So too Corellius Rufus, another venerable senator, according to Pliny the Younger, Letters, book 1, letter 12, starved himself to death: “Afflicted in his feet, suffering incredible agonies and most grievous torments, he abstained entirely from food.” Neither Pliny nor Rufus’s wife Hispulla could dissuade him, but “resolved to die, more obstinately,” and so forth: die he would, and die he did. So did Lycurgus, Aristotle, Zeno, Chrysippus, Empedocles and tens of thousands more. In war, for a man to rush rashly into imminent danger and immediate death is counted courage and greatness of spirit. To cause his own destruction and that of many thousands besides, in a manner to commit the wilful murder of himself and others, is a glorious deed, for which he will be crowned.

In former times the Massagetae, the Barbicians and I do not know what other peoples suffocated their old men after seventy years of age to free them from the troubles belonging to that age. So did the inhabitants of the island of Choa: because their air was pure and good, and the people generally long-lived, “they anticipated their fate, before they lost the use of their limbs or weakness came upon them, with poppy or hemlock.” With poppy or hemlock they forestalled death.

Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, commends voluntary death if a person is “troublesome to himself or others,” troublesome to himself or others: “Especially if living is a torment to him, let him free himself by his own hands from this weary life, as from a prison, or allow others to free him.” It is the same doctrine that Laertius reports of Zeno long ago: “The wise man rightly takes his own life if he is suffering severe pain, mutilation of his limbs or diseases difficult to cure.” Plato approves it in Laws, book 9, if old age, poverty, disgrace and the like oppress him; and Fabius expresses it in effect in the preface to book 7 of the Institutes: “No one suffers long except through his own fault.”

It is common in China, says the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, “if they despair of better fortunes or are wearied and tortured by misery, to deprive themselves of life, and often, to spite their enemies further, to hang themselves at their door.” Tacitus the historian and Plutarch the philosopher greatly approve a voluntary departure; and Augustine, The City of God, book 1, chapter 29, defends a violent death, provided it is undertaken in a good cause: “No one has died in this way who was not going to die at some time; and what does it matter by what kind of death this life is ended, when the person whose life ends is not compelled to die again?” And so forth.

No one dies voluntarily in this way who, “willing or unwilling,” must not die in the end. Our life is subject to innumerable accidents—who knows when they may happen? “Is it better to undergo one by dying, or to fear them all by living?” Better to suffer one than fear them all. “Death is better than a bitter life,” Ecclesiasticus 30:17. And it is a harder choice to live in fear than, by dying once, to be freed from all.

Theombrotus of Ambracia persuaded I do not know how many hundreds of his hearers, by an eloquent speech on the miseries of this life and the happiness of the next, to throw themselves to their deaths. Having read Plato’s divine treatise On the Soul, he led the way himself to set an example. That elegant epigram of Callimachus will tell you as much:

As the Ambracian said farewell to the sun, He is said to have leapt into the waters of Styx. He had suffered nothing to deserve death, but happened to read Divine Plato’s remarkable work on dying.

Calanus and his Indians of old hated to die a natural death; the Circumcellions and Donatists, loathing life, compelled others to kill them, and there are many such examples. But these are false and pagan doctrines, profane Stoic paradoxes, wicked examples. It does not matter what pagan philosophers decide in this matter: these doctrines are impious, abominable and founded on error. “No evil is to be done that good may come of it”; “Christ protests, Scripture protests.” God and all good men are against it.

He who stabs another can kill his body; but he who stabs himself kills his own soul. “He does a disservice who gives a beggar something to eat: what he gives is lost, and he prolongs the beggar’s life for misery.” He who gives a beggar alms, as that comic poet said, does harm because he only prolongs his misery.

But Lactantius, On True Worship, book 6, chapter 7, calls it a detestable opinion, and fully refutes it in On Wisdom, book 3, chapter 18; so does Saint Augustine, Letter 52 to Macedonius and chapter 61 to the tribune Dulcitius; and Jerome to Marcella on Blesilla’s death: “I do not receive such souls,” and so forth. He calls such men “martyrs of foolish philosophy.” So too Cyprian, On the Two Kinds of Martyrdom: “If any die in this way, weakness, ambition or madness compels them.” It is sheer madness to do so: “It is madness to die so as not to die.” Aristotle writes to this effect in Ethics, book 3, and Lipsius in his Introduction to Stoic Philosophy, book 3, dissertation 23. But it needs no refutation.

Let me add only this: in some cases those harsh judgments against people who do violence to themselves, or in some desperate fit to others—as they sometimes do by stabbing, slashing and so forth—should be softened. This applies to those who are mad, out of their minds for the time being, or found to have long suffered from melancholy, and who in its extremity do not know what they are doing, deprived of reason, judgment, everything: just as a ship without a pilot must strike the nearest rock or sandbank and be wrecked.