The tale of Samson, in the book of Judges, is one of the most famous biblical stories of someone engineering his own death. Samson was special from before birth. His mother said that during her pregnancy she was visited by an angel and told that as long as the infant followed Nazirite vows he would have special strength from God. These included refraining from all alcohol—the mother-to-be also had to stop drinking—and never cutting his hair. He grew up in an Israel controlled by the Philistines, and when he became an adult, his strength against them was legendary, demonstrated by such feats as killing a thousand armed soldiers using only the jawbone of an ass. Once he was attacked by a lion and killed it with his bare hands. This vignette fits into the story of his engagement to a Philistine woman. On his way to a party for the coming wedding, he visits the site of his dead lion and finds that a swarm of bees has made its hive in the lion’s ribcage. He takes some of the honey, shares it with others without telling them where he got it, and teases his in-laws-to-be with a riddle: “Out of the eater something to eat, out of the strong something sweet.” It ends in a bloodbath. The Bible says that in the time of the Philistines, Samson ruled Israel for twenty years. It is love for another Philistine woman that topples him. He falls for Delilah, who nags him to expose his secret weakness, until eventually he tells her that he must not cut his hair.
She immediately betrays him, shaving his head as he sleeps. The Philistines capture Samson in this weakened state, and they blind him with a sword. Later they chain him and make the strongman use his residual strength to push the grindstone around a grain mill, like an ox. The Philistines then drag Samson to their temple, where thousands are gathered to celebrate their victory over him. Meanwhile, however, Samson’s hair has grown back a bit, and he prays to God for renewed strength. Samson does not ask God for an escape from his captivity and restoration of his reign, though. Rather, he asks for one last burst of power so that he can pull down the ceiling and kill as many Philistines as possible. As for himself, he says, “I will die with the Philistines.” Then Samson flexes mightily, and the ceiling comes down on the multitude. It was said that Samson killed more in death than he did in life. The biblical author says nothing of the morality of his action and does not tell the story as a tragedy. Instead, it is framed as the last impressive act of an unusual hero.
Nor did the ancient Hebrews express explicit disdain for the suicides of lesser figures, which occur on a few occasions in the Hebrew Bible and are mentioned as mundane responses to failure. Wounded and defeated, Saul asks his armor bearer to kill him; when the man refuses, Saul falls upon his own sword, which the armor bearer then does as well. A character named Anhithophel tries to overthrow King David, and when he fails, hangs himself; Zimri usurps the throne of Israel, fails, and burns down the palace around him; and Abimelech, wounded in battle and dying of a broken skull, has his armor bearer kill him. Jonah tried several times to kill himself, but God kept saving him, most notably when Jonah jumped overboard on a voyage he was taking to avoid doing God’s bidding. God caused him to be swallowed by a whale, which later spat him out. For thousands of years, Samson and Saul and Jonah have remained part of the conversation about suicide.
Overall, the Hebrew Bible has been seen as neutral toward suicide, but there are exceptions. Job, for example, though he is made so miserable that he wishes he had never been born, resists suicide even when his wife suggests that he “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9).1 Job says, “My soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life” (7:15)—seemingly suicidal words, yet he does not do it. For this reason, Job has long been seen as an antisuicide book.
Consider also some of the wisdom of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, written around the second century B.C.E.
Give not over thy mind to heaviness, and afflict not thyself in thine own counsel. … Love thine own soul, and comfort thy heart, remove sorrow far from thee: for sorrow hath killed many, and there is no profit therein. Envy and wrath shorten the life, and carefulness bringeth age before the time. …
For of heaviness cometh death, and the heaviness of the heart breaketh strength. In affliction also sorrow remaineth: and the life of the poor is the curse of the heart. Take no heaviness to heart: drive it away, and member the last end. (Ecclesiasticus 30:21, 22–24; 38:18–20)
“Love thine own soul, and comfort thy heart.” We are given a clear directive there: “Sorrow hath killed many, and there is no profit therein.” Scripture is thus not as neutral as it might have seemed.
In this chapter I will introduce the major figures of ancient suicide, especially those from stories that keep recurring in Western civilization. Through these portraits, beginning with the mythical and then turning to the historical, we will see a range of motives for self-murder. In the mythical most fall into one of these categories:
• suicide because of great loss,
• altruistic suicide,
• suicide because of shame,
• and suicide because of love gone wrong.
It will become clear that the ancient Jewish and the Greek and Roman worlds were not categorically against suicide; in fact, they sometimes celebrated it. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that suicide was common, at least until the first century B.C.E.
As we will see, suicides of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds do not generally look like our era’s despair suicide, the tragic end result of depression. In the ancient world it is very rare to find anything like this diagnosis for any individual, real or fictional. We hear what sounds like despair suicide in negative generalizations—Plato, for instance, praises a suicide as a noble act done for some good reason and adds contrasting disdain for people described as merely having weak characters, unable to face life. But while some figures are specified as noble suicides, the ignoble kind is generally left hypothetical. The ancients considered it suicide even when one was coerced into killing oneself, as was Socrates, a situation which looks, to modern eyes, more like execution.
