Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me

"Edith Hall is a very interesting writer and thinker. She’s a Classicist and she’s a philosopher. She’s an Aristotle enthusiast. She also writes about poetry. She seems to publish the book almost every six months. This is a very personal one. It’s a mixture of autobiography, family memoir, analysis of Greek tragedy, philosophy and confession. It’s a book about suicide that arises from her own family history of suicide. And Edith herself talks about her own suicidal ideation at various points. She’s open about having been depressed and having seriously considered suicide herself. The big theme of the book is not just trying to understand her family and the impact the suicides have had upon subsequent generations, but also how much better the ancient Greeks were at discussing the impact of suicide than our contemporary commentators, including philosophical commentators. For Edith, ‘better’ means recognizing the generational impact of a suicide in a family. She quotes Sophocles line from Oedipus The Tyrant ‘The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen themselves.’ Edith is very clear that the liberal account of suicide, where it’s an individual’s decision that doesn’t affect anybody else, is just not accurate. What really happens when a suicide takes place is that even people who don’t know that person very well can be deeply affected. People who know them, their family, and even people who haven’t yet been born, are all hugely impacted—almost inevitably. In ancient Greece people would talk about being being ‘chased by Furies.’ There could be a sense of a curse on the family. And there is a modern day equivalent. I know this from personal experience: my grandfather’s attempted suicide that resulted in him being put in a psychiatric hospital that thirty years before my birth, has affected me deeply even though I never knew him. For Edith, the deaths by suicide in her family have very much hung over her whole life. So one of her themes is that somebody who decides to commit suicide should, if at all possible, take that into account. There’s a sense in which moral decisions around suicide should acknowledge the complexity of relationships that we have with one another. Our decisions deeply affect those around us, particularly something as significant as the decision to kill oneself. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Like all of Edith’s books, this is extremely easy to read, despite the subject matter. It oscillates between dark personal memoir and really illuminating discussions of passages of ancient Greek tragedy. I wanted to include this book because I think it’s important to have a broad conception of what philosophy is. In an academic philosophy department in the UK, this probably wouldn’t be classified as philosophy. But so much the worse for philosophy departments! This book grapples with deep questions about life and death, just as Camus ’s The Myth of Sisyphus does. She does this by drawing upon ancient philosophy as well as Greek tragedy. It’s richly embedded in real life, in literature, and in philosophy. For me, it’s much more authentic than many abstract philosophical discussions about putative suicide attempts and what the implicit ethical implications might be, and it’s written with passion and honesty. It’s reassuring that she can write a book like this while remaining a British academic—she’s in a Classics department. But it’s very encouraging that she hasn’t been knocked off her path by obligations to produce a certain kind of monograph or series of journal articles. Having said that, she is a very dynamic person and no doubt is also producing academic research of a high quality alongside this."