissioned a team of artists to design a special poster for the event, showing Socrates in armour, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

Self-Consciousness and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy

Self-Consciousness and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy

Social anxiety is the generic term that psychologists use to describe nerves about public speaking and other interpersonal situations. When I was a teenager, I was very anxious about speaking. I remember asking my older sister, Sheila, to call an employer for me about a job interview because I was too nervous to do it myself. Over the years, it got much better, but the susceptibility to that form of anxiety often never disappears completely.

Some very common self-help techniques potentially do more harm than good.

Many years later, I trained as a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist and ended up working with people suffering from a range of severe anxiety disorders, including what we call Social Anxiety Disorder or Social Phobia. I learned that there are many hundreds of scientific research studies on social anxiety that tell us how it works. Modern research has actually shown us how to treat social anxiety very effectively. However, it also shows that some very common self-help techniques can potentially do more harm than good.

How Anxiety Works

One of the most well-established findings in the entire field of psychotherapy research is that most anxiety abates naturally, given the right conditions. For example, animal phobias are often considered the simplest and purest form of anxiety. If you take someone who has a snake phobia and throw them in a room with snakes what will happen to their heart rate? Within thirty seconds, it will approximately double, from about 70bpm to about 140bpm. But what happens next?

Most clients with severe anxiety will actually be temporarily stumped by that question. They want to say it will get worse, or some catastrophe will happen, although they realise that can’t be right. What goes up must come down. If they wait, their heart rate will normally start to reduce. So how long does that take? It normally takes anything from five to thirty minutes for heart rate to go from its peak level back down to something approaching the normal resting level.

So what will happen next time the same person is exposed to a snake? Their heart rate will go up again but not usually as high as before, and it will reduce more quickly each time. So with repeated, prolonged, exposure, anxiety reduces following a pattern resembling the tail of a dinosaur. Eventually, it will be permanently extinguished, or return to a milder or “sub-phobic” level of unease. Psychologists have known this for over half a century and there are hundreds of research studies demonstrating the effect of what we call “Exposure Therapy” on phobias, a process technically referred to as anxiety habituation.

So if it’s that easy, why doesn’t everyone do it already? Well, what do people most want to do when their anxiety is spiralling? Run away! The drive to get out of the situation peaks alongside anxiety, and often anticipates it. So people either avoid getting into situations that make them anxious, or if they find themselves in them, they escape as quickly as possible. That means there’s often not enough time for anxiety to abate naturally.

The main thing that will keep someone in a situation, despite their wanting to flee, is the presence of another person encouraging them. With children, it’s typically a parent who motivates them to face their fears until anxiety goes away naturally. Adults who grow up without overcoming their phobias may have to enlist a therapist, to do something similar, using Exposure Therapy. Clinical studies show success rates of up to 90% for animal phobias, after as little as three hours of exposure. However, social phobia only has a 75% success rate after about 12–15 sessions of therapy. That’s still very good but the success rate is slightly lower, on average, and the therapy takes four or five times as long. So why would that be?

Making it Worse

There are several features of social phobia that explain why it’s usually harder to treat than animal phobia. However, I’m going to focus on the biggest one. Researchers have found an extraordinarily high level of statistical correlation between self-focused attention and social anxiety. Self-consciousness and social anxiety, it turns out, are virtually synonymous.

You might say that’s just common sense and we all know it already. However, what are the practical implications of that finding? Well, doing things that increase self-focused attention are likely to be toxic for people with social anxiety. In the long-run, focusing too much on themselves prevents speakers focusing on the other people who are triggering their anxious feelings, and that prevents natural habituation from taking place.

Often techniques that people have learned from older self-help books can actually be counterproductive.

Here’s the real problem, though. Many of the strategies people use to cope with social anxiety actually increase self-focused attention. Often techniques that people have learned from older self-help books can actually be counterproductive. For example, trying to relax the muscles of your body, or trying to use breathing techniques, while speaking. These can force you to focus more attention on yourself than on the audience. So can using “thinking strategies” like repeating verbal affirmations in your head, trying to visualise success, or even some forms of mindfulness meditation.

Even worse, some of these strategies increase what we call “cognitive load”, meaning they require extra brainpower. We know that increasing self-focused attention often causes people to hesitate, lose their place, and make more speech errors. If they’re also trying to say or picture “helpful” things in their mind that often doesn’t leave enough mental resources available for speaking fluently. It generally makes their performance feel more awkward. So don’t try to walk and chew gum, in other words!

Conclusion

Nowadays we know a lot more about how social anxiety works and, in particular, that some of the ways people try to help themselves may actually backfire. On a positive note, when people practice speaking and abandon their unhelpful coping strategies they will usually improve fairly quickly. In fact, more recently it’s been shown that actually training people to focus all their attention on the audience can halve the number of therapy sessions required to treat social anxiety.

