Roman and Catholic writings about anger have been the most influential canonical texts consulted on anger. Yet both those which reject Aristotle, such as those of Seneca or Cassian, and those which rely upon him, such as those of Plutarch and Aquinas, are considering anger in very different eras. Unlike the concern with the status of an active citizen which Seneca’s De Ira and Plutarch’s essay on anger, as well as the account of wrath in the early Christian writer Cassian and in the later attempt by Thomas Aquinas to provide an Aristotelian theory of anger within a medieval Christian perspective. All these authors in examining anger do so in a very different milieu—where most people have no political role, where status is set by lawLaw, and where rulers are guaranteed their power and prerogative. Their views of anger often shape our own but without consideration of the difference in those circumstances and how they affect the role of anger.