honours of burial, and the validity of their testaments.[1] The exquisite avarice and cruelty of Domitian appears to have deprived the unfortunate of this last consolation, and it was still denied even by the clemency of the Antonines. A voluntary death, which, in the case of a capital offence, intervened between the accusation and the sentence, was admitted as a confession of guilt, and the spoils of the deceased were seized by the inhuman claims of the treasury.[2] Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life; and the posthumous disgrace invented by Tarquin[3] to check the despair of his subjects was never revived or imitated by succeeding tyrants. The powers of this world have indeed lost their dominion over him who is resolved on death; and his arm can only be restrained by the religious apprehension of a future state. Suicides are enumerated by Virgil among the unfortunate rather than the guilty;[4] and the poetical fables of the infernal shades could not seriously influence the faith or practice of mankind. But the precepts of the Gospel, or the church, have at length imposed a pious servitude on the minds of Christians, and condemn them to expect, without a murmur, the last stroke of disease or the executioner.
Abuses of civil jurisprudence The penal statutes form a very small proportion of the sixty-two books of the Code and Pandects; and, in all judicial proceeding, the life or death of a citizen is determined with less caution and delay than the most ordinary question of covenant or inheritance. This singular distinction, though something may be allowed for the urgent necessity of defending the peace of society, is derived from the nature of criminal and civil jurisprudence. Our duties to the state are simple and uniform; the law by which he is condemned is inscribed not only on brass and marble but on the conscience of the offender, and his guilt is- ↑ Qui de se statuebant, humabantur corpora, manebant testamenta; pretium festinandi. Tacit. Annal. vi. 25 [leg. 29], with the notes of Lipsius.
- ↑ Julius Paulus (Sentent. Recept. l. v. tit. xii. p. 476), the Pandects (l. xlviii. tit. xxi.), the Code (l. ix. tit. L), Bynkershoek (tom. i. p. 59. Observat. J. C. R. iv. 4), and Montesquieu (Esprit des Loix, l. xxix. c. 9) define the civil limitations of the liberty and privileges of suicide. The criminal penalties are the production of a later and darker age.
- ↑ Plin. Hist. Natur. xxxvi. 24. When he fatigued his subjects in building the Capitol, many of the labourers were provoked to dispatch themselves; he nailed their dead bodies to crosses.
- ↑ The sole resemblance of a violent and premature death has engaged Virgil (Æneid, vi. 434-439) to confound suicides with infants, lovers, and persons unjustly condemned. Heyne, the best of his editors, is at a loss to deduce the idea, or ascertain the jurisprudence, of the Roman poet.