Translated and Annotated by Robin Waterfield

Translated and Annotated by Robin Waterfield

This is a brand new edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations from Basic Books, due for publication on 6th April 2021 in the US. (ISBN 1541673859) It’s been translated, edited, and annotated by the British classicist Robin Waterfield.

Waterfield will be familiar to many readers as the translator of numerous Greek classics. His edition of this particular text begins with a fairly detailed and helpful introduction, about 46 pages long, which tells us about Marcus’ life, the writing of The Meditations, and the Stoic philosophy upon which it’s based.

The translation itself is a welcome addition to the array of modern translations available such as those by Martin Hammond, Gregory Hays and Robin Hard. It’s a very readable modern translation, and faithful to the original Greek.

What really make this edition stand out, though, are the annotations. Each chapter begins with an introduction, commenting on the style and content. There are multiple footnotes for most of the passages of the text, explaining the meaning of obscure references, commenting on the Greek, making links with other related passages, and generally shedding light on Marcus’ meaning throughout the text. Waterfield also includes a helpful appendix with a list of the people mentioned in The Meditations, and brief biographical details about them, where available.

I’m frequently asked the question: “which is the best translation of The Meditations to get?” I think this edition will suit most people’s needs. It’s very readable but the introduction will also help many readers to better understand the context in which the text was written. The annotations will be extremely beneficial as a way of clarifying some of the more obscure passages. It’s also an indispensable resource for scholars, especially where connections are made with related parts of the same text. Some of Waterfield’s remarks about Marcus’ words are quite insightful. Overall, therefore, I think it’s a good investment.

If it’s literally true that anger is “necessary” for human survival then how do you explain people who don’t exhibit anger and yet flourish — life seems to offer us many examples. I asked my daughter if she’d ever seen me get angry and she said only once. But I think I get on pretty well on life, indeed, much better than if I was prone to anger. So how can it be necessary? It hasn’t proven to be in my life. And like I said in the article, anger often actually makes people weaker and less effective at fighting — see the George Foreman example where he got knocked on his ass by Ali due to his anger.

Yes, the Stoics carefully distinguish between voluntary and involuntary feelings of anger. This is a complex question because modern cognitive research shows that people tend to be very confused about what’s voluntary and what isn’t, especially with regard to their thoughts and feelings. We actually need to train ourselves properly to clearly understand what’s automatic and what’s deliberate in our anger. Deliberate anger is absurd, for Stoics, and irrational. Automatic anger, is morally neutral or indifferent. What matters is how we respond to it, i.e., what happens next.

Ancient Philosophy as a Therapy for Violent Passions

Ancient Philosophy as a Therapy for Violent Passions

One of the most celebrated physicians and medical researchers of the ancient world, Galen of Pergamon, wrote a book about mental illness, called On Passions and Errors of the Soul. The passion considered most dangerous by Galen and other ancient writers is anger. That’s because anger is, in a sense, the most interpersonal of emotions. It poses a threat not only to the angry individuals themselves but to others around them, and even to society as a whole.

Galen’s most striking case study for anger is that of the Emperor Hadrian, who had a violent temper tantrum one day because an unlucky slave did something to annoy him. Hadrian was writing at the time and happened to have a stylus in his hand — the Roman equivalent of a fountain pen. In a moment of madness, he stabbed the slave right in the eye with it, blinding him. Later, when Hadrian had calmed down, and was feeling highly ashamed of himself, he summoned the man and asked what he could do to make amends. The slave was silent for quite a long time but eventually found the courage to speak frankly to the emperor: “All I want”, he said, “is my eye back.”

The consequences of anger are often very destructive. Sometimes they cannot be reversed. Even the most powerful man in the world may be unable to undo the harm he’s done in a fit of violent rage.

Marcus Aurelius mentions overcoming anger in the very first sentence of The Meditations…

Stoicism

Galen is famous in his own right but he also happens to have been court physician to an even more famous historical figure, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. (You might have seen Marcus Aurelius portrayed by Richard Harris in the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator, although that’s going back a few years now.) Marcus is well-known today, though, as the author of one of the most influential self-help classics of all time, a book which we call The Meditations.

He was the last famous Stoic philosopher of antiquity. Like Galen, the Stoics also believed that anger is one of the biggest psychological threats that we face. In fact, Marcus mentions overcoming anger in the very first sentence of The Meditations, and it’s one of the main themes running through the rest of his much-loved book.

The Stoics agreed with Galen that we should take care to contemplate the dangerous consequences of anger, picturing them in our mind’s eye. As we get older, and hopefully wiser, we can look back on our lives in this way, and learn from our experience. What have been the consequences of our own anger in the past? How has the anger of others affected our lives or the lives of those we care about?

