Aegean Civilizations

conception antedates the use of the word by centuries. (This remains true even after van H.'s important discovery that the word was used by the twelfth-century writer Gauthier of Saint-Victor long before the occurrences in the seventeenth century previously thought to be the earliest (p. 271, n. 4; Romanische Forschungen 102 [1990], 254ff.).) In fact the history of words coincides even less with the history of concepts and moral attitudes than van H. admits. Although suicidium, as he agrees, was not a possible compound in classical Latin (which did not use pronouns as prefixes), classical expressions like se occidere carry no stronger or weaker connection with murder and no more or less condemnation than suicidium. Nor does the history of concepts coincide with the history of moral attitudes to the extent he believes. In the first century A.D. the notion that a person who killed himself was a murderer, a homicida, and did not deserve to be buried was debated in the rhetorical schools (Elder Seneca, Controv. 8.4; Quintilian 7.3.7), but there were arguments for and against, and Quintilian rejected the analogy. Clearly, the conception of suicide as selfmurder could exist before condemnation of the act became the social norm. Indeed Aristotle (NE 5.1138a4ff.) already compared self-killing to murder and, though this was in a condemnatory context, he could elsewhere allow that suicide in the service of friends or country was noble (NE 9.1169al9ff.). Nor did moral disapproval require the conception of suicide as self-murder: Pythagoras and Plato could disapprove of the act without that comparison.