Roman schoolboys sometimes died by suicide from beating-related shame

Evidence

Quintilian is saying — and the Latin is heavy here — while the wretched and weakened body is being assaulted with these blows, the soul itself — animus — flees to the shame of the punishment itself. And then the closing clause: the shame which has driven young men into untimely death. … This is — and I want to flag what we are reading — this is a teacher, in 95 CE, writing that boys have killed themselves over the shame of being beaten in school. He is not saying it abstractly. He is placing the claim, in his careful Latin, in the form a Roman writer uses when he is referring to something that has actually happened, that the reader is expected to know about. — , The Rod and the Child, 566

Categorization

• XREF: Expected to verify against modern research: Gershoff’s meta-analyses and Grogan-Kaylor’s work link school corporal punishment to suicidality as mentioned later in this same chapter. — connects to: Sumerian schoolboys copied satirical texts about their own beating — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 27
• QUESTION: Is there independent corroboration that Roman schoolchildren died by suicide from school beating shame, or does this rest solely on Quintilian’s privileged-passing assertion?

Related

• Sumerian schoolboys copied satirical texts about their own beating (similarity 0.85)