Hi. So just to preface this: suicide and attitudes towards suicide are certainly not a subject specialism of mine, so it might be the case that this is indeed based on an historical event that I am just not aware of, and if that is the case then I would be glad if someone more knowledgeable than myself could correct me or clarify my thoughts. But with that in mind: I’m unaware of any “epidemic” of young girls committing suicide in 5th-4th century Athens as Dr Jung suggests. My guess is that perhaps Jung may have either misunderstood some detail in the ancient literature (which I’ll explain below), or has made an anachronistic mistake and is referring to an event from a later period that I am unaware of.

But since he specifically mentioned “four or five hundred years” BC I thought I could briefly explain attitudes to suicide in Ancient Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and why this story is very unlikely based on how victims of suicide were perceived and treated both culturally and legally.

The main emphasis of this story is the desecration of the young girl’s body by displaying her naked publicly as a deterrent. Publicly exposing the bodies of criminals was indeed a practice used by the Athenians, a specific pit in Athens called the Barathron was used as the spot for condemned criminals to be disposed of. This state sanctioned condemnation of the body was important: not only were the proper funeral rites for the dead not performed for the criminal, but it also symbolically ensured that the “pollution” they had caused by committing such a heinous crime was physically removed from the city itself and disposed of (more on this below). More specific to Jung’s anecdote, Plato (Laws, 871D) when discussing different forms of crimes and applicable punishments suggests that people who had committed a murder against their own kin (which the Greeks regarded as worse than other murder) should be executed and their bodies thrown out naked in a crossroads outside of the city limits. Though Plato is theorising about justice he is very likely using Athenian law as the basis of his ideas. So as you can see a specific punishment for criminals condemned of capital offences could include publicly humiliating the condemn’s body by leaving it naked and exposed without the proper funeral rites having been performed.

So far Jung’s anecdote is not completely out of the bounds of possibility, but of course we are dealing with suicide victims, not murderers or criminals. And though suicide was a serious taboo, for the Ancient Greeks there seems to have been a very clear and important distinction to make between the two. For example, we are told by Plutarch (Themistocles, 22) that in the Barathron “public officers cast out the bodies of those who have been put to death, and carry forth the garments and nooses of those who have dispatched themselves by hanging”. This detail is incredibly important because Plutarch distinguishes between the bodies of the criminals and the objects of the suicide victims being disposed of. For the Greeks any sort of violent death, whether that be murder, war or suicide appears to have been considered to cause a “pollution”, Robert Parker defined this pollution as “a kind of institution, the metaphysical justification for a set of conventional responses of life through violent death” (1983, pp. 120). For the Greeks when a violent death occurs the pollution must be driven out through religious purification - this explains why the body of a murderer for example is thrown in the Barathron, as a way of ridding themselves of this polluter. But Plutarch’s point suggests that a victim of suicide was themselves not considered the polluter, but instead the object with which they took their own life. We see this elsewhere in Greek literature, for example Timachidas of Lindos tells us of a corpse found hanging in a temple of Athena in Rhodes: to clear the pollution the oracle of Delphi told the priests to replace the roof beams that the victim used to hang themselves with to purify the temple again.

This distinction of pollution is incredibly important: it essentially means the suicide victim is considered (largely) blameless, and hence why the victim themselves is not polluted. We see this a lot in Greek Tragedy also where suicides are a common denouement to the story: tragic heroes and heroines such as Ajax and Jocasta kill themselves to escape very human issues such as social ridicule, loss of honour, regret over their previous crimes etc. - and the audience is asked to pity - not revile - their actions.

So with this in mind, it would be incredibly unlikely that the poor girl who committed suicide would be so publicly shamed and ridiculed. Though of course suicide was a taboo and looked down upon by most writers who discuss it, the historical evidence seems to suggest that the victim was considered innocent and the body of a suicide victim would not be desecrated.

There is one exception to this; and that is a speech given by the statesman Aeschines, where he mentions off-hand that “when sticks and stones and iron, voiceless and senseless things, fall on any one and kill him, we cast them beyond the borders - and when a man kills himself, the hand that did the deed is buried apart from the body”. (Against Ctesiphon, 244) Which seems to suggest that the hand of a suicide victim would be cut off during burial as this was considered the polluter. This is the only reference to this practice that we have, and so it’s not clear how widespread this practice was, but even in this you can still see that Aeschines makes a clear distinction between the hand itself and the individual by comparing it to inanimate objects - the victim themself is still blameless.

To further prove how unlikely Jung’s anecdote would be: Plato tells us that before Socrates took his own life by drinking hemlock, a punishment he was forced into by the Athenian courts, he took a bath to spare the women who would tend to his body the trouble of it later. Socrates seems to have expected that he would be given proper funeral rites after his death. So clearly even institutional suicide (i.e suicide as a form of punishment by the state) was still regarded as suicide and not as execution, and they will not receive the same fate as other criminals executed by the state.

The only thing I can think of that may validate Jung’s anecdote is whether this was an extreme exception taken by the Areopagus in a time of crisis. As I said I am unaware of any “epidemic” of such a kind in Athens in the fifth or fourth centuries, but we are told by Lysias, when recounting the horrors of the government of the Thirty Tyrants in 403 BC, that they banned those who they executed or forced into suicide from being given funeral honours (Lysias, Against Eratosthenes 12.96). This is the only comparable time I can think of where a suicide victim was denied funeral rites, but this was an extreme exception and Lysias uses this as proof of the government’s ruthlessness, suggesting suicide victims are never normally treated this way.

So to sum up: I’m unaware of any period in the fifth-fourth centuries BC in Athens where an epidemic of suicides occurred, nor would the treatment of the victim’s body be in-line with contemporary attitudes to suicide victims nor legal punishments for those who committed suicide. As I said at the beginning, my guess is Jung may have misunderstood something he read on Ancient Greece, is presenting an apocryphal story, or he’s relating a different period or an event that’s just out of my area of expertise!

Hope this helps!

Parker, R. (1983) “Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion”, Oxford.

Garrison, E. P. (1991) “Attitudes towards suicide in Ancient Greece”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. 121, pp. 1-34.