The people of classical Athens did not regard suicide as a crime committed by the victim. Instead, the Athenians regarded suicide as a crime committed by the instrument that the victim used, or by the victim's hand as opposed to the victim himself. This non-human agent was culpable, just like non-human agents were blamed for accidental deaths. Although suicide victims were innocent, inanimate agents were guilty. In Sophocles' Ajax, for example, the sword that the hero turned upon himself was blamed for his death. The Athenian response to suicide was more about objects than it was about people.
The chief sources for these conclusions are the orators and Plutarch. Previous scholars, to be sure, viewed the subject of classical Athenian suicide more broadly.Footnote 1 Save for Rudolph Hirzel, they did not pay concentrated attention to Athenian laws and burial customs, and even Hirzel paid more attention to drama and philosophy. For this article, dramatic and philosophical sources such as Sophocles or Plato are occasionally indispensable, but mostly tangential.
The contrast between innocent victims and guilty agents does not appear in the response to suicide anywhere else, save for some Greek poleis or regions that may have resembled Athens. (For example, it does not appear in ancient Rome.) The first and longer part of this article presents the evidence for this contrast, including Sophocles' sword and the death of Socrates. The short second part asks how the contrast arose. Plato again is relevant, but so is later history in which this contrast did not exist.
I
If suicide is to be considered a crime, it must be a sort of homicide, and homicide in classical Athens was a crime against the family of the deceased. Unless the victim forgave his killer, the family was obliged to prosecute.Footnote 2 The family and the community joined in the task of isolating the killer, who would bring miasma upon anyone he approached.Footnote 3 To prevent miasma, he stood trial in the open air.Footnote 4 If convicted, he left Attica for the same reason. In a case of suicide, there was no one to do the forgiving, no one to be prosecuted, and no one to isolate. There was no one to put on trial or to go into exile. There was, in short, no crime. There was also no miasma involving the killer. There was only miasma involving the corpse of the suicide victim. To solve this problem, the family of the victim would take away the body and bury it with the usual purificatory rites. Timon of Athens had this custom in mind when, according to a story Plutarch knew, he warned his fellow Athenians that a fig tree on his vacant lot would no longer be available for hangings. His warning was partly for would-be suicide victims, and partly for those who would come and remove the bodies.Footnote 5 Even if the story is wrong about Timon, it is probably right about the removal of suicide victims from vacant lots.
A passage in Plato confirms the lack of any crime of suicide. When Socrates discusses suicide in the Phaedo, one of his auditors, Cebes, asks, ‘What do you mean, Socrates, by saying that it is not right for a man to lay violent hands upon himself?’Footnote 6 Socrates now mentions the opinion of the Pythagorean Philolaus, which was that suicide was ‘illegitimate’ (παράνομος). Cebes replies, ‘I have heard Philolaus say … that it was not right to do this, but I have never heard from anyone anything distinct on the subject.’Footnote 7 If there was a nomos about suicide, Cebes should have known it. Yet Socrates does not reproach Cebes for his ignorance. Instead the philosopher explains his own opinion of when ‘certain people … in certain circumstances are better off dying than living’. In this passage, suicide is an unregulated practice that some philosophers reject, but that Socrates accepts under conditions on which Plato wished to focus.
As Elise Garrison observed in her article on ‘Attitudes towards suicide’ (n. 1), only one Athenian source says that any suicide victim commits homicide. In Lysias 12, the speaker complains that the Thirty ‘compelled their victims to become the murderers of themselves, and denied them customary burial’.Footnote 8 This charge stresses the act of compulsion, and implies that without such compulsion the killing would not have occurred. The Thirty, not their victims, caused these deaths. Since they did so deliberately, they committed murder.Footnote 9 These tyrants did the opposite of what the court did to Socrates. Rather than pass a sentence in which suicide was optional, they inflicted pressure that made suicide unavoidable. Here as elsewhere, the Thirty upended a norm.
Denying burial was another crime committed by the Thirty. Burial was a right that Socrates refers to elsewhere in the Phaedo; after Crito asks, ‘How shall we bury you?’ Socrates teasingly answers, ‘Any way you want, so long as I don't escape you when you take me.’Footnote 10 Both speakers envisage burial without difficulty. The reason for their confidence is not that Socrates, unlike some suicides, died at judicial command. Other Athenian suicide victims (or reported victims) did not die at judicial command, yet received burial. Isocrates, who reportedly starved to death of his own volition, received burial, and so did Themistocles.Footnote 11 Rather than die at judicial command, Themistocles fled Athens to escape execution. According to most accounts, he took poison.Footnote 12 He was then buried in Magnesia on the Maeander.Footnote 13 In his case there was a difficulty, but it did not arise because of the manner of his death. As Plutarch reveals, this difficulty arose because Athens regarded him as a traitor. For that reason, he had to be buried outside Attica.Footnote 14 Even for this notorious suicide, burial was a right.
