Suicide is educational. Suicide demonstrates suicide for others to suicide.

A suicide that displays prudence and courage, writes Hume, sets an example for others. It speaks of the moment when happiness gives way to misery, and teaches others of freedom and how they might proceed accordingly.[1]
It is said that Cicero read the death of Socrates three times in his resolving to die.

Following centuries of condemnation during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance realized a rebirth of suicide as a noble death including for ladies as well as lords. Published in 1528, Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) established throughout Europe the ideal of the perfect courtier and the perfect lady. Within its pages, Castiglione admires the women of Saguntum, and their suicides, according to “the beauty of the gesture.”

Other works of the times were instructive on female suicide, often in the Greek and Roman worlds, as models of grace and nobility. Thomas Elyot’s Defence of Good Women (1530), honors the courage of Porcia — wife of Brutus — and Pauline — Seneca’s wife — who accompanied their husbands into death.

In Palace of Pleasure (1566), William Painter retells the suicide of Pantheia, wife of Abradatas, first reported in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Painter writes that upon learning of the death of Abradatas who fell in battle alongside Cyrus: “Panthea with a sworde, whiche she had prepared long time for that purpose, killed her selfe, and laying her head vpon her husbandes breaste, she yelded from her chaste bodie, her innocent ghost.”[2]

Augustine exhorts: “That on this martyr’s day, make the invisible goals of the martyrs your aim; prepare your spirits to endure it.”[3] For Bonhoeffer, the early Christian martyrs are exemplar, who are but imitators of Christ, supreme example and standard. “The acts of the early Christian martyrs are full of evidence which shows how Christ transfigures for his own the hour of their mortal agony by granting them the unspeakable assurance of his presence.” Bonhoeffer instructs: “suffering is the badge of true discipleship.”[4]

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[1] Hume, “Of Suicide,” in Essays, 588.
[2] William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, “The Eleuenth Nouell.”
[3] Augustine, “Sermon on the Feast of Martyrs Day.”
[4] Cost of Discipleship, 100-1.