The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.