Outside Athens, the scanty Greek evidence does not answer the question of whether suicide was a crime, but it does confirm that suicides received burial, even as it also confirms that circumstances like the commission of a crime would not deprive the victim of last rites. Plutarch reports that when an epidemic of suicide swept the female population of Miletus, the authorities responded by burying the victims naked – a dishonour, but still burial.Footnote 15 Diodorus says that the Syracusans should have buried the suicides Demosthenes and Nicias. Allowed to avoid execution, just like Socrates, these two generals were left in front of the jail where they died.Footnote 16 It was just as disgraceful for the enemies of the suicide victim Alcetas to wrap his body in a cheap cloak and bring it to Antipater.Footnote 17
In the 31 complete Attic tragedies, suicide victims are always buried, often with heroic honours. Of the eleven persons who commit suicide in these plays, just one, the Ajax of Sophocles, is even threatened with loss of burial, and the case of Ajax is peculiar, for he is threatened not because of his suicide, but because of his conduct before his death.Footnote 18 Jocasta is properly buried in Oedipus Rex, and Euadne will be buried with her husband in Euripides' Suppliants.Footnote 19 In later tradition, two of the eleven, Heracles and Ajax, received hero worship, meaning that they received burial with honours. A third, Macaria, likely did also.Footnote 20 Three more, Menoeceus, Phaedra, and Deianira, were buried in honourable locations, if not shrines, and perhaps received worship.Footnote 21 Of the eight mentioned so far, three, Euadne, Ajax and Macaria, received burial in Attica. The heroes and heroines that make up the rest of the eleven, Antigone, Eurydice and Haimon, are not reported to have received any cult or honoured burial, but neither were they denied burial. Outside tragedy, there is only one report for the three of them, concerning Antigone, supposedly burnt to death in a temple along with Ismene.Footnote 22
In other respects, these eleven suicide victims are diverse. Three persons, the Jocasta of Sophocles, Eurydice and Phaedra, hang themselves, an unfavourable circumstance in the view of some scholars, yet they receive the same treatment as Deianira, Haimon and the Jocasta of Euripides, who die by the sword.Footnote 23 Motive varies, too. Two of these suicides – Macaria and Menoeceus – become communal martyrs. Two others – Phaedra and Ajax – express resentment towards family members or communal leaders. Deianira is innocent of the crime of wilful murder, Phaedra guilty of the crime of constructive adultery. Antigone dies for a brother's sake, Haimon for the sake of his betrothed, but Heracles for his own sake.Footnote 24
Myths from outside tragedy echo these eleven instances. In Attica, Aglauros and Herse committed suicide by jumping off the Acropolis; a shrine marked the place of death. Aegeus jumped off the highest point in the Propylaea, but somehow landed in the Aegean, a longer leap for which he received the same honour.Footnote 25 Outside of Attica there were more examples, including one linked to Theseus: Ariadne, who committed suicide according to Plutarch, and whose bones ended up in an underground shrine to Dionysus in the Argolid.Footnote 26 The manner of death varied. If some heroes or heroines jumped to their deaths, or starved themselves to death, as Ariadne did, others hanged themselves.Footnote 27 The motives varied. Aglauros and Herse were frightened, Aegeus was distressed; Ariadne abandoned. All were suicides, all were buried and given heroic honours.
Heroizing victims is very unlike condemning inanimate objects used in acts of suicide. One kind of condemned object caused accidental death. It might be investigated and put on trial. Another kind caused suicide. Since this kind was manifestly responsible for the death that occurred, a trial was superfluous. Both kinds of objects were disposed of.
