At length he retired to his apartment, and, when all was quiet in the house, he lay down upon his bed and stabbed himself with his sword He fell from the bed by the blow, or else from the effect of some convulsive motion which the penetrating steel occasioned.

His son and servants, hearing the fall, came rushing into the room, raised him from the floor, and attempted to bind up and stanch the wound.

Cato would not permit them to do it.

He resisted them violently as soon as he was conscious of what they intended.

Finding that a struggle would only aggravate the horrors of the scene, and even hasten its termination, they left the bleeding hero to his fate, and in a few minutes he died.
[Sidenote: Folly of his suicide.] The character of Cato, and the circumstances under which his suicide was committed, make it, on the whole, the most conspicuous act of suicide which history records; and the events which followed show in an equally conspicuous manner the extreme folly of the deed.