ABSTRACT
The view that discourse on self-killing is appropriately defined in relation to an understanding of the self as moral witness within an aristocratic community is not confined, in Republican writing, to philosophical texts. It is found reflected also in the persistent association in Latin writing of the epoch between frustrated erotic desire and self-killing. The linkage is a little more difficult to discern in the Roman stereotype of the suicidal lover than it is in the philosophical writings of the period. This is partly the case because Roman philosophers approach the topic more directly than do authors of Latin imaginative literature. A more significant difficulty, however, is that the erotic self-killing as presented in Roman writing in many senses represents an inversion of the philosophical ideal of suicide. Roman philosophical writers on the whole concern themselves with rational self-killing and the mindset that is appropriate to this. When such thinkers refer to the stereotypical suicidal lover, it is as an example of the philosophical fool and the power the irrational emotions can attain if they are allowed free run in the psyche. 1 The ideal self-killing for the philosophers is one that arises from a perfected awareness of one’s own nature and an absence of irrational impulses and aspirations. To kill oneself from frustration at an inability to attain one’s erotic desires, by contrast, demonstrates that one’s self-awareness has been entirely overwhelmed by the impetus of the emotions. From a philosophical point of view, lovers, with their complete devotion to an external object upon which their happiness entirely depends, are clearly exemplary instances of the stulti, and the erotic self-killing is obviously the height of folly.
