Note 1 — THE THIRD BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO NOVATUS. OF ANGER. Book I.

Here a leaf or more has been lost, including the fragment cited in Lactantius, De ira dei, 17 “Ira est eupiditas,” &c. The entire passage is:—“But the Stoics did not perceive that there is a difference between right and wrong; that there is just and unjust anger: and as they could find no remedy for it, they wished to extirpate it. The Peripatetics, on the other hand, declared that it ought not to be destroyed, but restrained. These I have sufficiently answered in the sixth book of my ‘Institutiones.’ It is clear that the philosophers did not comprehend the reason of anger, from the definitions of it which Seneca has enumerated in the books ‘On Anger’ which he has written. ‘Anger,’ he says, ‘is the desire of avenging an injury.’ Others, as Posidonius says, call it ‘a desire to punish one by whom you think that you have been unjustly injured,’ Some have defined it thus, ‘Anger is an impulse of the mind to injure him who either has injured you or has sought to injure you.’ Aristotle’s definition differs but little from our own. He says, ‘that anger is a desire to repay suffering,’ ” etc.