Chapter 7 treats the consolatory letter to Marullus, which is provided as an enclosure in Epistulae morales 99. The latest of Seneca’s consolations, this work takes an unusually rigorous Stoic line. Although the deceased was a young child, Marullus is told not to grieve at all: Even the death of an adult friend would not truly be an evil, and the correct response to it is to rejoice in the goodness of the relationship that is now concluded. As elsewhere, however, Seneca concedes that an emotion-like reaction that does not depend on a belief that the loss is an evil is both natural and blameless. That pre-emotional reaction may include tears, as also may the eupathic joy of the Stoic sage. This last claim is paralleled in Philo of Alexandria, with interesting implications for the phenomenology of the Stoic eupatheiai. At the end of his letter, Seneca considers and rejects a consolatory tactic suggested by the Epicurean Metrodorus.

In the early treatise On Anger, Seneca struggles to reconcile what he thinks is required of a therapeutic treatise with the view of emotions to which he is philosophically committed. In book 1 and the first part of book 2, he states the Stoic position with great clarity: that anger, like any emotion, consists essentially in a judgment by the rational mind; that the moment this voluntary judgment has been made, anger becomes unmanageable; that involuntary corporeal responses (pre-emotions) that occur prior to that assent are not themselves anger. Even the contested passage in De ira 2.4 can be read consistently with Stoic orthodoxy if one recognizes that the “third movement” described there is a further response that goes on beyond anger, namely the impulses of post-rational feritas as described in 2.5. Seneca’s recommendations for the management of anger in the remainder of the book mainly accord with this theoretical framework, in that they concentrate on the period before assent. At one point in book 3, however, he does offer a stratagem for managing anger in full swing, in tension with his own theoretical position.