Another consideration to keep in mind regarding suicide among the ancients is that while families surely lamented a suicide in their midst—wives sometimes followed their husbands’ example—suicide in the ancient world was less commonly committed against the family than for them. In the past several centuries suicide might lower the status of a family, but in ancient times suicide was often committed in the wake of a shameful event, in order to preserve or repair the family’s name or fortune. In the ancient world, legal regulation was limited, and the honor and trustworthiness of the family name was paramount.
We begin with the archaic myths from Homer and Hesiod and later Greco-Roman literature of Sophocles, Ovid, and others. (Many ancient stories have multiple versions, and sometimes a suicide occurs only in some tellings.) Consider the daughters of Erechtheus. Having asked the oracle how Athens could win the war against Eleusis, Erechtheus was told that he must kill one of his daughters. According to one source, “When he slaughtered the youngest, the others also killed themselves, for some say that they had sworn an oath with each other to die together.”2 They could not stand the loss.
Similar is the story of Erigone. When the god of wine, Dionysus, taught viticulture and oenology to one Icarius, the man foolishly shared his newfound love of wine with his neighbors without sufficiently briefing them on the effects. Drunkenness convinced them that they’d been poisoned. Terrified and infuriated, they killed Icarius and buried him under a tree. His daughter, Erigone, “abandoning hope, and overcome with loneliness and poverty, with many tearful lamentations she brings death on herself by hanging from the very tree beneath which her father was buried.” As another source tells us, “sorrowful Erigone wept her fill for her slain sire, and already was untying the fatal girdle, and bent on death was fastening it to the sturdy boughs.”3 The sad story of loss does not end there. Erigone’s dog Maera led her to her father’s grave, and having done so, the little dog threw itself into a well.
Two stories of special powers lost stand out. The Sphinx strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer her riddle, “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” But when Oedipus solves the riddle, answering “man,” who as a baby crawls on all fours, as an adult walks on two feet, and then in old age walks with a cane, the Sphinx leaps from the acropolis to her death. Similarly, the Sirens kill themselves when Ulysses successfully evades them: “Ulysses proved fatal to them, for when by his cleverness he passed by the rocks where they dwelt, they threw themselves into the sea.”4 They could not accept having their power thwarted, even once. In each case the supernatural beings had one cardinal purpose and, bested, they could not allow themselves to survive.
Iphigenia, the daughter Agamemnon sacrifices so that Artemis will allow the winds to shift and launch the Greek fleet toward Troy, provides an example of death for a community at war. But in some versions of this tale, Iphigenia makes the sacrifice on her own, for love of her country. “I have chosen death: it is my own free choice. I have put cowardice away from me. Honor is mine now.”5 Honor in this world is not only about the family but also about the polis, the city-state in which one lived. That final short sentence makes it clear that Iphigenia sees something positive in dying in this fashion for the sake of her community.
Yet that is not how her mother, Clytemnestra, reads the situation; when Agamemnon returns from the war, she avenges her daughter’s death by killing her husband. Her other daughter, Electra, then persuades her brother Orestes to avenge their father’s death by killing their mother. Having done it, he is driven mad by divine spirits. He is later tried and acquitted by an Attic court, with Athena casting the deciding vote. Though a certain equilibrium is restored, Iphigenia’s suicide had wide and mortal repercussions, from Agamemnon’s House of Atreus to the walls Troy.
Another memorable account from Greek mythology of sacrifice for community is the story of the Coronides, Menippe and Metioche, daughters of Orion. After their father’s death, their mother raised them with the help of the gods—Athena tutored them in weaving, and Aphrodite gave them beauty. When all of Ionia was suffering a plague, an oracle declared that two young women must be sacrificed willingly. As one ancient chronicler tells it,
Of course not one of the maidens in the city complied with the oracle until a servant-woman reported the answer of the oracle to the daughters of Orion. They were at work at their loom, and, as soon as they heard about this, they willingly accepted death on behalf of their fellow citizens before the plague epidemic had smitten them too. They cried out … that they were willing sacrifices. They thrust their bodkins into themselves at their shoulders and gashed open their throats.6
Other sources have one of the sisters cracking her loom over her skull.
The illustrious Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.E. to 18 C.E.), wrote of an artist’s depiction of Orion’s daughters, pictured in the streets of Thebes, wounding themselves with great courage, “cutting their throats, piercing their brave hearts with swords,” and dying “for the sake of their people.”7 Here too, suicide has a laudatory quality to it, frighteningly explicit in the wounds they suffered, but summed up as a self-sacrifice for the community.
A classic suicide of shame in ancient literature is that of Ajax. When Achilles is killed, his armor is to be awarded to the next-greatest Greek hero, and Ajax assumes it should fall to him. When the armor is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax goes mad and seeks revenge against his former comrades. Duped by Athena, Ajax slaughters a herd of sheep, thinking they are the Greek warriors. When he awakens from his stupor and sees what he has done, he is so dishonored that he kills himself with his sword. There is a shimmering irony in the fact that the dispute was over armor: the protective garb has left Ajax vulnerable to the foe no piece of armor could have protected him from: his own jealousy, rage, shame, and regret.
