From Autothanasia to Suicide

Self-killing in Classical Antiquity

Anton J. L. van Hooff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134953783
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Using almost a thousand case studies, both real and fictional, Dr van Hooff provides us with a unique and engaging insight into self-killing in the Graeco-Roman world. The author analyses the methods and motives which lie behind self-killing relating them to ancient popular morality as it appears in the various media and traces the development of the concept of self-murder, as opposed to the original idea of autothanasia, which lies at the root of the Christian abhorrence of suicide.

Part I
PHENOMENA OF SELF-KILLING

1
CASUS MORIENDI

A certain morbid collector’s mania is required for making a file of suicides in the Graeco-Roman world¹. For research of this type the klassische Altertumswissenschaft is well equipped; it has many instruments available. In the tradition of classical scholarship philology and history never lost contact; therefore it is possible to trace many cases by means of reference books: various terms for self-killing in lexicons disclose many a passage in ancient literature. Greek and Latin have at their disposal a much richer vocabulary on suicide than dictionaries and lexicons suggest. As a by-product of our heuristic activities a suicidal vocabulary was developed which has been relegated to Appendix C. It may not only be useful as an instrument for further investigation; the corpus of expressions makes it possible also to see the nuances in ancient thinking on selfkilling, the more as a central word (and idea) like ‘suicide’ is lacking (see II.4.A ‘suicidium, a non-word’ and Appendix B).

Exploring usage is part of the history of mentality in a narrow sense. Apart from the use of lexicological instruments reading of ‘promising’ authors like Seneca, Plutarch and Diodorus of Sicily enriched the corpus of cases—this type of investigation was helped by the fact that suicides usually figure at the end of a life-story. At first it seemed only necessary to collect the data on Greek suicide as Yvonne Grisé has published several articles and a book on Roman self-murder which includes an impressive list of cases. That was the reason why in the autumn of 1983 when I was working with some students on ancient suicide, special attention was given to the collecting of Greek data. For the Roman situation Grisé’s list was used as the basis for generalization. Working on this book and checking Grisé’s materials I discovered deficiencies in her data: some passages could not be found in modern editions. It seems that the authoress copied many a reference from older publications. More serious are misinterpretations of sources she claims to have consulted². Several weeks had to be spent doing her homework over again. Also many a conclusion she draws is debatable, as will become apparent when we compare our views with hers on several major points.

Data were also added to the stock by way of academic communication: colleagues who came across cases in their reading of classical authors passed them on to me; I have thanked them in the prologue.

The material gathered in these ways is mainly literary in the ancient broad sense of ‘literature’. As ‘realistic’ genres historiography and biography account for 484 out of 960 cases. Suicides also figure in other prose: they illustrate philosophical points of view or they serve as exempla in rhetorical texts. An ancient book on dreams has some fine cases taken from the practice of an interpreter. Mythical and purely fictional cases have been collected from epic, drama, lyrical poetry, novels and even from jokes. Special attention has been paid to direct sources: do inscriptions mention suicide as a cause of death and are there cases in the papyri from Greek Egypt? The—meagre—harvest of this research will be presented in Part II as material which demonstrates ancient attitudes to self-killing³.

This collector’s work resulted in a file of 960 cases which are presented in without the claim of covering all ancient suicides. Further research would certainly disclose some more cases: the magical limit of 1000 is already in sight. On the other hand I would be surprised if the number ever surpassed 2000 or even 1500. Far more time was spent on gathering the last tens of cases than the first hundreds, which indicates that the law of diminishing returns is already operative. There is no need to aim at completeness, for the list of the Appendix does not have real statistical significance: several filters determined the appearance in ancient sources. Therefore certain types of suicide were recorded with zeal by ancient authors whereas others are demonstrably underrepresented. For instance hanging as a method arguably does not emerge in the cases as often as one would expect. Another filter accounts for the fact that Roman women do not have the place in the statistics they should have. Before we tackle the problems connected with suicidal patterns of specific groups such as women, cultures and age-groups it is necessary to make it clear why in this study absolute numbers of individuals have not been chosen, but that the case has been chosen as the basic element.

A WHAT’S IN A CASE?

Ischomachos’ daughter had been married to a priest of Demeter and Persephone. This holy man, devoted to Mother and Maid (Kore), as Andokides describes in his speech on the Mysteries (1,125), seriously misbehaved: he took his wife’s mother as well into his house and bed. Thereupon the young woman tried to hang herself, but was stopped in the act. Then, when she recovered, she ran away from home (later the mother was driven out by her lover as well). This attempt at suicide has also been included in the corpus of cases because it enables us to analyse means as well as motives. Basically it is impossible to trace the real motive of a suicide⁴. In fact the ratio of attempted to committed suicide in the ancient corpus remains far below the proportions which are regarded as standard in modern times: instead of eight to ten attempts for each suicide committed, in our material the ratio is one attempted self-killing to four or five accomplished acts (see Appendix B 2).

