developement, so quick is it. For none of
the passions when stirred up and set in motion has so palpable a birth
and growth as anger. As indeed Homer skilfully shows us, where he
represents Achilles as seized at once with grief, when word was brought
him _of Patroclus' death_, in the line,

"Thus spake he, and grief's dark cloud covered him;"[683]

whereas he represents him as waxing angry with Agamemnon slowly, and as
inflamed by his many words, which if either of them[684] had abstained
from, their quarrel would not have attained such growth and magnitude.
And so Socrates, as often as he perceived any anger rising in him
against any of his friends, "setting himself like some ocean promontory
to break the violence of the waves," would lower his voice, and put on a
smiling countenance, and give his eye a gentler expression, by inclining
in the other direction and running counter to his passion, thus keeping
himself from fall and defeat.

Sec. V. For the first way, my friend, to overcome anger, like the putting
down of some tyrant, is not to obey or listen to it when it bids you
speak loud, and look fierce, and beat yourself, but to remain quiet, and
not to make the passion more intense, as one would a disease, by tossing
about and crying out. In love affairs indeed, such things as revellings,
and serenadings, and crowning the loved one's door with garlands, may
indeed bring, some pleasant and elegant relief.

"I went, but asked not who or whose she was,
I merely kissed her door-post. If that be
A crime, I do plead guilty to the same."[685]

In the case of mourners also giving up to weeping and wailing takes away
with the tears much of the grief. But anger on the contrary is much more
fanned by what angry persons do and say. It is best therefore to be
calm, or to flee and hide ourselves and go to a haven of quiet, when we
feel the fit of temper coming upon us as an epileptic fit, that we fall
not, or rather fall not on others, for it is our friends that we fall
upon most and most frequently. For we do not love all, nor envy all, nor
fear all men; but nothing is untouched or unassailed by anger; for we
are angry with friends and enemies, parents and children, aye, and with
the gods, and beasts, and even things inanimate, as was Thamyris,

"Breaking his gold-bound horn, breaking the music
Of well-compacted lyre;"[686]

and Pandarus, who called down a curse upon himself, if he did not burn
his bow "af