Another suicide of shame is that of Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother. The story, told most famously by Sophocles, begins with Laius, king of Thebes, being informed by the oracle at Delphi that any son born to him would kill him. When his queen, Jocasta, gives birth to a son, they set him out to die by exposure, piercing his ankles with a small stake. But a servant saves him and gives him to a shepherd; eventually he is adopted by the childless king and queen of Corinth. As a young man, Oedipus hears a rumor that he is adopted, and he visits the oracle to learn the truth. There he is told that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. In an attempt to avoid this destiny, he travels far from those he assumes are his parents, all the way to Thebes. On the road he finds himself blocked by another chariot, that of Laius, his true father, and the two fight over who should pass first. In self-defense Oedipus kills Laius. Continuing his journey, he encounters the Sphinx and answers her riddle, thus bringing about her death. The people of Thebes are so grateful to be free of the Sphinx that they make him king and marry him to the newly widowed Queen Jocasta. Four children later the truth is gradually revealed to Jocasta and Oedipus; she hangs herself in shame, and he blinds himself with a pin from her cloak.
One of the great myths of suicide for love is that of Thisbe, a beautiful Babylonian girl, and Pyramus, the boy she loves but is forbidden to marry. They plan a secret meeting one night, but things go horribly wrong. Arriving at the meeting place early, Thisbe is frightened by a lion and runs away, dropping her shawl. The lion, its mouth still bloody from an earlier meal, chews at the garment. When Pyramus finds the bloodstained shawl he thinks Thisbe has been killed and stabs himself in his anguish. Thisbe returns, finds Pyramus dead, and stabs herself. In Ovid’s account she cries out in agony over the loss of him, then picks up the sword, places the point of it beneath her breast, and falls “onto the blade still warm with her lover’s blood.”8 This prototypical story of love gone wrong later provided a template for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The story of Narcissus is a story of self-love. In Ovid’s famous account, when Narcissus sees himself in the water’s reflection, he is frozen there by his own beauty and dies. In two earlier versions he kills himself. In one attributed to Parthenius of Nicaea and written around 50 B.C.E., Narcissus is so tortured by his own image that he plunges himself into the water and purposefully drowns himself. In a version by the mythographer Conon, a slightly earlier contemporary of Ovid, Narcissus is said to destroy himself, after which the narcissus flower blooms in the ground soaked with his blood.
Then there is Hercules, who represents a whole different kind of self-enacted death, one that may not even be suicide. His lover yearns to make the straying Hercules love her anew. Tricked by an enemy of the demigod, she soaks his robe in what she believes is a love potion, but when he puts it on, it sears his flesh, and when he tries to take it off, it pulls out his organs. He asks his friend to build a pyre, and he throws himself on it and dies. A suicide might be called Herculean when it simply hastens an inevitable and otherwise painful end.
Euripides, who lived from around 480 to 406 B.C.E., was the most modern of the three ancient Greek playwrights whose work survives to this day. In his play Iphigeneia in Aulis he writes: “Ill life o’er passeth gracious death”—that is, even a bad life is better than a good death.9 In The Madness of Hercules, Euripides’ hero says: “Yet, thus I have mused—how deep soe’er in ills—shall I quit life and haply prove me craven? Or, … I will be strong to await death.”10 Euripides values life and seems to disapprove of suicide.
These ancient suicides of myth and literature are all marked by considerable passion. But historical suicides in the ancient world are characterized less by passion than by philosophical calm. The prominent Greek and Roman suicides were typically people who were being told—often by legal authority—to kill themselves. Though our modern definition of suicide doesn’t generally include forced self-murder, the protagonists in these historical events are included because they killed themselves with a display of bravery and even indifference to death. Such deaths were celebrated as a prime feature of the philosophical approach to life. We will also look at some commentaries on suicide from the ancient Greek and Roman era.
It should be noted before we look at these deaths that they were understood to be final—ancient Greek culture did not imagine an eternal afterlife for ordinary people. The gods were immortal, and in some stories a mortal might return from the dead, usually to seek reparation for some injustice on earth. But even in those rare cases, the return to life after death is always short-lived.
Perhaps our earliest declaration of a theory of antisuicide was by the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras, who lived between about 570 and 495 B.C.E. One of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians in ancient Greece, he founded the Pythagorean school, which was active until the early Christian era. Pythagorean philosophers deprecated a voluntary end to life because, to them, life is sacred. Pythagoras taught that each of us is stationed at a guard post, responsible for attending to it until we are dismissed. Plato would borrow the idea, which remained a cogent metaphor for centuries.
One of the earliest chronicles of an ostensible real-life suicide recorded in ancient Greece is also one of the few to refer to madness. Cleomenes I, one of two kings of Sparta from 519 B.C.E. until his death in 491, was a remarkably belligerent ruler. His suicide is of particular interest because he would be cited in the coming centuries by such figures as the Renaissance philosopher Michel Montaigne and the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. The first- and second-century Roman historian and essayist Plutarch wrote Cleomenes’ story, and the tale has been remembered as much for its rejection of suicide as for its eventual suicide. Cleomenes had engineered the ousting of the other Spartan king, Demaratus, by bribing the Delphic oracle, but his actions were discovered and he had to flee. When all seemed lost, his friend and fellow warrior Therycion passionately argued that they should kill themselves rather than risk falling into enemy hands. Cleomenes rejected the appeal, declaring that suicide would be weakness, not courage, and said he would stay alive as long as he could for others, “For it is an ungenerous thing either to live or die for ourselves.”11 Eventually, he was imprisoned, went mad, and killed himself, by slashing at his legs and belly with a knife. The women in his family were later killed, and they died with such poise that they were remembered as models of sublime grace in the face of death.
