Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶40 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶40

But we see Ajax in Homer advancing to meet Hector in battle cheerfully, without any of this boisterous wrath. For he had no sooner taken up his arms than the first step which he made inspired his associates with joy, his enemies with fear, so that even Hector, as he is represented by Homer, trembling, condemned himself for having challenged him to fight. Yet these heroes conversed together, calmly and quietly, before they engaged. Nor did they show any anger or outrageous behavior during the combat. Nor do I imagine that Torquatus, the first who obtained this surname, was in a rage when he plundered the Gaul of his collar, or that Marcellus’s courage at Clastidium was only owing to his anger. I could almost swear that Africanus, with whom we are better acquainted from our recollection of him being more recent, was noways inflamed by anger when he covered Alienus Pelignus with his shield and drove his sword into the enemy’s breast. There may be some doubt of L. Brutus, whether he was not influenced by extraordinary hatred of the tyrant so as to attack Aruns with more than usual rashness, for I observe that they mutually killed each other in close fight. Why, then, do you call in the assistance of anger? Would courage, unless it began to get furious, lose its energy? What? do you imagine that Hercules, whom the very courage which you would try to represent as anger raised to heaven, was angry when he engaged the Erymanthian boar or the Nemaean lion? Or was Theseus in a passion when he seized on the horns of the Marathonian bull? Take care how you make courage to depend in the least on rage. For anger is altogether irrational, and that is not courage which is void of reason.