STRABO, the historian, in his Tenth Book, tells us that at Ceos, the country of Simonides, B.C. 500, it was an established custom to allow the act of self-destruction to persons who had attained the age of 60, or who had become incapacitated by their infirmities. Several suicides can be directly traced to oracles; the great Oracle at Delphi has become especially notorious; Codrus, king of Athens, and Aristodemus, killed themselves distinctly in consequence of these oracular utterances. There is a _tradition_ mentioned by Plutarch, Pliny, and Virgil, that on the coast of Epirus, on the peninsula called Neritos (Virgil, Æneid, iii., 271), overlooking the Ionian Sea, was the hill then named Leucate, or Leucadia; here stood a Temple dedicated to Apollo, and from this rock a suicidal leap into the sea became the common sequence to disappointed love, for the Greeks of those times. Sappho, a poetess, whose love for Phaon was unrequited, is said to have originated the custom; an arm of the sea has, since then, cut off this promontory from the mainland, and the island is now called St. Maur. Tradition is evidence of the existence of a _custom_, even if it be objected to as proof of an individual fact. Timon of Athens, the Misanthrope, whose exact era is also uncertain, is narrated to have been a suicide; he met with some curable accident, but from his intense dislike of his fellowmen he refused all assistance, and allowed himself to die unrelieved. This was the philosopher who is said to have kept in his garden a fig-tree specially convenient for hanging oneself on, and which he refrained from having cut down, so as to be able to accommodate his friends. Shakespeare’s play “Timon of Athens,” refers to this odd character. The Spartans, that brave and hardy race, are known to have disapproved of Suicide; it is narrated that an honourable burial was refused to Artemidorus, who sacrificed his life unnecessarily at the battle of Platœa, which was fought B. C. 479, between the united Greeks and the Persians. Among the suicides of Greece, however, occur the names of some of her greatest men, lawgivers, orators, generals, philosophers, and statesmen; although we find in Greek custom more condemnation of the practice than in Roman law. In Thebes, it was a custom that no honours should be paid at the death of a suicide, and no funeral rites were allowed; the body was ordered to be burned in the absence of the relatives of the deceased. At Athens, a suicide was not allowed to be burned and his ashes preserved, as was the custom for the rich and great, if such died in war, or by a natural death. See Samuel Petit, “De Legibus Atticis.” The body was _buried_ instead, and the right hand struck off and buried in a separate place. See Æschines, Ctesiphon, and in Plato, Laws, Book ix., regulations are laid down for the burial of suicides.