Another of the earliest historical records of suicide is what we would today call a suicide cluster. As Plutarch described it several hundred years after the story was supposed to have occurred:
Once upon a time a dire and strange trouble took possession of the young women in Miletus for some unknown cause. The most popular conjecture was that the air had acquired a distracting and infectious constitution, and that this operated to produce in them an alteration and derangement of mind. At any rate, a yearning for death and an insane impulse toward hanging suddenly fell upon all of them, and many managed to steal away and hang themselves. Arguments and tears of parents and comforting words of friends availed nothing, but they circumvented every device and cunning effort of their watchers in making away with themselves.12
Finally someone proposed an ordinance that in the funeral processions of the women who hanged themselves, they would be carried naked through the marketplace. This worked. Protective of their reputations, “the women who were not afraid of the most dreadful of all possibilities, death and suffering,” could not bear the thought of the disgrace that would come to them after their deaths and this ended the epidemic. These events have been remembered as a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon throughout history.
More understandable was Socrates’ death in 399 B.C.E. It is easily the great suicide of ancient Greek history, and like many suicides of the ancient world, it was enforced. Socrates left no writings, believing that philosophy was best done in conversation, so almost all we know of his ideas comes from his student Plato. Socrates questioned every aspect of life in his contemporary world of ancient Greece, especially the hunger for power, envy of riches, and competition—all distractions, in his view, from what was real in life. He famously said that he knew nothing but had more wisdom than most because at least he knew that he knew nothing. Eventually, he was charged with corrupting youth. His death, described by Plato in the Phaedo, has been remembered as a model of poise and resignation. To save the women the trouble of washing his corpse, he bathed; then he requested the poison hemlock before it was forced upon him, and calmly described its action in his body to the friends and students who stood around him.
Socrates in his jail cell mused to his listeners that there might be a kind of philosopher’s heaven where life’s intellectual conversations and convivial drinking continue, but this afterlife is suggested as only one possible outcome. It adds a critical dimension to the famous coerced suicides that the victims had been, on some level, willing or even glad to go. A second written account of the death of Socrates, by Xenophon, shows a world-weary philosopher not just resigned but almost eager to die and avoid the humiliations of old age. Xenophon’s Socrates proclaims himself “better off dead.” Socrates is depicted as somewhat indifferent to the outcome of his trial, paying more attention to discussing ideas than to winning, and he does not plead for his life.
The two accounts agree that Socrates’ friends would have been able to bribe the guards to allow his escape. But he rejects flight, saying that he must live by the laws of his polis and accept his community’s dictates. Moreover, he said, wherever he might run, he would always be his same questioning self and thus would eventually infuriate someone else and get into similar trouble. To escape would just be putting off the inevitable.
Still, in his famous dying scene recorded by Plato, Socrates tells his followers that suicide is wrong. The gods put us here, he contends, and only they should be allowed to tell us when to go. He encourages others to live, to reject suicide. He borrows the formulation of Pythagoras, asserting that each of us has been put in life the way a sentry is assigned a guard post; suicide is a terrible abandonment of that calling. Absent a compulsion such as that which Socrates’ own sentence carries, everyone must stand at his post. We will take a closer look at responsibility and community as bars to suicide in Chapter 5.
Plato, who lived from around 424 to 348 B.C.E., wrote about society, government, and morality but also thought about the true nature of the world—conceiving, for example, the theory of ideals, wherein everything in the visible world has somewhere an ideal form that represents its true reality. Plato described the hidden nature of reality in his telling, in the Republic, of Socrates’ Parable of the Cave. In it, people are chained to face the far wall of a cave on which shadows of objects pass by, cast by representations of the objects in front of a fire. When a person is freed from the chains and turns around, he is blinded, first by the fire, then by the light outside. Gradually he begins to see the real world, including, eventually, the sun that illuminates everything. The lesson is that what passes for “knowledge” is merely a shadow; true knowledge comes in stages of understanding that are painful and disorienting at first.
Given this penchant for otherworldliness and extended metaphor, on suicide Plato was relatively straightforward. In his Laws Plato listed the types of suicide and the circumstances that might excuse suicide. To kill oneself when compelled by the state, like Socrates, Plato wrote, was not contemptible, and suicide was also forgivable for someone who had experienced a truly extraordinary loss or intense shame: for one so dishonored as to be beyond redemption, suicide could be the right path, assuming it did not add further disgrace. In the end the only proscribed suicide was killing oneself out of “weakness to the vicissitudes of life,” which we may take as plain sadness.
Plato’s student Aristotle was the more practical-minded of the two, the inventor of many sciences and disciplines from marine biology to logic, ethics to psychology. He rejected suicide as an injustice to society, since a person cannot steal from himself but can steal himself from others. It is a concept we will revisit in coming chapters. By contrast, he allowed self-sacrifice for the sake of the country. Aristotle made it clear that suicide was wrong, and yet giving up one’s life for the community was to be lauded. In practice, such distinctions are rarely so easy to make, as young people in particular can be swayed by such ideas to put themselves in harm’s way.
