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They did. The exact thing you're describing happened in ancient Greece multiple times. In fact, the resolve of an entire community to destroy itself rather than face enslavement was common enough to have a name: Phokian desperation.

In the 480s BC, a few years before Xerxes invaded mainland Greece, there was a war between the Phokians and their powerful northern neighbours, the Thessalians. This was a so-called "war without heralds" - the name the Greeks used to describe a conflict so bitter that no quarter was asked or given by either side. When the Thessalians invaded Phokis with their full strength and Phokian defeat seemed imminent, the people of the region made a decision:

They gathered together in one spot their women, children, movable property, and also their clothes, gold, silver and images of the gods, and making a vast pyre they left in charge a force of 30 men. These were under orders that, should the Phokians chance to be defeated in the battle, they were first to put to death the women and the children, then to lay them like victims with the valuables on the pyre, and finally to set it alight and perish themselves, either by each other's hands or by charging the cavalry of the Thessalians. Hence all forlorn hopes are called by the Greeks "Phokian desperation".

-- Pausanias 10.1.6-7

Victory in the ensuing battle prevented a self-inflicted genocide, but the resolve was no less real.

In this account (also preserved in Polyainos, Stratagems 8.65) it seems as if the plan of collective suicide was something the men inflicted on their wives and children without consulting them. But many Greeks believed that the women and children would have willingly chosen this fate, and another account of the same event presents this as fact:

Nearly all voted approval of the plan, but one man arose in the council and said it was only right that the women approve this also; otherwise they must reject it, and use no compulsion. When report of this speech reached the women, they held a meeting by themselves and passed the same vote, and they exalted Daïphantos for having conceived the best plan for Phokis. It is said that the children also held an assembly on their own account and passed their vote too.

-- Plutarch, On the Courage of Women (Moralia 244D)

We shouldn't be tempted to take this as the literal truth of what happened; these are late sources embellishing an already-ancient tale, and the detail that there was a separate children's assembly is especially incredible. But it does show that the notion of mass suicide to avoid subjection and enslavement was considered morally right and worthy of admiration. Pausanias, the first source cited above, listed this story among "the most renowned exploits of the Phokians" (10.1.3).

In 310 BC, king Nikokles of Cyprus was ousted by Ptolemy during his conquest of the island. Nikokles and his brothers, knowing that the people were on Ptolemy's side and saw the invader as a liberator, chose suicide - and the women of his family chose the same fate for themselves and their children. Our sources present this as a sign of their great honour and nobility:

Axiothea, the wife of Nikokles, wishing to emulate the glorious resolution of the deceased, assembled their sisters, mothers, and wives; and exhorted them not to submit to anything unworthy of their family. Accordingly they barred the doors of the women's apartments, and while the citizens were crowding into the palace, with their children in their arms they set fire to the house. Some dispatched themselves with a sword, and others resolutely leaped into the flames. Axiothea, who was the promoter of the enterprise, after she had seen them all thus gloriously fall, first stabbed, and then threw herself into the fire; to preserve even her dead body from falling into the hands of the enemy.

-- Polyainos, Stratagems 8.48

This glorification of the resolve not to leave one's fate in enemy hands meshed with a belief that free women should prefer to die rather than endure rape and enslavement. A very precious epigram from Miletos confirms this; the source is precious because, though quoted in a late anthology, it was written by a woman, the Hellenistic poet Anyte. Her epigram celebrates three local girls who chose to kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Galatians (it is written from the girls' perspective):

We leave you, Miletos, dear homeland, because we rejected the lawless insolence of impious Gauls. We were three maidens, your citizens. The violent aggression of the Celts brought us to this fate. We did not wait for unholy union or marriage, but we found ourselves a protector in Death.

We do not know anything more about this event, but it seems likely that the three girls were captured in a Galatian raid and chose - by whatever means - to end their lives rather than be treated as enslaved women were. The epigram was likely commissioned by their grieving parents to broadcast the righteousness of their choice.

But this kind of celebration of suicide as a way to avoid the consequences of defeat encouraged the escalation of self-inflicted violence. It was both the horror of what was about to happen and the demands of proper behaviour that prompted some communities to destroy themselves when defeat seemed imminent. If the alternative is only death, many people will endure even the prospect of a lifetime of suffering. But if the alternative is a chance at everlasting glory for "saving" one's honour, the story is different. In extreme despair - in Phokian desperation - humanity's capacity for violence is turned inward with devastating force. Antiquity is sadly replete with harrowing episodes like the fall of the Lykian city of Xanthos to Brutus in 42 BC (Plutarch, Life of Brutus 30):

The Lycians were suddenly possessed by a dreadful and indescribable impulse to madness, which can be likened best to a passion for death. At any rate, all ages of them, freemen and slaves with their wives and children, shot missiles from the walls at the enemy who were helping them to combat the flames, and with their own hands brought up reeds and wood and all manner of combustibles, and so spread the fire over the city, feeding it with all sorts of material and increasing its strength and fury in every way.

When the flames had darted forth and encircled the city on all sides, and blazed out mightily, Brutus, distressed at what was going on, rode round outside the city in his eagerness to help, and with outstretched hands begged the Xanthians to spare and save their city.

No one heeded him, however, but all sought in every way to destroy themselves, men and women alike; even the little children with shouts and shrieks either leaped into the fire, or threw themselves headlong from the walls, or cast themselves beneath their fathers' swords, baring their throats and begging to be struck. After the city had been thus destroyed, a woman was seen dangling in a noose; she had a dead child fastened to her neck, and with a blazing torch was trying to set fire to her dwelling.

So tragic was the spectacle that Brutus could not bear to see it, and burst into tears on hearing of it; he also proclaimed a prize for any soldier who should succeed in saving the life of a Lykian.