The Stoics also liked to discourage anger by contemplating its consequences closer to home: how it contorts our face. Anger is ugly and, in a sense, unnatural, because, as though in a trance, we seem to abandon reason when we’re in the throes of rage. We’re thinking creatures and yet when anger takes control of us we become mindless and stop thinking. We’re therefore less human when enraged — that’s what the Stoics found most unnatural about it. Anger, hatred, and the desire for revenge, potentially turn us into animals.

One of the most famous Stoic slogans says that: Anger does us more harm than the things about which we’re angry. We eat our own hearts when we give in to anger, as philosophers used to say. It’s self-destructive. The consequences of our anger might harm others but we also harm ourselves. Modern research in cognitive psychology has shown that people who are very angry tend to underestimate risk. For that reason, they often expose themselves to danger. Anger makes us vulnerable, in other words.

That’s why Mohammed Ali tried to provoke George Foreman, for example, during the Rumble in the Jungle by taunting him in the boxing ring. Ali realized that anger was Foreman’s greatest weakness. When Foreman became angry he became reckless, threw too many punches, tired himself out, let his guard down, and made himself vulnerable as a result. He underestimated the risk of exhausting himself early in the fight.

The consequences of yielding to our anger can be harmful. Ask George Foreman — he ended up flat on his back, handing a knockout victory to Ali, and the heavyweight championship of the world. However, the Stoics were actually concerned about an even deeper kind of injury: the harm that anger does to our very character. They called anger “temporary madness”, and they were right. In addition to causing us to underestimate risk, strong emotions such as anger introduce many cognitive biases into our thinking. We start to make sweeping generalizations, we jump prematurely to conclusions, we struggle to empathize with others or to understand their motives accurately, and our problem-solving abilities are seriously impaired.

Moderate Anger

Even in the ancient world, there were those who tried to argue that, in moderation, anger could be useful. Most notably, the followers of Aristotle believed that anger sometimes helps to motivate us to do good things such as addressing genuine injustice in society. We call this righteous anger. The problem with this idea is that every tyrant, every brutal dictator, believes his anger is justified and righteous.

On the other hand, we can all think of examples of individuals, such as Gandhi, who achieved social change through peaceful means, without giving way to feelings of anger. Anger clearly isn’t necessary as a form of motivation. Anything anger can do, love and reason can arguably do better. For instance, a soldier motivated by anger may fight very courageously against an enemy he hates. However, so may one without hatred and anger, who fights only to defend the country, and kinsmen, that he loves. Even if you believe that anger can sometimes be helpful, it’s clearly not the only option, and the motivation it provides comes at a terrible cost. Anger blinds us and makes us stupider, by undermining our ability to think clearly and make rational decisions about complex social problems.

Get angry — do stupid things faster and with more energy!

People who say that anger motivates them remind me of the Internet meme that says: Drink coffee — do stupid things faster and with more energy! Getting angry motivates you, sure, by making you do stupid things faster and with more energy. We can’t think clearly when we’re angry, though. That’s why we make mistakes and end up doing things we regret later.

Think about it this way. If you’re trying to fix a leaking tap and bang your thumb with a spanner, you’ll maybe get all angry and frustrated. Suddenly it becomes ten times harder to do what should be a really simple repair job. If you don’t take a break to calm down, you’ll perhaps end up losing your temper and throwing the spanner across the room. We can’t even fix a broken tap when we’re angry. How much more difficult, though, is it to fix a broken relationship, or a broken society?

The most difficult problems we face in life are the ones involving other people — and that’s where being motivated by anger can become particularly dangerous. The fact is that very few complex social problems, throughout history, have ever actually been solved, in the long-run, by angry mobs. That’s because anger seriously impairs our ability to engage in rational decision-making and problem-solving.

Worse, anger has a tendency to escalate. People who end up losing their temper, and regretting it, almost always started off by thinking they were on safe ground indulging in feelings of moderate anger. They’re playing with fire because anger likes to deceive us into thinking that it’s under our control but we all know how quickly it can spiral out of control once it gets started.

Stoic Remedies

So what do the Stoic philosophers think we should do about it? Well, of all the schools of ancient philosophy, Stoicism is the one that placed the most emphasis on self-help and psychotherapy. Although many people assume that psychotherapy is a modern concept that’s just plain wrong. The Stoics thought of philosophy as a form of therapy, therapeia in Greek, therapy for the soul or psyche.

They wrote influential books on the subject such as the Therapeutics of Chrysippus, the third head of the school. Most of these books are sadly lost today. Nevertheless, we do have many scattered references to their therapy techniques and even an entire book by Seneca called On Anger, which describes in great detail Stoic psychotherapy for this particular problem. Indeed, Stoicism was the original philosophical inspiration for cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT, the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy.