Likewise, medical opinion on suicide is rarely as straightforward in practice as it is in conception. Here too the ancients provide an express rejection of suicide. Hippocrates, one of the founders of scientific medicine, lived from around 460 to 377 B.C.E. As is well known even today, his byword for doctors was “First, do no harm.” This principle included a rejection of helping healthy people commit suicide. Indeed, part of the Hippocratic Oath specifies, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make any suggestion to this effect.” That said, however, for Hippocrates, passive euthanasia was another matter. Here he suggests that doctors not try to treat patients who are being “overmastered by their disease.”13 These matters may seem more salient for us than for the ancient world because we have more effective treatments, so withholding them is really equivalent to bringing on premature death. Yet practitioners of ancient medicine were often as convinced of its efficacy as are our medical personnel today, and they saw the decision to treat or not to treat as of great consequence. We do not know exactly where Hippocrates drew the line, but it is significant that he was not willing to give a fatal drug to someone who wanted to die; “First, do no harm” was not only a warning against excessively invasive medical practices but also a guide for the physician faced with a suicidal patient.
That medicine took such a firm stance is especially important when we come to the era of the Stoics, who might otherwise convince us that the ancient world had no objection to suicide. Stoicism, which began late in the Greek period, was a dominant philosophy throughout the Roman period. It was founded in the third century B.C.E., by Zeno of Citium, and thrived until 529 C.E., when the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in deference to Christianity. At the heart of Stoicism was the idea of accepting life as it is. When you are suffering you have a choice, Stoics said, of either achieving your desire or conquering your desire so that you are at peace. Stoics called for doing one’s duty, so faced even with death, they encouraged one another to accept the situation calmly. This came to mean a willingness to die even if it was not necessary. Stoics counseled one another to stay alive so long as life was pleasing. One should leave life as one leaves a room that has become too smoky. The Stoics considered this to be strength, but from our perspective, such a suicide might seem rather to indicate weakness, a choice not to bear the difficulty of life. With the Stoics, the weight was never on actually committing suicide but rather on not fearing death. Nevertheless, Stoicism has been famously connected to the tolerance of suicide.
Like the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, with some exceptions, thought of death in naturalist terms. The idea of an afterlife for ordinary people, distinct from gods, begins to emerge, vaguely, in the Judaism of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., starting with the prophet Isaiah. Centuries later the author of Ecclesiastes dismisses the notion of an afterlife, thus providing evidence that some believed in one:
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:19–21)
Elsewhere the eponymous Preacher writes:
For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:4–6)
Romans had considerable contact with the Jews and knew of the beliefs about the afterlife against which Ecclesiastes was arguing.
Reinforcing the idea of an afterlife, a range of “mystery religions” came to prominence in the Hellenistic age, dating from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., and some spread throughout the vast Roman Empire. The cult of Isis was one of the largest of them, and one of its central tenets was that if you took part in the mysterious rites, Isis would protect you and give you life after death. Other prominent mystery religions were the Eleusian mysteries and, later, the Mithraic mysteries. Most devotees of the mystery religions were sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, who passed them on from generation to generation over many centuries. The “mysteries” at the center of these cults were well-kept secrets, known only in part by the general membership; typically they included nighttime rituals, special foods, dancing, sacrifices, purifications, theatrical symbolism, and general drinking and revelry. These members-only cults claimed they could offer their initiates protection in life and a kind of life after death. We do not know exactly how many people participated in the mystery religions, but we do know that they were a major counterpoint to the pre-Christian imperial cult, devoted to worshiping the emperor and the state. The imperial religion, mandated across the Roman Empire, offered little in the way of warmth, comfort, or promises for the future. The expansion of the mystery religions at this time seems to have been an answer to that cold religion of the state. In the time of Christian Rome the mysteries were persecuted and outlawed. The emperor Theodosius I banned the Eleusian mysteries in 392 C.E.
Aside from the mystery religions and the monotheism of the Jews, pre-Christian Romans rarely encountered the notion of an afterlife. The value of one’s life was to be measured while one lived, for the sake of the world of the living. The Romans, especially as the Empire expanded, lacked the compact unity of the ancient Greek polis, a community meaningful enough to hold a place at the center of its members’ lives. Instead, honor was due to the state at large. In some ways that meant death was meaningless; many suggested that allegiance to the values and virtues of the culture was the main way to secure purpose and inner peace. One of those virtues was to train oneself to be calm in the face of death, even to sacrifice oneself if necessary for the greater good.
Like Stoicism, the Epicurean movement spanned the Hellenistic period and the early Roman era, and like the Stoics, the Epicureans were thought of as tolerant toward suicide. Epicurus established a sort of school, called the Garden, where people got together to talk philosophy and share friendship. It was mostly men, but there were a few women adherents as well. Little of Epicurus’s writing survives, but the fragments are informative. What is clear is that Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 B.C.E., considered few things as important for a happy life as making peace with the fact of death. Epicurus was devoted to saving people from their fears, especially fear of death, fear of the gods, and fear of pain. Life, he argued, was basically benign. Our worries about the gods are silly, he explained, because the gods are only shadows living between universes, oblivious to our existence. He counseled ways of meditating on its absoluteness so that it would appear less frightening. Why, for example, should we fear something about which we will be utterly ignorant when the time comes?
Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.14
Still, despite his counsel that we not fear death, Epicurus was adamant that suicide was unreasonable, even a kind of weakness.15 He was certain that the motives that lead to self-murder are not physiological. He suggested that people who choose suicide do so because they grow tired of the vicissitudes and tedium of life, and weary of their fear of dying. Epicurus does make allowances for people in dire pain and insupportable illness.
The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius was the great bard of Epicureanism and is said to have taken his own life at age forty-five, in 55 B.C.E. The report of Lucretius’s death by suicide comes to us, however, in a text written four hundred years afterward, by the Christian chronicler Jerome, who decried the views of Epicurus and Lucretius and the huge movement they represented. Since Lucretius wrote a great deal about how to be happy and at peace, Jerome’s account could have been mere slander. But Jerome was a lot closer to events than we are today, so neither can we automatically dismiss his testimony. After all, Lucretius wrote about how to alleviate pain, but it was from a rather dark emotional perspective, so suicide would not be inconsistent with what we know of his temperament.
Because we have so little of Epicurus’s own writing today, we get a lot more detailed information from Lucretius’s book-length poem On the Nature of Things. Following Epicurus, Lucretius dispenses with worry about death by attempting to get his reader to face it, to see that everyone dies and that the length of one’s life is a trivial matter:
Death, then, is nothing to us, no concern,
Once we grant that the soul will also die.
Just as we felt no pain in ages past
When the Carthaginians swarmed to the attack,
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
So too, when we no longer are, when our
Union of body and soul is put asunder,
Hardly shall anything then, when we are not,
Happen to us at all and stir the senses,
Not if the earth were embroiled with the sea and the sea with heaven!
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now if you happen to see someone resent
That after death he’ll be put down to stink
Or be picked apart by beasts or burnt on the pyre,
You know that he doesn’t ring true, that something hidden
Rankles his heart—no matter how often he says
He trusts that there’s no feeling after death.16
The reason for this resistance, Lucretius suggests, is that “he posits, unknowing, a bit of himself left over.” As Epicurus argued and Lucretius expanded and put into verse, since there are no gods intervening for us or watching us, nothing is required of us other than that we get along with others. Pain doesn’t last long, and when it does it is usually bearable.
We do not know much about Lucretius, but in contrast to Epicurus, who exalted friendship and his conversation garden, Lucretius seems to have been a solitary figure. He expounds the same philosophy that Epicurus describes in his letters, but Lucretius counsels his reader from a stance that feels more like existential nihilism. He encourages his fellows to think often about the multitude of those already dead and how little it now matters how long they lived. He deals with self-criticism and embarrassment with the same pointing toward death; in this context, he observes, such things do not matter. While friendship and a basic joy in the small things in life were key to Epicurus’s system, Lucretius seems to have been a more pessimistic fellow.
Lucretius wrote so much about being philosophical about death that his purported suicide is considered to be proof that he “lived by his word” on the subject, rather than evidence of depression. Having written so much about taking death lightly, the thinking goes, he took his own death lightly. But Lucretius may well have been a despair suicide. He wrote compellingly of the sufferings of humanity, especially of the anxiety, worry, and disappointment that oppress us. “Thus,” he wrote, “each man tries to flee from himself, but to that self, from which of course he can never escape, he clings against his will, and hates it.” According to the unsympathetic Jerome, Lucretius went mad after taking a love potion, remained intermittently mad during the period when he wrote his books, and eventually took his life for this reason. Again, we must remember that this account was written centuries after Lucretius died, by an author with an antagonistic agenda, so we cannot know how true it is.
Also important because it was to be remembered for the next two thousand years is the story of Arria. In the year 42 C.E., Caecina Paetus was accused of disloyalty by the emperor Claudius and ordered to kill himself. When he found himself unable to do it, his good Roman wife, Arria, grabbed the dagger from him and stabbed herself, famously saying, “Non dolet, Paete!”—It doesn’t hurt, Paetus!—and handed the dagger back to him for his turn.17 She became an epitome of noble self-sacrifice and a paragon of the philosophical spirit.
In the late first and early second centuries C.E., there were reports of many Stoic suicides. This was the era of the Pax Romana, but though the Mediterranean was peaceful, expansion of the Roman Empire ensured continuous wars on the frontiers. Stoicism, with its attention to duty and self-discipline, even self-abnegation, was a dominant belief system among the soldiers.
Pliny the Younger (61–c. 112 C.E.) praised several of the era’s suicides. Some of these remind us of the praise bestowed on Arria. He told the story of a man suffering so acutely from ulcers that he wanted to take his life but could not bring himself to do it, until his wife helped.18 Praising her as the equal of Arria, Pliny told how this ulcerous man’s wife aided him by tying the two of them together with a rope and then jumping into a lake—achieving both their deaths.
Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), the great Roman poet who gave us the epic Aeneid, tells a story of suicide for love. Dido, the first queen of Carthage (in modern day Tunisia), was in love with Aeneas; in anguish at his leaving Carthage, she stabbed herself to death. Consider this romantic passage on the ancient queen:
“Let me die, I go gladly to the dark.
