Matthew's Journal

Re Brutus: suicide had a very different cultural significance in the classical world. Everybody thought of it as a natural response to an overwhelming reversal of fortune (the more so, perhaps, because it was often a way of forestalling unpleasant execution anyway), nobody thought any the worse of people who did it in those circumstances, and it had no (even residual) religious significance. I guess the nearest analogue we have today is people who want to end their own lives in the last stages of terminal illness. There seems to be no stigma attached to that at all. But of course we don't call it suicide, even though it clearly is. I don't think I've ever come across an account of someone in the classical world killing themself as a result of something that was what we would now recognise as a mental illness, though that doesn't mean that nothing like that exists.