Suicide in world of Romans « IMPERIUM ROMANUM

If a Roman citizen wanted to commit suicide, he had to first submit a request to the senate with a justification and a request for positive consideration. If the request was approved, the citizen received poison (hemlock) free of charge¹. Then he drank it or put it on a sword with which he then pierced himself. Slaves, soldiers²and people sentenced to death could not decide to commit suicide. The reason was simple: losing them was an economic cost.

Suicide in the world of ancient Rome was extremely common. Many people, sometimes prominent like Seneca the Younger, had to choose to commit suicide, with the choice of keeping honour or dying at the hands of praetorian. For the Romans, killing oneself was a sign of great courage and a chance to maintain honour. This solution was better than living in the face of disgrace or defeat. According to the Stoics, death was a guarantee of liberation and the only way to avoid dishonour.

This perception of suicide was due to the influence of Greek culture, which considered taking your life to be trespassing as an attempt to understand death and get rid of the fear of the unknown. A common method of taking one’s own life in Rome was to “open one’s veins”, that is, to cut them and bleed them out. Another way was to stab himself in the stomach with a dagger, incl. the famous Lucretia did so.

According to Plutarch, Marcus Antony after the lost battle of Actium in August 30 BCE, he asked his servant to help him in suicide. The slave, however, refused, and Antony took the matter into his own hands. He pierced himself with a sword, thinking Cleopatra had already done so. The dying Antony died in the hands of the queen.

The Romans accepted taking their own lives out of a desire to maintain honour. However, they did not respect the situation when, in their opinion, the reason for taking their lives was dictated by private matters. For example, Roman society felt very negatively about the suicide of Marcus Antony, who had committed suicide out of love.

When it comes to views on the fact of suicide, the Romans essentially relied on the arguments of the Greeks. Suicide was accepted only in certain cases: senile infirmity (this was what Zeno of Kition used in his decision), loss of honour, ananke (coercion), irreversible misfortune.
In Plato’s case, what is supposed to stop us from committing suicide is the necessity to meet the tasks set for us by the gods, invoking the doctrine of Filolaos. Both Plato and Aristotle pointed to the anti-state nature of such an act.

At one time in Rome there was something like a cult of suicide death; what is most clearly expressed in the writings of Seneca, who in his work “On providence”, writing about the death of Cato, considers it one of the few spectacles on earth truly worthy of Jupiter’s attention.

And in Letter 70 (“Moral letters to Lucilius”) we find the following passage:

You need not think that none but great men have had the strength to burst the bonds of human servitude.

In Rome, suicide in the face of a shameful death was an expression of willpower. In a certain period, there was a kind of theatricalisation of suicides. A person who wanted to take his own life would have a feast and invite friends to whom he was saying goodbye. At the same time, interestingly, despite widespread admiration, suicide under Roman law was sometimes treated as taking the life of a relative. This was especially true at times when suicides increased. The state tried to intervene, and then frequent repression was the seizure of property and desecration of the body. We do not even have general numbers on how many people died by their own hand, but based on the works of Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius or Pliny the Elder and Younger, we may assume that it was a fairly common practice.

Cato’s suicide. Painting is the work of an unknown author. In the picture, we can see the Roman senator Cato the Younger who, after the siege of Carthage and the defeat at Thapsus, committed suicide by stabbing a dagger in his chest and tearing the wound with his own hands. Cato did not want to witness the fall of the republic.

The law did not criminalize the suicides of free people; this only applied to slaves and, more importantly, to people who were already condemned to death. Many, anticipating execution and having a death sentence issued by the state – which was associated with the possible confiscation of property – fled from it, for the good of the family, taking their own lives. Tacitus describes such an advance of judgment as pretium festinadi. On the other hand, this law was not always in force, because Makron, the prefect of praetorians, after hearing the death sentence, decided to take his life, and his fortune did not remain with the family. Ulpian mentions in his Digest (XXVIII, 3, 6-7) that this record disappeared after Cicero’s death.

In fact, there was no established, even customary, pattern of ce