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CHAP. IX.: That the Greek and Roman Laws punished Suicide, but not through the same Motive. - Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Complete Works, vol. 2 The Spirit of Laws [1748]

Edition used:

The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777), 4 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: Complete Works of Montesquieu, 4 vols.

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CHAP. IX.

That the Greek and Roman Laws punished Suicide, but not through the same Motive.

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. 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 Lacedæmonian 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. But when the emperors perors 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.

[* ]Book ix. of laws.

[]Eorum qui de se statuebant humabantur corpora, manebant testamenta, pretium festinandi. Tacit.

[* ]Rescript of the emperor Pius in the third law, sect. 1. and 2. ff. de bonis eorum qui ante sent. mortem sibi consoiverunt.