History of Monsters. 222

ry, he punished her in the following manner: he shut her up with a fierce horse and provided food to neither of them. Consequently, the horse, driven mad by hunger, devoured the girl. From this originated the proverb, "A man more impious than Hippomenes." According to Crinitus, Hercules also slew his sons when he was seized by epilepsy and lost his mind. Livy recounts how Manlius Torquatus struck off his son’s head with an axe because he had engaged the Samnites in battle contrary to orders.

Similarly, according to Plutarch, Cassius the standard-bearer killed his son Crassus Brutus during the war between the Romans and the Latins because the youth had intended to open the gates to the enemy. Finally, Caelius records that Diodorus, having fathered many sons, slit the throats of all but one, so that the survivor might emerge wealthier and more powerful. Indeed, if we wished to recount the slayers of brothers and sisters, or the women who killed their husbands, and conversely the men who killed their wives, we would surely run out of time.

Now we must hasten to describe those who took their own lives. Lactantius Firmianus first mentions the philosopher Cleanthes, who, having gained knowledge of the immortality of souls, sought a voluntary death. Textor relates that Menander stated Publius Terence drowned himself after losing one hundred and eight plays that he had translated into Latin from Greek. From the same author, we learn that the Sicilian poet Empedocles, seeking immortality through a novel form of death, cast himself into the burning craters of Mount Etna. Likewise, the poet Labienus, seeing his books committed to the flames by public decree because of his excessive freedom in criticizing others, refused to outlive his own monuments and submitted to the yoke of a voluntary death.

The iambic poet Hipponax took it so bitterly when the painter Bubalus depicted him with a deformed face that he pursued the artist with such insulting verses that he forced him to end his life with a noose. From this arose the adage, "An Hipponactean proclamation," a proverb which Cicero occasionally used in his *Letters to Friends*. Similarly, when the Parian poet Archilochus was rejected by Lycambes' daughter Neobule, who had been promised to him in marriage, he hounded Lycambes with such shameful iambics that he drove both the father and daughter to the gallows. Regarding this poet's rage, Horace wrote: "Rage armed Archilochus with his own Iambic."

Sardanapalus, the King of the Assyrians, once a man so soft and effeminate, saw his affairs being ruined and no hope remaining. He built a pyre in his palace, carried his belongings there, and threw himself into the flames. In this way alone, by showing no fear of death, did he prove himself a man. Ovid mentions this kind of death in his *Ibis*: "And may you cast your dearest bodies onto the pyre with you, which was the end of Sardanapalus's life."

Themistocles the Athenian, son of Neocles, was exiled due to the envy of his fellow citizens and fled to Artaxerxes. When he was forced to go to war against his own country, he died after drinking mouse blood. Likewise, Nero—the son of Domitius and Agrippina and a filthy cesspool of every vice—was judged an enemy of the state by the Senate. To ensure he did not suffer a fate worthy of his deeds, he left the city and ran himself through with his own sword. Ausonius records his end thus: "The matricide Nero endured the force of his own blade."

According to Plutarch, Portia, the daughter of Cato, sought a blade to kill herself upon hearing of her husband Brutus's death. When the weapon was hidden from her, she swallowed burning coals and thus gave up her spirit in an unheard-of manner of death. Similarly, after her husband Antony had died, Cleopatra learned she was being kept alive by Augustus for his triumph; she offered her arm to be bitten by an asp and departed this life. But why do we wander through these tales? We read in Josephus the Hebrew that Herod, King of Judea and son of Antipater—after slaughtering the Innocents and killing three of his own sons, namely Alexander, Aristobulus, and Antipater—died with worms swarming over his entire body, an end he brought upon himself while attempting to intercept the sacred birth of the Blessed Ever-Virgin. Similarly, when Judas had sold Christ to the Jews for a paltry price, he weighed the gravity of his crime and, despairing of pardon, rushed to the noose.

To these succeeds Pontius Pilate, a native of Lyon,