ABSTRACT
The title of this book contains two terms endowed with considerable potential to mislead the reader. Central to the argument of this study is the claim that the words “suicide” and “self” must both be systematically redefined if they are to prove useful to the interpretation of Roman culture. Their employment is, if problematic, nevertheless necessary and unavoidable for precise discussion of the phenomenon which it is the chief concern of this study to explain: that throughout the Late Republic and Julio-Claudian Principate the members of the Roman aristocracy, at the historical moment in which that class was at its most powerful and influential, had a pronounced tendency to die in theatrical and unusual ways. Not the least strange aspect of these often grotesque and painful deaths is that they were generally entered upon deliberately and inflicted by the victim’s own hand. So frequent are these dramatic voluntary deaths in the annals of Roman history that such behavior became for later ages a stereotypical attribute of the Roman national character, 1 and even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the concept of the Romana mors—the “Roman death”—has remained something of a ‘modern myth.’ 2 For anyone with a more than passing acquaintance with Latin literature the phrase “a Roman death” readily evokes certain well-defined and familiar images—the defeated general falling upon his sword, the senator holding his wrists out for incision by his Greek physician—ubiquitous in Late Republican and Early Imperial writings. 3
