Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across any number of flashpoints, from one’s own or others’ beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one’s place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque—in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self.

This article aims to show that Sophocles anticipates questions about the autonomous subject and “ownership” of the self that are central to contemporary discourse. It suggests that Sophoclean self-killing, often considered quintessentially individualistic, in fact reflects a preoccupation with the autocheir , a less definite figure than our “suicide,” since s/he may also be (actually or potentially) a kin-killer. Also, that where Sophocles attempts to distinguish self-killing from kin-killing, it is to isolate and explore the nature and (not inevitably negative) implications of autocheiria . Close readings of scenes from Antigone , Ajax , and Trachiniae demonstrate that this is achieved through the elision or obscuring of the moment of self-destruction, and the posthumous analysis of self-killing in the “verbal post-mortem.” A strand of metacriticism suggests that editors committed to a model of suicide as unequivocal act intentionally performed by a single agent have sometimes oversimplified the complexity evidenced by the transmitted text.