May the heartless Trojan see my flaming pyre
from far out on the deep
and let it bring him evil omens.” She spoke
and then her maidens saw her fall
upon her sword, the red blood spouting
and frothing over her sword
drenching her hands.19
There is no apparent condemnation of her action here. By Virgil’s time suicide tended to be described as a choice that might be made by anyone so inclined.
For ancient Romans the only people expressly forbidden to kill themselves were soldiers and slaves, because of their respective duties of service to others. (The Stoic army suicides show that this prohibition was not altogether effective.) For no one else was there a religious or legal prohibition against suicide. Yet the culture and philosophy of the age that praised a few famous suicides also encouraged most people to persevere and bear even a difficult life, including one full of inner turmoil and self-hatred. Life, whatever its hardships, was meant to be lived for others, and honor required a person to live as long as life gave him, unless an occasion presented itself by which he could aid his fellow citizens.
We have seen that the story of the Roman Republic begins with the suicide of a woman in the name of family honor. It ends with an equally fascinating and macabre suicide of a man in the name of political honor. The Roman Republic began around 500 B.C.E., underwent centuries of advancement, crisis, revival, and reform, and eventually ended with a dramatic shift to empire in the mid-first century B.C.E. The Republic did not go out quietly, though. After five centuries during which the ideas of honor and duty were employed to manage the chaos of human society, the last pious plea for the sanctity of the Republic came from the strange and famously “incorruptible” Cato the Younger.
Cato was a paragon of moral integrity, a Roman statesman and politician famed for his steely resolve and resistance to the common bribes of the period. He was also a Stoic. Cato was one of the most prominent orators of his time, and he brought all his skills and tenacity to bear in his long struggle against Julius Caesar. In 49 B.C.E. Cato urged the Senate to demand Caesar’s return to Rome, stripped of his proconsular command. Instead, Caesar illegally led his army into the city—famously crossing the Rubicon River and committing himself to this risky course of action—and seized power from the Senate. When Caesar’s army brushed aside the attempt of Pompey’s army to deflect his advance, Cato, rather than face a victorious Caesar and the end of the Republic, took his own life. In fact, he may have taken it twice. In one version Cato stabbed himself, slicing open his belly, and collapsed into a tray that clattered to the ground, thus alerting his family. They rushed into his room to find him on the floor in a pool of blood, alive though disemboweled. A doctor replaced his intestines and stitched up his wound, but when left alone again, Cato ripped out the stitches, eviscerated himself again, and finally died. Caesar is said to have reacted to this news with the words, “Cato, I begrudge you your death, as you would have begrudged me your pardon.” Like Lucretia, Cato was enshrined as a Roman hero. It is an amazing commentary on the complexity of real human experience that Cato, credited with a maddeningly calm, steady, single-mindedness, responded to an untenable shift in his world by pulling his guts out.
Thus the Roman Republic opened and closed with dramatic suicides hinged on outrage and a sense of right and wrong, suicides envisioned as courageous, community oriented, and heroic. In the first, the case of Lucretia, the virtue of purity demands the creation of the Republic for its own defense; in the second, the Republic dies, and the virtue of purity opts to die with it.
Another salient commentary on suicide came from the brilliant Roman orator, philosopher, and statesman Cicero, who lived from 106 to 43 B.C.E. Among many other works, Cicero was the author of On the Nature of the Gods, in which an Epicurean, a Stoic, and a Skeptic (an adherent to another major philosophy of the time) debated whether the gods exist and, if so, what they are like. Cicero had been against Julius Caesar in defense of the Republic, but when Caesar prevailed he made peace with the situation and lived with honor in Rome. Cicero judges suicides according to their situations and motivations. He finds Cato a model of liberty but also cites Plato’s opinion that we have no right to abandon our posts. Finally, Cicero was impressed by self-sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, writing, “But noble deaths, sought voluntarily, for the sake of country, are not only commonly reckoned glorious by rhetoricians but also happy. They go back to Erechtheus, whose daughters sought even with eagerness for death to save the lives of their fellow-citizens.”20
Military and political reversal persuaded the senator and army commander Cassius to kill himself, though he enlisted a freedman to strike the fatal blow. Brutus, also a politician and army commander, who famously conspired in the assassination of Julius Caesar, also took his own life when his army was defeated. (Actually, he got wrong information and killed himself prematurely, though his side did eventually lose.) Brutus’s wife followed her husband’s death by taking her own life. Porcia Catonis was Brutus’s first cousin and second wife, and also Cato’s daughter. She is supposed to have swallowed hot coals or put them in her mouth and suffocated from the fumes; it is likely that in fact she burned coals in an unventilated room and died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and history and romance muddled the details.21 Either way, it is a poignant image of swallowing what cannot be swallowed. She has been remembered as both a devoted wife and a devoted Republican, and as either deeply philosophical or a little mad with grief.
Just a bit later in Egypt, Cleopatra responded to Augustus Caesar’s triumph in 30 B.C.E. by taking her own life, clutching two poisonous asps to her breast. Her lover Marc Antony took his own life as well. Mistakenly thinking that Cleopatra has already killed herself, he stabs himself with his sword. Still living, he is brought to Cleopatra and dies in her arms. Of all the ancient suicides, Marc Antony had the worst reputation within his own culture, not because he took his life, but because he took his life for love. Like despair suicide, this was not what the ancients had in mind when they praised a man for ending his own days.
