Attitudes toward suicide have varied through time and across cultures. Antiquity to 1700 Suicides played at times prominent roles in ancient legend and history, like with Ajax the Great who killed himself in the Trojan War, and Lucretia whose suicide around 510 B.C. initiated the revolt that displaced the Roman Kingdom with the Roman Republic. One early Greek historical person to die by suicide was Empedocles around 434 B.C. One of his beliefs was that Death was a transformation. It is possible this idea influenced his suicide. Empedocles died by throwing himself into the Sicilian volcano Mount Etna. In general, the pagan world, both Roman and Greek, had a relaxed attitude towards the concept of suicide. The Council of Arles (452) stated "if a slave commits suicide no reproach shall fall upon his master." There are some precursors of Christian hostility to suicide in ancient Greek thinkers. Pythagoras, for example, was against the act, though more on mathematical than moral grounds, believing that there was only a finite number of souls for use in the world, and that the sudden and unexpected departure of one would upset a delicate balance. Aristotle also condemned suicide, though for quite different reasons – in that it robbed the community of the services of one of its members. In Rome, suicide was never a general offense in law, though the whole approach to the question was essentially pragmatic. It was specifically forbidden in three cases: those accused of capital crimes, soldiers and slaves. The reason behind all three was the same – it was uneconomic for these people to die. If the accused killed themselves prior to trial and conviction then the state lost the right to seize their property, a loophole that was only closed by Domitian in the 1st century AD, who decreed that those who died prior to trial were without legal heirs. The suicide of a soldier was treated on the same basis as desertion. If a slave killed themselves within six months of purchase, the master could claim a full refund from the former owner. The Romans, however, fully approved of what might be termed "patriotic suicide"; death, in other words, as an alternative to dishonor. For the Stoics, a philosophical sect which originated in Greece, death was a guarantee of personal freedom, an escape from an unbearable reality that had nothing left to give. And so it was