previous next
[39] Further there are cases where a senator sets forth to the senate the reasons which determine him to commit suicide,1 in which there is one legal question, namely, whether a man who desires to kill himself in order to escape the clutches of the law ought to be prevented from so doing, while the remaining questions are all concerned with quality. There are also fictitious cases concerned with wills, in which the only question raised is one of quality, as, for instance, in the controversial theme quoted above,2 where the philosopher, physician and orator all claim the fourth share which their father had left to the most worthy of his sons. The same is true of cases where suitors of equal rank claim the hand of an orphan and the question confronting her relatives is which is the most suitable.

1 Based on a law of Massilia, where the state provided poison for the would-be suicide, provided he could justify himself before the senate.

2 VII. i. 38.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Introduction (Harold Edgeworth Butler, 1922)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: