Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide: II

Abstract

II. Just as suicide has been, and is, practised in all sorts of societies, from the most primitive to the most civilized, so there has probably never been a social code that sanctioned it absolutely without conditions. In primitive societies there are often deep-seated superstitions about βιαοɡάνατοι, victims of violent or untimely death. It is a fear of the ghost, which it is thought will be vengeful or troubled and not rest in peace. Special modes of burial with denial of ordinary burial rites, originally an expression of this fear, are attested for Greece and possibly for early Rome. But whatever regulations of a religious kind once obtained in Rome, they seem to have lapsed by the historical period. It has, however, been suggested that the persistence of such feelings may partly explain the fairly frequent cases of mutual killing recorded right into the Empire. The Emperor Claudius, celebrated as an antiquarian, proposed to remove from the senate rolls a man who was said to have stabbed himself (Suet. Cl.16).