In a paraphrase of Demosthenes, Aeschines speaks first of objects causing accidental death and then of objects causing suicide:
We exile pieces of wood and stones and iron implements, voiceless and senseless things that descend on somebody and cause his death, and if anyone does away with himself, we bury the hand that did the deed separately from the body.Footnote 28
This passage envisages a sentence of exile imposed on objects held responsible for accidental deaths, and envisages a similar punishment for the part of the body held responsible for death by suicide. Two other sources explain how the Athenians imposed such sentences. The Athenaiōn Politeia says, ‘The King Archon and the phulobasileis also judge cases against inanimate objects and animals.’Footnote 29 This passage about accidental death adds animals to the list of non-human agents. Pollux locates the court of King Archon and the phulobasileis in the Prytaneion, but does not mention any agents other than objects that cause accidental death by falling:
The court at the Prytaneion passed judgment on killers, even if their identity was unclear, and also on fallen objects that caused death. The phulobasileis presided. They had to throw the fallen object out (of Attica).Footnote 30
This passage confirms the ‘exile’ of non-human agents in Aeschines.
None of these classical sources mentions a suicidal agent other than the hand, but Plutarch's Life of Themistocles fills the gap:
[Themistocles] assigned a place near his house for the shrine [of Artemis Aristoboule]. That's where the public slaves throw the bodies of those put to death and put out the clothes and nooses of those who have been hanged and cut down.Footnote 31
This passage differs from the previous ones not only because it describes conditions centuries later, but also because it does not envisage some obscure place, as Aeschines does, or some remote place, as Pollux does. Instead the suicidal instruments are isolated in a place of ill-repute, as shown by the disposal of the corpses. A lex sacra from early third-century Cos refers to agents for suicide, too, but does not mention a place of disposal. Herzog thought that the items mentioned in this law were to be burned, not ‘put out’, as in Plutarch. He supplemented as follows:
[If anyone in any deme hangs himself with a rope], the witness should first release [the corpse and cover it with a cloth.] He should [cut] off [and dispose of the] piece of wood from which the dead person was hanged and [burn] the rope. If the priest is the witness, [let him order the first passer-by to do it].Footnote 32
The letters translated as ‘off’, ΑΠΟ, show that the wood and rope were to be disposed of.
The treatment given to the objects in bοth Plutarch and the inscription resembles that given to the hand of the suicide victim in Aeschines. In all three sources, the guilt of the agent is supposed to be obvious, and so the response of the witnesses is immediate, as if a thief had been caught red-handed,Footnote 33 ἐπ᾽ αὐτοφόρῳ. The removal of the offending agent resembles a citizen's arrest, or ἀπαγωγή. Unlike theft, however, the suicidal hand or instrument caused pollution, so the community disposed of them, a response comparable to the isolation of murderers both before and after conviction. The non-human agent served as a substitute for a murderer.Footnote 34
Two more passages refer to inanimate, polluted agents. A fragment of Hyperides refers to the branches or beams from which a suicide might hang himself, called ὀξυθύμια. To express his contempt for a law that he opposes, the orator says, ‘It would be much fairer for the stele [for the law] to be put among the ὀξυθύμια than in a shrine.’ This term also referred to the leavings of household purification rituals, but Aristarchus says that in Hyperides it refers to wood used in acts of suicide.Footnote 35 Both objects were polluted. A contemporary passage from Eupolis mentions ὀξυθύμια and polluted persons: ‘a gibbering polluter of the community who should have been burnt at the crossroads and among the ὀξυθύμια’.Footnote 36 Once again the inanimate agent resembles a murderer.
If we turn from laws and regulations to examples of culpable, inanimate agents, oratorical sources give way to Sophocles' Ajax. Two characters, Teucer and the protagonist, blame Ajax's death on the sword that Ajax uses to kill himself. Addressing the corpse, Teucer says: ‘How will I get you off this shining blade that was your murderer … when you breathed your last?’Footnote 37 In an ambiguous, and perhaps spurious, phrase found a few lines later (1032–3), Teucer blames both the sword and the man who gave it to Ajax, Hector: ‘This man was holding that man's gift when he perished in a fatal fall, because of this object’ (οὗτος δ᾽ ἐκείνου τήνδε δωρεὰν ἔχων | πρὸς τοῦδ᾽ ὄλωλε θανασίμῳ πεσήματι). Yet Sophocles might have expressed this thought by putting ‘this object’ in the dative, as emended by Schneidewinn. Morstadt and others thought the lines unsalvagable.Footnote 38 If the lines are genuine, ‘this object’ may instead be ‘this very man’, whom Teucer does not identify. Similarly, Ajax blames both his sword and Hector. As he stands atop the ἐγκύκλημα, and looks down on his sword, he says:
The sword stands where it would cut best – since I have the chance to think about it. It's a gift from Hector, the man who was the most hated of my guest-friends and the most hateful to lay eyes on. It's stuck (πέπηγε) in the hostile land of Troy…;
then he modifies his idea that the sword will do the cutting, and says:
I positioned it and made it stick (ἔπηξα). It is very friendly towards my swift death. We are well prepared.Footnote 39
Like Teucer, Ajax has now expressed an ambiguous attitude, but for a different reason. Ajax makes himself and the weapon responsible, whereas Teucer makes someone else and the weapon responsible.
