What did Seneca say about anger?

In his essay De Ira (On Anger), Seneca takes a more radical position than most ancient ethicists: anger shouldn't be managed or moderated, it should be eliminated outright. He defines anger as “the desire to repay suffering with suffering” — not simply the perception of being wronged, but the active decision to seek payback for it. That definition matters because it makes anger, for Seneca, fundamentally a judgment rather than a raw feeling: “anger can venture upon nothing by itself, without the approval of the mind” — to be angry, a person has to first conclude they were wronged and then conclude that revenge is owed, two propositions the mind assembles, not something that simply happens to it. This is what separates Seneca's Stoic position from the more moderate Aristotelian view, which treats a measured amount of anger, felt at the right target and the right time, as appropriate. Seneca rejects that compromise directly, asking what “control” could even mean for something he considers fundamentally destructive rather than a raw material that just needs shaping: better to remove it than to try to tame it. His case against anger is also practical, not just logical: “mankind is born for mutual assistance, anger for mutual ruin: the former loves society, the latter estrangement.” Because anger is a judgment, not an involuntary reflex, Seneca's larger claim is a hopeful one for Stoic practice — if the mind assembled the judgment that produces anger, the same mind can also refuse to assemble it, catching the wrong conclusion before it hardens into rage.