to leave life when he pleases, sometimes inclining to the Platonic doctrine that man is a soldier of God, occupying a post which it is criminal to abandon.(312) Plotinus and Porphyry argued strongly against all suicide.(313) But, notwithstanding these passages, there can be no question that the ancient view of suicide was broadly and strongly opposed to our own. A general approval of it floated down through most of the schools of philosophy, and even to those who condemned it, it never seems to have assumed its present aspect of extreme enormity. This was in the first instance due to the ancient notion of death; and we have also to remember that when a society once learns to tolerate suicide, the deed, in ceasing to be disgraceful, loses much of its actual criminality, for those who are most firmly convinced that the stigma and suffering it now brings upon the family of the deceased do not constitute its entire guilt, will readily acknowledge that they greatly aggravate it. In the conditions of ancient thought, this aggravation did not exist. Epicurus exhorted men “to weigh carefully, whether they would prefer death to come to them, or would themselves go to death;”(314) and among his disciples, Lucretius, the illustrious poet of the sect, died by his own hand,(315) as did also Cassius the tyrannicide, Atticus the friend of Cicero,(316) the voluptuary Petronius,(317) and the philosopher Diodorus.(318) Pliny described the lot of man as in this respect at least superior to that of God, that man has the power of flying to the tomb,(319) and he represented it as one of the greatest proofs of the bounty of Providence, that it has filled the world with herbs, by which the weary may find a rapid and a painless death.(320) One of the most striking figures that a passing notice of Cicero brings before us, is that of Hegesias, who was surnamed by the ancients “the orator of death.” A conspicuous member of that Cyrenaic school which esteemed the pursuit of pleasure the sole end of a rational being, he taught that life was so full of cares, and its pleasure so fleeting and so alloyed, that the happiest lot for man was death; and such was the power of his eloquence, so intense was the fascination he cast around the tomb, that his disciples embraced with rapture the consequence of his doctrine, multitudes freed themselves by suicide from the troubles of the world, and the contagion was so great, that Ptolemy, it is said, was compelled to banish the philosopher from Alexandria.(321)