II
THE CLASSICAL WORLD:
“HE IS AT LIBERTY TO DIE
WHO DOES NOT WISH
TO LIVE”
WHERE DID CONTEMPORARY Western attitudes toward suicide come from? In ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization, suicide was considered a respectable option. It is true that a few taboos surrounded the act; for instance, in Athens, the corpse of a suicide was buried outside the city, the offending hand cut off and interred separately to prevent the suicide’s ghost from attacking the living. But these were the products less of moral judgment than of the ancient Greeks’ abhorrence of any violent or untimely death—murder, stillbirth, abortion—and their horror of shedding kindred blood. Suicides from starvation, which were bloodless and slow, were rarely denied ordinary rites; there was no sudden wrenching of the soul from the body, which the Greeks most feared.
In fact, the histories and literature of ancient Greece brim with suicides, which are usually described without shock or blame. They seem to aspire to one quality: honor, whether originating from pride, patriotism, shame, or grief. The first Greek suicide on record is Jocasta, who, on discovering that she had married her son Oedipus, “steep down from a high rafter, throttled in her noose, she swung, carried away by pain.” Homer recorded her suicide without comment, as a natural, even inevitable, response to an intolerable situation. Leukakas jumped from a rock into the sea to avoid being raped by Apollo. Dido preferred to stab herself on her husband’s funeral pyre rather than remarry. Erigone hanged herself from a tree when she discovered the body of her murdered father, touching off an epidemic of suicide among Athenian women. Charondas, the lawgiver of Catana, a Greek colony in Sicily, decreed that no armed men should enter the assembly under pain of death. Returning to the assembly in haste one day, he forgot to remove his dagger, thus breaking his own law. He quickly drew his weapon and killed himself.
Suicide to avoid capture was almost de rigueur among the ancient Greeks. At ninety, the Athenian orator Isocrates starved himself to death rather than submit to Philip of Macedon. Demosthenes took poison to avoid falling into the hands of Antipater. Entire regiments or towns committed suicide rather than surrender. In 425 BC the oligarchs of Corcyra, trapped in a temple and condemned to death, took their own lives, according to Thucydides, “thrusting into their throats the arrows shot by the enemy, and hanging themselves with the cords taken from some beds that happened to be there, and with strips made from their clothing; adopting, in short, every possible means of self-destruction.” It is perhaps not surprising that Pantites, one of two survivors of the battle of Thermopylae, found hanging himself the only way to redeem his reputation on his return to Sparta.
Only the most extravagant suicides were attributed to insanity. Herodotus informs us that in 490 BC, Cleomenes, king of Sparta, “went quite mad” and “began to mutilate himself, beginning on his shins. He sliced his flesh into strips, working upwards to his thighs, and from them to his hips and sides, until he reached his belly, and while he was cutting that into strips he died.” Cleomenes’ suicidal delirium was blamed by some on the drinking of unmixed liquors, a nasty habit he had picked up from visiting Scythians.
In classical Greece, suicide was not the province of physicians but of philosophers, who introduced most of the ethical arguments, pro and con, that would be used for the next two millennia. The Pythagoreans disapproved of suicide. They taught that man is a stranger in this world, and his immortal soul, imprisoned in the body, undergoes atonement and purification, the success of which dictates whether at death it will return to its divine origin or transmigrate into another body and start over from scratch. Suicide, therefore, interfered with that process, and the Pythagoreans forbade men “to depart from their guard or station in life without the order of their Commander—that is, of God.” Reinforcing their antisuicide stance was Pythagoras’ theory of numbers, which hypothesized that a fixed number of souls were available for use in the world at any given moment. Suicide skewed the spiritual mathematics, for it was possible that no other soul was ready to fill the gap caused by such an abrupt exit from life.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, condemned to death by the state, refined this theme. Mortals are the soldiers of the gods, he said, and a man’s life is akin to a soldier’s watch. Suicide, therefore, was desertion. We may leave our station only on orders from above. Furthermore, he said, man belongs to God, and suicide was therefore destruction of divine property. “If one of your own possessions, an ox or an ass, for example, took the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could? . . . Then, if we look at the matter thus, there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me.” Socrates explained that in his case he had been called by God, and calmly swallowed the hemlock.