In the first century C.E., Stoic philosopher Seneca is also remembered as having taken his own life. He wrote plays and other literature, often relying on the tenets of Stoicism. Coming after the Golden Age of Latin—the era of Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid—Seneca is one of the most prominent of the less illustrious Silver Age writers. He was also a political adviser to the emperor Nero. Seneca wrote that we must not worry inordinately about our own death, but neither should we run to it. Seneca committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to assassinate Nero; he was probably innocent, but Nero ordered him to kill himself. This might make us think of his suicide as entirely coerced, but his contemporaries observed that he had some choice in the matter. Even without our knowing whether he could have avoided his fate, Seneca’s writing about despondency makes him seem like a despair suicide, a suicide of sadness. Here is how he talks about the bad times:
Hence the boredom, the disgust for oneself, the tumult of a soul fixed on nothing, the somber impatience that our own inaction causes, especially when we blush to admit the reasons … tightly contained in a prison with no exit.… As Lucretius says, “Thus all continually flee themselves.”… We follow ourselves; we cannot get rid of that intolerable company.... We lack the strength to bear anything: work, pleasure, ourselves, everything in the world is a burden to us. There are some whom this leads to suicide because their perpetual variations make them turn forever in the same circle and because they have made all novelty impossible for themselves, they lose their taste for life and the universe.
But Seneca never advocated suicide in his writings. Indeed, he tells his reader to resist the temptation to die. He writes of having experienced a time of misery in which he was tempted to end his life, but consideration of the feelings of his aged father kept him from doing so. “I saw not my own courage in dying, but his courage broken by the loss of me. So I said to myself, ‘You must live.’ Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” George Minois, a historian of suicide, wrote in 1995 that the kind of taedium vitae that Seneca talks about did not really take lives; rather, “its most typical manifestation was floating in a perpetual state of indecision between life and death.”22 This nagging vacillation between living and dying has been a major theme of the suicidal through to modern times. After Socrates’ death, Seneca’s is one of the most remembered ancient suicides. When he took his own life, it was by rather gruesomely cutting himself up.
These stories stake a place in one’s memory. Socrates and Seneca are the famous coerced suicides. Most others were putting an end to what seemed to be an intolerable situation. Lucretia, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, Porcia, and Cleopatra all refused to let anyone conquer them, but you cannot quite say they “won.” Instead, they fashioned exits from difficult situations. Clearly, in the ancient world, for a person who had been defiled or humiliated, or was threatened with the like, killing oneself might sometimes be a praiseworthy response. These suicides were not seen as exacerbating their crime or failure, they were not called cowards for escaping punishment, but rather seemed to be partially absolved, as if the act were a self-punishment that could assuage the stigma of bad luck and redeem earlier wrongs.
It is reasonable to surmise that the same force that took Lucretia’s life and the lives of Orion’s weaving daughters actually kept a lot of people alive in the ancient world. People were profoundly enmeshed in their families and in their tribes or city-states. Honor before everything means that under normal circumstances one has to stay at one’s post. Lucretia is compromised and furious, but she is not killing herself because she is depressed. She is not killing herself in spite of her family’s protests. She is enacting the values of the group, which here are about a woman’s chastity. She is putting her family first in removing herself from life. Orion’s girls, Menippe and Metioche, put their community first in taking arms against themselves. Their deaths have to do with being profoundly connected to their society. This is quite the opposite of the alienation and loneliness often associated with suicide in the modern world.
Before we leave the ancient world, we have to look at one last development in our story, suicidal martyrdom. As we saw, the Hebrew Bible does not feature many suicides. Yet in the period of history after the five books of Moses, when Jews confront the power of Rome, martyrdom emerges. When Roman soldiers tried to march through town, the ancient Hebrews took offense that there were graven images on their shields, and in the ensuing confrontation, the Romans were surprised by the Hebrews’ willingness to die rather than allow any trespass of their laws. Such martyrdom is not technically suicide: though the victim does opt for death, the oppressor does the killing. Still, in a case like the siege of Masada, it is hard to deny that it is suicide in fact as well as intent. The ancient chronicler Josephus tells the gruesome story. After the Romans surrounded and laid siege to the fortress Masada, the Jews had no prospect of escape. To avoid being conquered, the men agreed that each would kill his own wife and children. After tearful goodbyes, they dispatched their families, then drew lots to choose a squad who would kill their comrades, each man to be slain lying down and embracing the corpses of his family. At last a final executioner was chosen, again by lot, and he killed the killers, ultimately running himself through with his own sword.
Only two old women and some children chose to hide and survive; 960 died. The Romans broke through the defense the next day expecting a fight; instead, they entered an eerily quiet place of “terrible solitude” and could not guess what had happened. Even after the hiding women emerged and reported the mass suicide, the Romans did not believe it until they found the bodies. They “could take no pleasure in the fact, though it were done to their enemies.” It was just too disturbing.23 Lucretia had long been a Roman heroine, but those who witnessed this mass suicide found it profoundly unsettling.