Now, the Stoics describe many techniques for managing anger. At one point, Marcus Aurelius actually gives a list of ten different strategies. They often bear a striking resemblance to methods found in modern cognitive-behavioural therapy. For example, one of the best-known and most fundamental Stoic techniques is simply to remind yourself “It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them.” This is the basic idea that cognitive therapy inherited from Stoicism and in modern psychology we call it the cognitive theory of emotion — it says that our emotions, including anger, are shaped largely by corresponding, underlying beliefs.

When a therapy client arrives for their first session they’ll often spend a while describing how negative feelings like anger are causing them problems in life and making them miserable. They explain that anger is ruining their health, affecting their work, damaging their relationships, and so on. As they’re listing all the problems caused by their anger, it seems glaringly obvious why they’re desperate to change. Finally, though, in total frustration, they’ll say “I know my anger is causing all of these problems, and that it doesn’t make any sense, but I can’t help it, it’s just how I feel!” So they’re stuck — there’s nothing they can do to help themselves. A good cognitive therapist would lean forward, smiling, at that point and reply: “Yes but it’s not just how you feel, is it? — it’s also how you think!”

That’s important because most of our thoughts are propositional — meaning they’re either true or false. Once we recognize that our feelings are caused by our thinking we gain more control. We can question the evidence for and against the thoughts that are making us angry, check them against the facts of our experience, highlight contradictions in our thinking, and look for alternative perspectives on the same events, which might be more rational, realistic, and helpful. In other words, when we really understand the cognitive theory of emotion, it suddenly opens up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques for us. That’s a big deal because it often seems difficult, or even impossible, to change strong emotions such as anger directly. However, it can be easier to change angry emotions, indirectly, by learning to question our angry thoughts and beliefs.

It’s not other people who make us angry, therefore, but rather our opinions about them, especially our strongly-held value judgments. Marcus Aurelius tends to describe this as separating our opinions from the external events, or people, to which they refer. The Stoics like to follow this by asking themselves how someone wiser and more patient would respond to the same situation. They actually asked themselves: what would Socrates do? We might ask: what would Marcus Aurelius do?

However, the Stoics realized that in many cases it’s already difficult to think clearly once we’re in the grip of a violent passion, such as anger. So they recommend postponing our response until we’ve had time to calm down. This is actually a very ancient technique, which goes all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, known as the Pythagoreans. In modern anger management, we call it the “time out” strategy. If you can walk away from an argument, for example, and wait until you’ve settled down again it’s easier to think things through more rationally and make better decisions about how to respond.

Conclusion

For Marcus Aurelius, as for other Stoics, the most important thing was a sense of connectedness. Humans were clearly built for cooperation, he says, like pairs of feet, hands, eyelids, or jaws working together. Acting against one another’s interests is contrary to nature, he adds, and it is against nature to become angry with our neighbour or to desert them.

Stoics were ethical cosmopolitans, in other words, who saw the whole of humankind as fellow-citizens of the cosmos. When we’re angry, though, we alienate ourselves from other people. The Stoics tried to conquer anger precisely because they wanted to restore our sense of oneness.

One of the most celebrated physicians and medical researchers of the ancient world, Galen of Pergamon, wrote a book about mental illness, called On Passions and Errors of the Soul. The passion considered most dangerous by Galen and other ancient writers is anger. That’s because anger is, in a sense, the most interpersonal of emotions. It poses a threat not only to the angry individuals themselves but to others around them, and even to society as a whole.

Galen’s most striking case study for anger is that of the Emperor Hadrian, who had a violent temper tantrum one day because an unlucky slave did something to annoy him. Hadrian was writing at the time and happened to have a stylus in his hand — the Roman equivalent of a fountain pen. In a moment of madness, he stabbed the slave right in the eye with it, blinding him. Later, when Hadrian had calmed down, and was feeling highly ashamed of himself, he summoned the man and asked what he could do to make amends. The slave was silent for quite a long time but eventually found the courage to speak frankly to the emperor: “All I want”, he said, “is my eye back.”

The consequences of anger are often very destructive. Sometimes they cannot be reversed. Even the most powerful man in the world may be unable to undo the harm he’s done in a fit of violent rage.

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Yes, because Marcus doesn’t mention Seneca in The Meditations, nor does Epictetus, or in fact, as far as I recall, any subsequent Stoic author. Cassius Dio implies that Thrasea had said that people who had collaborated with Nero, like Seneca, should have their memories damned, i.e., never be mentioned again. Marcus had read him, although Fronto despised his writings and really trashes them, in his letters to Marcus.