Following up on last week's post about Taha Muhammad Ali's poem "Revenge," I wonder whether Ali found inspiration in his poem from Marcus Aurelius, who wrote nearly two millennia earlier in Meditations, Chapter 6, Part 6:
The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the the wrongdoer.
And then, maybe Aurelius was influenced by the Bible, specifically Romans, 12:19:
Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.
Or perhaps Aurelius somehow got his hands on Buddhist precepts, which view revenge as poisonous and self-destructive, worsening the problem rather than mitigating it. The key is understanding that the wrongdoer is also suffering. Khalil Gubran and Mahatma Gandhi were credited with saying, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Even Frank Sinatra's more self-centered viewpoint, "The best revenge is massive success," is better than seeking to heap violence upon those who hurt us.
It's one thing to say revenge is a misdeed, another to practice it. What does it require? Self-control. Restraint. Love.
