A man, says Plato, who has killed one nearly related to
him, that is, himself, not by an order of the magistrate, not to avoid
ignominy, but through pusillanimity shall be punished.
[10]
The Roman law
punished this action when it was not committed through pusillanimity,
through weariness of life, through impatience in pain, but from a
criminal despair. The Roman law acquitted where the Greek condemned, and
condemned where the other acquitted.
Plato's law was formed upon the Lacedmonian institutions, where the
orders of the magistrate were absolute, where shame was the greatest of
miseries, and pusillanimity the greatest of crimes. The Romans had no
longer those refined ideas; theirs was only a fiscal law.
During the time of the republic, there was no law at Rome against
suicides; this action is always considered by their historians in a
favourable light, and we never meet with any punishment inflicted upon
those who committed it.
Under the first emperors, the great families of Rome were
continually destroyed by criminal prosecutions. The custom was then
introduced of preventing judgment by a voluntary death. In this they
found a great advantage: they had an honourable interment, and their
wills were executed, because there was no law against suicides.
[11]
But
when the emperors became as avaricious as cruel, they deprived those who
destroyed themselves of the means of preserving their estates by
rendering it criminal for a person to make away with himself through a
criminal remorse.
What I have been saying of the motive of the emperors is so true,
that they consented that the estates of suicides should not be
confiscated when the crime for which they killed themselves was not
punished with confiscation.
[12]
