The famous suicides of antiquity generally resulted from one of three causes:—First, it was practised by those who wished to avoid pain and personal suffering of body and mind; secondly, when a person considered the act as a necessary vindication of his honour; and thirdly, when life was sacrificed as an example to others. The first class is the most excusable of the three. Pain, physical or mental, puts a man’s courage severely to the test. He may have to choose between the alternative of years of unmitigated anguish, or an immediate release from torture. Need we feel surprise at many resorting to the latter alternative, when they have been taught to believe death either to be an eternal sleep, or a sure entrance into regions of happiness! How many instances have we on record of persons who have dispatched themselves to avoid falling into the hands of an enemy! The case of the wife of Asdrubal, the Carthaginian general, is a famous instance of the kind. Asdrubal had deserted his post, and had fled to Scipio; and during his absence his wife took shelter with her troops in the temple, which she set on fire. She then attired herself in her richest robes, and holding her two children in her hands, addressed Scipio—who had surrounded the building with his troops—in the following language:—“You, O Roman, are only acting according to the laws of open war; but may the gods of Carthage, and those in concert with them, punish that false wretch who, by such a base desertion, has betrayed his country, his gods, his wife, his children! Let him adorn thy gay triumph; let him suffer in the sight of all Rome those indignities and tortures he so justly merits!” The case of Nicocles, King of Paphos, in Cyprus, who committed suicide in conjunction with his wife and daughter, on the approach of King Ptolemy, is another in point. Isocrates, the celebrated Athenian orator, starved himself to death, sooner than submit to the dominion of Philip of Macedon. Demosthenes also poisoned himself, when Antipater, Alexander’s ambassador, required the Athenians to deliver up their orators, fearful of being subjected to slavery and disgrace. The persecution to which the Romans subjected Hannibal, after he was oppressed with years and sunk in obscurity, impelled him to have recourse to the poison which he always kept about him in a ring, against sudden emergencies. Mithridates took poison, and administered the same to his wives and daughters, in order to escape being taken prisoner by Pompey, before whose victorious arms he had been compelled to fly.