The “modern” narrative of a suicide is a otherwise successful individual who has “everything to live for” taking their own life due to personal mental struggles the public knew nothing (or very little) about (e.g. Kurt Cobain, L’Wren Scot, Gary Speed, etc.).
The “ancient” narrative of a suicide is someone (e.g. Cleopatra, Hannibal, Cato) who has been defeated, or otherwise spectacularly failed, and killed themselves to avoid the shame (or a worse fate at the hands of their captures).
Obviously this is a massive simplification of complex issue (and I am not suggesting there are only two “types” of suicide). But are are there any examples of the former from the ancient world, a successful high-status individual taking their own life, not due to a massive defeat or insurmountable setback, due to mental struggles that have nothing to do with life events.
I think your “modern narrative” is a bizarre idea about suicide in current society. Most individuals that commit suicide are unemployed or in poor paying jobs, or have serious relationship or financial problems that seem insurmountable (often due to clinical depression) or other mental health issues. You’ve named three people that seemed to have everything to live for, but I can name other celebrities who made that choice due to insurmountable setbacks Robin Williams, Hunter S Thompson, Ernest Hemingway.
Kurt Cobains issues with drug addiction and depression were also fairly well known, I don’t know enough about the other two to judge.
Well, the suicides that the media will comment on most often, and at most length, are the suicides of already-public figures, who by definition have a public life and a private life, with the public knowing little about the latter. So it’s entirely to be expected that, if they suicide, they usually do so for “reasons the public knew nothing about”.
Conversely, the suicides from the ancient world that we know about are the suicide of public figures, and in particular the suicides of public figures whose death was in itself signficant - i.e. suicides arising in cirucmstances of public interest. A private Roman citizen, ending his own life for reasons of no interest other than to himself and his family, would go unremarked; why should we expect to know about it, two thousand years later?
Roman culture was heavily influenced by stoicism; they believed in dignity when facing adversity in life. They also believed in the moral value of facing death nobly, when it came. So, when it came to suicide (a) their attitudes would have been somewhat different from ours, but (b) they certainly didn’t condemn suicide in blanket terms. They would have deplored suicide as a way of runnign away from challenges or hardship that you could tackle, even in part and with limited success, but would have accepted or applauded it as a response to a disaster from which no recovery was possible. I dare say there were Romans who suicided in response to personal and private disasters, but there is no reason why we would expect their names to go down in history.
That doesn’t fit the OP. First, Dido is semi-mythical at best and the manner of her death can’t be considered an historical fact. Second, she committed suicide under duress to avoid marriage to an enemy king who threatened war. She didn’t commit suicide out of depression or mental struggles.
Richard Cory went home last night,
And put a bullet through his head.
Perhaps a better question is - “Is depression a luxury that only modern people can afford?”
In the ancient world where daily life was a struggle, few people other than the aristocratic had the luxury to sit and mope. Life was a daily struggle. Even most of the aristocrats had purposes they had to serve (i.e. army).
We do have the alleged story of Judas hanging himself with remorse.
The media deliberately doesn’t report on suicides of ordinary people, to prevent copy cat attempts. Mental health is certainly a big issue but job / financial / relationship problems act as triggers to make those worse. Also people in poverty / low income are much less likely to be able to afford proper decent mental health care.
But yes anyone can get struck with depression and suicidal ideation, no matter how rich and successful you are. There’s still a massive stigma for people to come forward and talk publicly about this kind of issue. So the end result is that people suffer in silence for years and the media only reports on the celebrity cases.
I mean, Hamlet, obviously, for a fictional example. But it couldn’t have become one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays if it didn’t resonate with a large group of people.
There are accounts of fictional characters in classic literature that killed themselves for romantic reasons (Ariadne, Haemon) so at least the idea of suicide caused by depression was not unheard of.
Oh, man, I want to kick Virgil’s Dido so badly. Talk about overreacting. I mean, what is this, high school? Yes, Dido, he dumped you. Shit happens. You’ll get over it. Think about it: You’re a queen. You can have more or less any man you want, surely. Just give it a week, and you’ll feel better. There’s no need for all this drama.
Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest. Anyway…
As for the OP: We had a similar discussion in a thread a while ago, and I could only think of one ancient example of a kinda-sorta modern-style suicide (and even that is from late antiquity): The Roman emperor Valentinian II. He was just a powerless figurehead, which apparently bummed him out so much that he hanged himself. Although it’s also possible that he was murdered.
One more example did occur to me later: Antonia Minor, mother of the emperor Claudius. Apparently, she was driven to suicide because Caligula was pestering her so much.
Neither are particularly great examples, I suppose. As the OP notes, defeated generals and politicians are falling on their swords all over the place in the ancient world (they really are doing it a lot, to the point where you stop even taking notice after a while), but the modern style suicide narrative isn’t really something you hear about with the ancients.
What insurmountable setbacks? You’ve just named a highly-successful actor and two highly-successful authors. That looks to me like three more examples of “had everything to live for”.
I have searched, but am unable to come up with a cite, but in college I read somewhere that a large percentage of suicides in the Middle Ages was because of dental pain. Not sure if that counts or not. And in the surprisingly scholarly work The History of Torture the author (Daniel Mannix) says that Jack Ketch, the famous hangman, got interested in hanging because his father hung himself to get away from his wife.
But mostly what md2000 says - the average peasant didn’t have the luxury of deciding whether or not life was worth living - he had to work in the fields or grind the grain or feed the pigs or try to keep his kids from starving. And if he did off himself, it would never be recorded.
Suicide in the modern world is most common among the elderly. In the ancient world, there were a lot less of what we would consider elderly, and maybe that affects it.
Cite. So apparently it happened enough in that culture to warrant a custom about burial.
Williams had been suffering from diffuse Lewy body dementia (initially misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s) which had already begun to manifest itself in mental and physical degeneration (e.g. tremors, paranoia). He had previously struggled with alcoholism and (earlier) drug abuse as well as depression. While he had a loving family and many friends and fans, what he “had to live for” was a slow and horrible deterioration of mind and body in front of those friends and family. For a man who struggled to cope even when he was “healthy”, that’s not a pleasant prospect.
Terry Pratchett, under similar circumstances, managed to hold on for a while longer but Pratchett was more stable overall and, in the end, also chose to take his own life rather than waste away.
md2000 beat me to the “Richard Cory” reference but the plain fact is that even rich and successful people can find life intolerable for all sorts of reasons.
I really want a better cite for this. I think someone may be mixing up suicides and sodomites (an easy mistake, I know).
I’m being serious. The only reference I’m finding in Tacitus for chucking people into bogs is this bit from Germania, where he is talking about executions:
The Latin translated as “sodomites” here is actually “corpore infames” - “infamous bodies” or “disgraced bodies”. There does seem to be some discussion about what this means, though, as I’m seeing different translations of it going around, such as the more noncommittal “unnaturally immoral”, “morally infamous”, or what have you. (If Tacitus really is talking about the Germans’ treatment of sodomites, though, then: Yeah, yikes. Give me the Romans any day, for whom sodomy was more a casual pastime.)
In actuality, bog burial seems to have been a complicated business, which may have also included some human sacrifice. (There is a another bit in Germania where Tacitus describes ritual drowning of slaves in lakes, which may be related to this.)
Not sure what the reference to the pre-emptive ghostbusting in your quote is about, I can’t see anything about that in the passage from Tacitus at all. Maybe it’s about something else in there, though. If anyone wants to correct/enlighten me on any of this, that is appreciated, as always.