Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A J van Hooff.
Attitudes to suicide differ between societies, and also change with time. 104 items of ancient art that show suicide have been examined and catalogued. These icons, the most distinctive of which are discussed here, confirm the view suggested by literary sources that in the Graeco-Roman world self-killing was preferably seen as a deliberate, resolute, and heroic act.
Attitudes toward suicide have not always been the same as they are today, and understanding the ideas of other cultures and times could enable us to reexamine contemporary conceptions of self-killing. Greek and Roman personal testimonies were examined to investigate the thesis that ancients did not see suicide as caused by psychic or emotional forces. Indeed, though the documents of antiquity give us a closer look into personal motives, they demonstrate that even would-be self-killers themselves wished to regard suicide as a rational act of volition.
There is room for a more balanced view of old age among the ancient Greeks than is furnished by De Beauvoir's la Vieillesse and other more or less one-sided publications. The old body was despised by the Greeks of classical times; especially walking with three legs (tripous) was stressed as a mark of old age. The Hippocratic writings show some interest in the infirmities of elderly people. Specific psychic and intellectual qualities were not attributed to senescence: old age brought out good and bad qualities of a person more sharply than before. The share of old people in the population cannot be established with any certainty, but there was always a group of men in their sixties who had specific tasks in society. Old age was not an autonomous theme in art, it was solely accidental. The position of the elderly was challenged occasionally in democratic Athens, but it was never undermined. Old people were never marginated in classical Greece.