Ancient legislators uniformly regarded a _felo de se_ as a criminal against society and treated him as a kind of traitor. The man had enjoyed the support and protection of the body-politic during his infancy and youth, and, by taking his own life, he shook off the responsibilities and shirked the duties devolving upon him as an adult member of the commonwealth. This is why self-murder was called felony and as such involved forfeiture of goods. Calchas would not permit the body of “the mad Ajax,” who died by his own hand, to be burned; and the Christian Church of to-day refuses to bury in consecrated ground with religious rites any person who deliberately cuts short the thread of his existence and thus commits treason against the Most High. The Athenians ignominiously lopped off the hand of a suicide and buried the guilty instrument of his death, as an accursed thing, apart from the rest of the interred or incremated body. In some communities all persons over sixty years of age have been left free to kill themselves, if they wished to do so. They had performed the duties of citizenship and of procreation and were permitted to retire in this way, if they saw fit. In very ancient times, the magistrates of Massalia (Marseilles, then a Greek colony) are said to have kept on hand a supply of poison to be given to any citizen, who, on due examination, was found to have good and sufficient reason for taking his own life. Suicide was thus legalized and facilitated, and thereby rendered honourable, and was perhaps found more convenient and economical than to grant pensions or to support paupers. It was a summary method of getting rid of those who had finished the struggle for existence or failed in it, and in either case might be a burden to themselves or to the state. On the other hand, when a suicidal mania seized upon the maidens of Miletos, an Ionian city in Caria, and threatened to produce a dearth of wives and mothers, the municipal authorities decreed that the bodies of all such persons should be exposed naked in the market-place, in order that virgin modesty and shame might overcome the desire of death, and check a self-destructive passion extremely detrimental to the Milesian commonwealth. It is true, as Blackstone asserts, that the Church claimed deodands as her due and put the price of them into her own coffers; but this fact does not explain their origin. They were an expression of the same feeling that led the public authorities to fill up a well, in which a person had been drowned, not as a precautionary measure, but as a solemn act of expiation; or that condemned and confiscated a ship, which, by lurching, had thrown a man overboard and caused his death.