Just because on the whole the ancient information remains on the surface of events the few cases of intro- and retrospection deserve special attention. A couple of people write that they once considered suicide because bodily or mental pain made life unbearable. As an adolescent Seneca contemplated his exit because he suffered from weak lungs. But he realized the grief it would cause to his old father and he abandoned the plan. St Augustine speaks about his ‘aversion to life’, taedium vitae, dominating his mind when he had lost ‘his soul’s half’, his best friend⁵.

The longing for another’s suicide may also clarify in which circumstances a person in antiquity was expected or supposed to take his life. In this category of people wishing suicide on others there is a case which has come to us on solid stone. In an inscription in Rome a girl is bewailed: ‘Her father miserable by missing her dragged himself weeping through evil life’. In the next lines the father is speaking about the arrangements for his own burial: ‘My bones mixed with those of my daughter must repose in an altar’. Then the speaking person imagines how his emancipated slaves, men and women with their children, will crown with garlands the altar. But one person is excluded, Atimetus the freedman ‘by whose guile I lost my daughter’. Grief is obstructing pure Latin in the next lines, but the general meaning is clear: ‘nail and rope to fasten his neck to’. What is meant by ‘guile’, dolus, can only be guessed at. Was the former slave held responsible for the death of the girl by practising black magic?⁶

When an ancient source expresses doubt about the reality of a suicide saying ‘it is said that’, ‘rumour has it that’, ‘some spokesmen say’, the case has been included (with a ? for ‘reality’ in Appendix A). In further ‘maximal’ counting also the many cases in the fiction of epic, novel and myth have been included. It is possible to discuss endlessly and fruitlessly whether Ajax really fell on his sword when Achilles’ weapons were not assigned to him. Did Iokaste really hang herself on discovering her shameful marriage with her son Oidipous? Epic and myth especially express the ideals and nightmares of ancient people: this highly significant material must not be left out. In this way beneath the neat figures of 960 cases with 9639 individuals there are layers of different solidity. To reassure the historian, who in spite of everything wishes to know ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, on those occasions where it makes sense to distinguish between hard and soft cases, the real figures are given explicitly or put between brackets after the hard number. Soft cases are all of the 960 cases where only an attempt, a consideration, a wish/curse is mentioned in the sources. Apart from that, all fictional suicides have been excluded in the solid figures. The remaining number has been reduced by three non-human suicides which, because of their very human motivation, are suitable for analysing the general experience of suicide in antiquity: Erigone had hanged herself on finding her father Ikarios dead; Maira her female dog pined away, refusing food, and finally jumped into a well⁷. Finally, there is one lifeless case: the dikaios logos, Right Reason, curses itself in Aristophanes’ Clouds to underline its words; its ‘May I hang if’ is one of the ‘softest’ instances which have been included in the corpus⁸. Such ‘fabulous’ cases may disturb the critical mind as sheer fantasy; therefore they have not been regarded as belonging to the hard core. This includes only the cases which meet Durkheim’s standard: ‘tout cas de mort qui résulte directement ou indirectement d’un acte, positif ou négatif, accompli par la victime elle-même et qu’elle savait devoir produire ce résultat’⁹.

By these reductions we reach a kernel of 564 hard, historical cases, i.e. in which according to the source beings have killed themselves¹⁰. This number of 564 cases (out of 960) comprises 494 individual suicides and 70 collective self-killings. Collective suicides are in all respects very difficult to assess; what is the element of personal will? Most often—to use Durkheim’s terminology—an ‘anomic’ fit of mind has overpowered a group. In establishing the motives in most cases we have to satisfy ourselves with the inarticulate ‘despair’, desperata salus in the Latin denomination we use on purpose (see I.3 on motives). A recent parallel in the difficulty of assessing the motivation of a group was the mass suicide by the adherents of Jim Jones’ Temple of God in French Guyana on 18 November 1978: what exactly were their personal motives? Among the 76 collective self-killings which are part of our file a disproportionate share, 35, is taken by groups of non-Greeks and non-Romans, ‘barbarians’ in ancient usage. They generally belong to the type which Durkheim styles ‘suicides obsidionaux’, self-killings by the inhabitants of a beleaguered city. In most cases the victor watches with satisfaction the fatal humiliation brought upon his enemies. This attitude is in principle not different from the way in which triumphant commanders have their opponents depicted as killing themselves. Thus Decebalus completes Trajan’s victory as he stabs himself as shown on one of the last panels of the column in Rome. More subtlety characterized the monument Attalus I erected in Pergamum commemorating his victory over the Gauls: some compassion mingles with the satisfaction of the victor (see II.5.D for the iconography of suicide). In a similar fashion Xenophon relates that the Ten Thousand looked on with bewilderment as the Armenian Taochians chose to commit suicide by hurling themselves from their fort onto the rocks below. In the first place the women threw their children from the heights. They jumped next and their men followed suit. One of the Greek soldiers, Aineias from Stymphalos, tried to stop one desperate individual but he was dragged along with the person he wanted to save¹¹.