The Phaedo provoked disparate reactions. While the Greek orator Libanius claimed that the arguments in the Phaedo kept him from committing suicide after the death of the emperor Julian, the young Greek philosopher Cleombrotus was so fascinated by Socrates’ description of the souls’ immortality that he flung himself into the sea and drowned. Plato himself was divided on the subject. In the ninth book of his Laws he reiterated his general condemnation of suicide but admitted certain circumstances in which it may be justified—extraordinary sorrow, unavoidable misfortune, intolerable disgrace, or compulsion by the state. On one cause he was adamant: those who commit suicide “in a spirit of slothful and abject cowardice” shall be buried “in deserted places that have no name.”
Plato’s student Aristotle borrowed the Pythagorean notion of responsibility beyond the self but asserted that we belong not to God but to the state. Suicide weakened the city economically by depriving it of a citizen. In a discussion of courage Aristotle sparked a debate that continues to this day: “To kill oneself to escape from poverty or love or anything else that is distressing is not courageous but rather the act of a coward, because it shows weakness of character to run away from hardships, and the suicide endures death not because it is a fine thing to do but in order to escape from suffering.” Nevertheless, when Aristotle died in exile at sixty-two, there were persistent rumors that he had killed himself.
While Plato found suicide justifiable when external conditions became intolerable, the Epicureans turned the argument inside out, making the choice of suicide an internal process. Plato’s “objective” circumstances under which suicide was permissible became subjective. Suicide was no longer an involuntary act dictated by outward circumstances but a voluntary assertion of freedom. Epicureans held that pleasure should be the guiding principle in life: whatever produced pleasure was good, and whatever produced pain was evil. Death, they believed, was neither good nor evil, and they professed to be as indifferent to it as to life. “The many at one moment shun death as the greatest of evils, at another yearn for it as a respite from the evils in life,” said Epicurus. “But the wise man neither seeks to escape life nor fears the cessation of life, for neither does life offend him nor does the absence of life seem to be any evil.” While pointing out the folly of killing oneself through fear of death, Epicurus urged men “to weigh carefully, whether they would prefer death to come to them, or would themselves go to death.” Lucretius, the Roman poet and Epicurean who killed himself at forty-four, put it more seductively: “If one day, as well may happen, life grows wearisome, there only remains to pour a libation to death and oblivion. A drop of subtle poison will gently close your eyes to the sun, and waft you smiling into the eternal night whence everything comes and to which everything returns.”
For the Stoics, “to live consistently with nature” was the ideal. When the conditions essential to that ideal no longer existed, suicide was a reasonable choice. Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, lived to the age of ninety-eight without encountering a reason sufficient to depart life. Then one day, upon leav
ing his school of philosophy, he stumbled, put a toe out of joint, went home, and hanged himself. The suicide of his successor, Cleanthes, seems only slightly less arbitrary. Suffering from a gum boil, he was advised by his doctor to refrain from food for two days. The remedy was effective, and he was told he could resume his normal diet. Cleanthes declined, saying that “as he had advanced so far on his journey towards death, he would not retreat,” and he starved to death. It is said that Timon of Athens grew a fig tree so that he might never lack a branch from which to hang himself.
At certain times, in ancient Greece, suicide even enjoyed official sanction. As early as 500 BC, in the Greek colony of Ceos, citizens who were over the age of sixty or incapacitated by sickness were allowed, even encouraged, to take their own life. After crowning their brows with floral garlands they drank state-provided hemlock or poppy juice. (The custom may have been introduced during a famine.) At the Greek colony of Massilia (modern Marseille) magistrates kept a supply of poison on hand for those who, pleading their case before the senate, obtained permission to kill themselves. (Acceptable reasons included illness, sorrow, and disgrace.) The law was intended to prevent hasty, impulsive suicides and to make reasonable, state-approved suicides as rapid and painless as possible. “Such a discussion is tempered with a manly benevolence; which does not suffer anyone to quit life rashly, but affords means of accelerating the end of him, who has wise reasons for his departure,” wrote Valerius. “Any one for instance may thus make an approved and honourable exit, who experiences the extremes of good and bad fortune; either of which affords sufficient grounds to covet a termination of life—the former lest it should forsake us or the latter continue with us.” This type of rationality seemed irrational to Libanius. Referring to a similar state-sponsored suicide program briefly practiced in Athens, he wrote sarcastically of a man who pleaded permission to kill himself to escape from his garrulous wife; a man distressed because his neighbor’s wealth had outstripped his; a man who preferred to part with his life rather than to part with a treasure he found.
