A certain morbid collector’s mania is required for making a file of suicides in the Graeco-Roman world1. For research of this type the klassische Altertumswissenschaft is well equipped; it has many instruments available. In the tradition of classical scholarship philology and history never lost contact; therefore it is possible to trace many cases by means of reference books: various terms for self-killing in lexicons disclose many a passage in ancient literature. Greek and Latin have at their disposal a much richer vocabulary on suicide than dictionaries and lexicons suggest. As a by-product of our heuristic activities a suicidal vocabulary was developed which has been relegated to Appendix C. It may not only be useful as an instrument for further investigation; the corpus of expressions makes it possible also to see the nuances in ancient thinking on selfkilling, the more as a central word (and idea) like ‘suicide’ is lacking (see II.4.A ‘suicidium, a non-word’ and Appendix B).