Collective suicide does not lend itself to precise analysis: with respect to motive it falls under the heading of despair, the least distinctive category. In sheer number of (countable) persons group suicide would determine the totals if we counted individuals: 8785 (out of 9639 in total) selfkillers were involved in the 11 (out of 76) cases of mass suicide where a specific number is given. The effects on the relative frequency of methods and motives would be enormous if we counted each participant in a collective self-murder as one item. In another respect too the conclusions would be distorted. A disproportionate share of group suicides is furnished by barbarians. Here the special attention by Greek and Roman historians devoted to the humiliation of enemies accounts for the overrepresentation. Leaving them completely out of account—an option contemplated for a while—would rob us of some valuable insights into what ‘civilization’ expected from defeated enemies. That is the reason why it figures in this study, whereas e.g. king Saul’s suicide has been left out: this case has not been ‘observed’ by a Greek or Roman¹².

B WHAT’S IN A NUMBER?

What is the general relation between the figures taken from our material and historical reality? In Appendix A there are 960 cases. As was explained above one case can comprise quite a lot of people if it refers to a collective suicide by troops who despaired of survival or if a mass of barbarians is involved who destroyed themselves together with wives and children. In most cases we simply do not know how many persons were involved in the 65 out of 76 cases of group suicide where the number of individuals is only indicated by Greek and Latin equivalents for ‘many’, ‘numerous’, ‘hundreds’ and the like. They only count as one case; in no way is it feasible to estimate the number of persons. Also in cases where the number is indicated by ‘a few’ etc. no attempt has been made to establish a figure. But wherever an ancient source gives a precise number it has been taken as factual. Thus St Jerome (Letters 123,7) gives three hundred as the number of the wives of Teutones and Cimbri who died by self-destruction. They had in vain asked Marius the Roman commander to guarantee their bodily integrity by putting them under the protection of the Vestal Virgins. To escape (sexual) humiliation they killed themselves ‘by reciprocal wounds or they hanged themselves by a rope made of their own hair on trees or the yokes of waggons’. Other participants in mass suicides were calculated in thousands: the absolute top are the five thousand inhabitants of Gamala who, in Flavius Josephus’ description, jumped into the abyss when the Roman took their city. Their number even exceeds the famous 960 defendants of Massada¹³. Adding up numbers like these exact three hundred we reach a total of 9639 countable individuals. This seems quite an impressive number.

But it has no significance for the suicidal reality of the ancient world. Modern Britain has about 5000 suicides per year out of a population which is comparable to that of the whole of the ancient Mediterranean world. If we take the earliest mythical and epic Graeco-Roman cases as happening about 1500 BC and regard as the last ancient instance the Byzantine lady (matrona ornata) who in the sixth century AD jumped into the water to escape violation by pirates, we have on average some five individuals each year from a population which at its peak is reckoned at 50 to 60 million people; so no figure can be produced that is comparable to modern statistics which reckon in ‘x cases per 100,000 per annum’. On the basis of the numbers it is impossible to answer the question whether suicide in antiquity was more or less frequent than in the modern world¹⁴.

There is a general belief among modern experts that suicide rates in literate societies are higher than those in primitive cultures. But among the latter there are some which exceed the lowest rate of some European countries. Neither is it demonstrable without question that industrialization and urbanization cause an increase of suicide as the myth of the dehumanizing metropolis has it. Do the modern statistics say anything about the suicidal calibre of a society? At first glance the rates of modern Greece and Hungary differ shockingly: 5 to 55 (out of 100,000 per annum); it looks as if the Magyars are eleven times more suicidal. But looking upon it from the point of view of survival one could say just as well that in Greece each year 99,995 out of 100,000 prefer to live on compared to ‘only’ 99,945 people in Hungary. The ratios of survival are not markedly different: 1.0005:1¹⁵. Using suicide rates as an indication for mental health of a nation is unjustified in the same way as once the rates of illegitimate births were mistaken as signs of the moral level of a people.

On a closer look modern suicide statistics are not t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Figures
• Prologue
• Less than an Animal, Mightier than a God
• Part I Phenomena of Self-Killing
• Part II Experience of Self-Killing
• Part III Reflections on Self-Killing
• Appendix A: 960 Cases of Self-Killing
• Appendix B: Profile of Ancient Self-Killing
• Appendix C: Suicidal Vocabulary of Greek and Latin
• Notes
• Bibliography