Such excess anticipated the Roman Empire. For if the Greeks rationalized suicide, the Romans made it a fashion, even a sport. Like Greece, the Roman Republic had its share of suicides and for much the same reason—to avoid dishonor and disgrace. Indeed, the death of Marcus Porcius Cato has been cited as a model of rational suicide through the ages. A just, scrupulous man, Cato dressed simply, never rode when he could walk, and “even from his infancy,” wrote Plutarch, “in his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything.” Cato had placed his life at the service of the Republic, and when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, Cato followed Pompey into Greece. After Pompey’s defeat, Cato fled to Utica, where he tried to rally the Republican party. But when several defeats put an end to his hopes for the survival of the old virtues of liberty and republicanism, he decided to die rather than live under Caesar. Cato spent the last evening of his life arguing favorite philosophical questions with his friends, then retired to his chamber to read Plato’s Phaedo. Glancing up, he noticed that his sword was missing from its usual place. His son, suspecting his plans, had removed it. Confronting his friends, Cato accused them of forgetting their Stoic ideals, asking them to “show cause why we should now unlearn what we formerly were taught.” His friends wept. The sword was sent to him, carried by a child. “Now I am master of myself,” said Cato, who, after testing the sword’s point, returned to the Phaedo, reading it through twice before falling into a sleep so deep the men outside could hear him snore. Near midnight he sent one of his men to the port to make sure the transports had left safely. Plutarch wrote:
Now the birds began to sing, and he again fell into a little slumber. At length Butas came back, and told him all was quiet in the port. Then Cato, laying himself down, as if he would sleep out the rest of the night, bade him shut the door after him. But as soon as Butas was gone out, he took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast.
When his friends heard Cato fall from his couch, they rushed in to find him in a pool of blood, alive. As a physician began to sew up the wound, Cato regained consciousness and, according to Plutarch, “thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.”
Cato was acclaimed as a hero. “The people of Utica flocked thither,” wrote Plutarch, “crying out with one voice, he was their benefactor and their saviour, the only free and only undefeated man.” His suicide impressed even Caesar, who, on receiving the news, exclaimed, “Cato, I grudge you your death, as you have grudged me the preservation of your life.” Horace composed an ode in his honor. His act also won the approval of antisuicide writers such as Cicero, who declared that death may sometimes be the least of evils, for “when God himself shall give a just cause, as formerly to Socrates, lately to Cato, certainly every man of sense would gladly exchange this darkness for that light.” Valerius Maximus called it “a noble lesson to mankind. How much superior in the opinion of all honest men is dignity without life to life without dignity.” Seneca declared, “Jupiter himself could not have seen anything more beautiful on earth.”
Seneca was the most prominent teacher of the Roman Stoics, who would raise suicide to an art form during the Roman Empire. For the Stoics, suicide was a final resource, an ultimate weapon against the vicissitudes of life. Whether the complaint be incurable illness, insufferable pain, or taedium vitae—the boredom and purposelessness of life—the Stoic attitude was Mori licet cui vivere non placet: “He is at liberty to die who does not wish to live.” The Stoics did not condone irresponsibility, however. Suicide was not to be a rash, impulsive act but accepted or rejected after a careful weighing of pros and cons. Praising an ill friend’s extensive deliberations, Pliny the Younger wrote, “A resolution this, in my estimation, truly arduous, and worthy of the highest applause. Instances are frequent enough in the world of rushing into the arms of death without reflection, and by a sort of blind impulse: but calmly and deliberately to weigh the motives for life or death, and to be determined in our choice as reason counsels, is the mark of an uncommon and great mind.” Pliny the Elder maintained that the option of suicide was proof of man’s superiority to the gods—man at least has the power of escaping to the grave. Conversely, he considered one of the greatest proofs of the bounty of Providence was that it had filled the world with herbs by which a sinner might procure a rapid, painless death. For the Stoics, suicide was the ultimate proof of man’s freedom. The human spirit need never be broken, for, as Seneca observed, death was only a moment away.
Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From every branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery. . . . Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body.
Seneca’s own death was consistent with his teachings. When his friends wept upon being informed that Emperor Nero, his former pupil, desired his death, Seneca chided them. “Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had devised over so many years?” wrote the historian Tacitus. Seneca bade farewell to his wife, Paulina, but she insisted on sharing his fate. “I will not grudge your setting so fine an example,” he said. “We can die with equal fortitude. But yours will be the nobler end.” They each cut their arms, but the aged Seneca bled slowly. A Stoic to the last, he had his wife carried into another room because “he was afraid of weakening his wife’s endurance by betraying his agony—or of losing his own self-possession at the sight of her sufferings.” Paulina survived; the emperor insisted on her rescue and treatment. Nero, who over the years demanded the suicides of dozens of his subjects, would himself commit suicide three years later, stabbing himself
in the throat while fleeing a revolt.
November of the Soul Page 22