or children, of life voluntarily and of purpose,
for him the earthly lawgiver legislates as follows: There shall be the
same proclamations about outlawry, and there shall be the same sureties
which have been enacted in the former cases. But in his case, if he be
convicted, the servants of the judges and the magistrates shall slay him
at an appointed place without the city where three ways meet, and there
expose his body naked, and each of the magistrates on behalf of the
whole city shall take a stone and cast it upon the head of the dead man,
and so deliver the city from pollution; after that, they shall bear him
to the borders of the land, and cast him forth unburied, according to
law. And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they
say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself
by violence of his appointed share of life, not because the law of the
state requires him, nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and
inevitable misfortune which has come upon him, nor because he has had
to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or
want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty. For him, what
ceremonies there are to be of purification and burial God knows, and
about these the next of kin should enquire of the interpreters and of
the laws thereto relating, and do according to their injunctions. They
who meet their death in this way shall be buried alone, and none shall
be laid by their side; they shall be buried ingloriously in the borders
of the twelve portions of the land, in such places as are uncultivated
and nameless, and no column or inscription shall mark the place of their
interment. And if a beast of burden or other animal cause the death
of any one, except in the case of anything of that kind happening to
a competitor in the public contests, the kinsmen of the deceased shall
prosecute the slayer for murder, and the wardens of the country, such,
and so many as the kinsmen appoint, shall try the cause, and let the
beast when condemned be slain by them, and let them cast it beyond the
borders. And if any lifeless thing deprive a man of life, except in the
case of a thunderbolt or other fatal dart sent from the Gods--whether
a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or by his falling
upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbour to be
a judge, and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And
he shall