These lines, which scholars have explained as a pattern of imagery, a personification of the sword, or an aberration, allude to a question that might arise for any non-human agent: was there no human to blame instead?Footnote 40 Sophocles let Teucer and Ajax answer partly ‘no’, since the weapon was to blame, and partly ‘yes’, since Hector or Ajax were. Sophocles also asked another question: had the agent been removed? Often this question was moot. The poison taken by Socrates and Themistocles could not be removed. In cases of death by starvation or fire, there was no culpable object. In Ajax, the question was open. The sword lay buried in Ajax's body. As Teucer says, the sword could be removed, but only after the body was disposed of, and the disposal of the body sparked a dispute between the relatives, led by Teucer, and the community, led by the Atreidae. The family wanted to bury the victim, as Attic and tragic usage enjoined, and the Atreidae refused, behaving like the disgraceful Syracusans. To emphasize this refusal, Sophocles has Ajax speak about burying the sword himself.Footnote 41
This two-part picture of Athenian nomoi – innocent victim and proper burial, guilty agent and removal of pollution – emerges from sources limited to Athenian law and custom, as opposed to other genres, places and times discussed by Hirzel and later writers, and especially as opposed to Rome.Footnote 42 Hirzel showed that many philosophers and the like disapproved of suicide, among them Philostratus and Artemidorus. A notice about Athens in the Suda may imply disapproval, too.Footnote 43 Some cities regulated the act of suicide, and even made it a crime under certain circumstances.Footnote 44 As for Roman suicide, the pontifical books condemned it, and punished it with dishonourable burial.Footnote 45 Quintilian thought that the early Republican Senate regulated it.Footnote 46 The courts passed judgment on the motives of suicide victims in order to determine the victim's guilt with respect to other crimes.Footnote 47 Epigraphical sources report disapproval of suicide, too.Footnote 48 On the other hand, there was no crime of suicide, and at the same time there was no condemnation of objects or parts of the body.Footnote 49 The Roman response to suicide combined some disapproval with different laws and customs.
This evidence makes the Athenian nomoi all the more remarkable. Why should Athenians have believed that the sword did it, and the swordsman did not? They surely knew that most acts of suicide were voluntary. David Daube's study of terms for suicide shows that Athenian sources, including tragic sources, use terms or turns of phrase that identify the suicide victim as the agent of his or her own death.Footnote 50 The Athenians also knew that most acts of suicide were unassisted. Among the many versions of the suicide of Ajax, including artistic versions, only a few vase paintings show a servant helping the hero fall upon his sword.Footnote 51
II
Since suicide was not a kind of homicide, the Athenians would need to explain it in some other way. For Pythagoreans like Philolaus, it was a crime not against a human body, or σῶμα, but against a human soul, or ψυχή. That perspective, though, would have been unfamiliar to many or most Athenians, who perhaps preferred to attribute suicide to divine intervention. In Homer and elsewhere, gods bring about human deaths by imparting special power to a weapon, such as a spear or sword. In the Iliad, Athena gives Achilles the chance to throw his spear twice, and not once.Footnote 52 In Herodotus, gods control weapons not used by heroes. At Delphi in 480 b.c., the advancing Persians met with weapons, and with another inanimate agent, thunder, that were not in human hands. ‘This’, Herodotus says,
was quite a wonder. Of their own accord, military weapons appeared lying outside the temple. Compared to any other marvel, the next event was worth gawking at. Just as the barbarians entered the temple of Athena Pronaia, thunder fell on them from heaven.Footnote 53
The thunder then accomplishes what the movement of the weapons foretells. Yet none of these examples involves suicide. They involve a different kind of homicide, a death in combat. Similarly, the polis might attribute suicide to τὸ θεῖον. Yet in classical Greek τὸ θεῖον does not cause suicide, except perhaps in Herodotus. In this author, Cleomenes committed suicide on account of madness that some Greeks thought heaven-sent. Unlike the other suicide victims mentioned in this article, Cleomenes did not act deliberately.Footnote 54 He was non compos mentis.
The ancient Athenian would have shared the general Greek (and also Roman) belief that a suicide victim suffered an untimely death, a mors immatura. This belief was compatible with an exception for those who died nobly, as Socrates had. It was not compatible with blaming the victim.
If the victim was hard to blame, the object was easy to blame. The object provided a kind of substitute for a murderer. It did not matter whether this substitute could form an intention and commit φόνος ἐκ προνοίας or have the disposition needed for φόνος ἀκούσιος. The object was evidently or visibly polluted, and that sufficed to identify it as the guilty party. The Athenians attributed a magical power to the object, just as they attributed a different magical power to statues and other objects representing gods. The suicide object possessed maleficent power, the divine object, beneficent power.
Plato found his own way to assign either guilt or responsibility. In the Laws, he sets forth a scheme that divides acts of suicide into three classes, each with an agent: those ordered by a court, those due to circumstances, and those due to cowardice. In the first class, the agent was the community, acting lawfully. In the second, the agent was fate, acting under divine control. In the third, it was the victim, acting wrongfully:
Whoever kills himself … and doesn't act according to communal verdict, and isn't compelled by unavoidable pain when some misfortune descends on him, and hasn't been put to some fatal and irreparable shame, condemns himself unjustly, through sloth and unmanly cowardice.Footnote 55
This classification eliminated the role of anything like a sword or rope. In every circumstance someone or something else now bore the blame, whether a court, fate or the victim himself.
If the victim bore the blame, Plato reasoned, the victim should not receive honourable burial, and instead
should be buried apart and not in a common tomb, … on the wild and nameless outskirts of the twelve wards – anonymously, without stelai and without names marking the graves.Footnote 56
The damnatio memoriae was another innovation expressing the wish to degrade some suicide victims. In contrast, the law that Plato proposes for trying inanimate objects makes no innovation. Save for some details, this law is the same as in the sources for the court at the Prytaneion.
Although Plato does not say so, a concern for the ψυχή may have inspired his condemnation of suicide. Whatever his motive, he set a precedent. In the future – if not the immediate future in Athens, about which we know little, then the distant future, in Europe, after the advent of Christianity – the condemnation of the suicide victim would be axiomatic. The Codex juris canonici largely agrees with Plato:
Those who by any pretext voluntarily bring death upon themselves with a weapon, with poison, or by hanging, or by any means whatsoever, are to be given no commemoration in any offering and are to be deprived of a church burial the same as those who die without repenting their offences.Footnote 57
It was now, in the Middle Ages, that the word suicidium and its cognates entered the Latin language. The new words evoked an attitude in Plato, but not one in ancient Athens or in antiquity in general.
In England, this attitude outlasted the authority of canon law. The priest in Act V of Hamlet may say of Ophelia:
Ophelia was cast out of holy ground, whereas her counterpart in the Laws was to be put on the margins of the community.Footnote 58 Burial in a shrine, something reserved for heroes in ancient Greece, had become a privilege bestowed on all Christians save suicides and other reprobates such as heretics and Jews. If a suicide was removed to a crossroads, and buried there, as provided by British law down to 1824, his fate echoed not only Plato but also Eupolis, who said a polluter ought to be cast out at the crossroads.Footnote 59 Only in the twentieth century did the Christian condemnation of the suicide victim yield to the contemporary attitude in which suicide is no longer a crime (in the UK, by the Suicide Act of 1961).
The other element in the Athenian nomoi, the culpable object, had its own career. In the medieval period, the suicide's felon hand was sometimes cut off, as in Athens. Down through the nineteenth century, the suicide weapon was confiscated by the Crown. Only if the victim was found to be non compos mentis, like Cleomenes, was the weapon given to his family.Footnote 60 Then, in the twentieth century, the culpable object disappeared. In the UK and elsewhere, the authorities return weapons to the victim's family after an investigation. In some American jurisdictions, the authorities confiscate weapons and may sell them to firearms dealers or distribute them to the police.Footnote 61 A search for the custom of destroying weapons yielded only a small town in Ohio.Footnote 62 No doubt other towns follow this custom, too, but they are sure to be small and rural. They would know little about ancient Athens. In the places that know more, the fatal instrument is no longer Attic – no longer spiritually charged or uncanny, and no longer cast out. Just as the corpse no longer disturbs the community, the instrument no longer threatens it. Suicide has lost some of its sting.
