Senicide

The Heruli were a Germanic tribe during the Migration Period (about 400 to 800 CE). Procopius states in his work The Wars, that the Heruli placed the sick and elderly on a tall stack of wood and stabbed them to death before setting the pyre alight.[4]

In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the illegal practice of senicide – known locally as thalaikoothal – is said to occur dozens or perhaps hundreds of times each year.[5]

A common belief is that the Inuit would leave their elderly on the ice to die. Senicide among the Inuit people was rare, except during famines. The last known case of an Inuit senicide was in 1939.[6][7][8][9]

Ubasute (姥捨, 'abandoning an old woman'), a custom allegedly performed in Japan in the distant past, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die. This custom has been vividly depicted in The Ballad of Narayama (a 1956 novel by Shichirō Fukazawa, a 1958 film, and a 1983 film).

An alleged custom was to throw incapable or ill elders off certain cliffs, a confirmed practice was the performing of euthanasia on ill, senile or suffering elders carried out by selected women named accabbadoras (lit. 'terminator' or 'ender') that after a blessing of the soon to be deceased would proceed to kill them through suffocation or blunt force to the back of the head by wooden mallet.

Lapot is a mythical Serbian practice of disposing of one's parents.

In Nordic folklore, the ättestupa is a cliff where elderly people were said to leap, or be thrown, to death. While the practice has no historical evidence, the trope has survived as an urban legend, and a metaphor for deficient welfare for the elderly.

Parkin provides eighteen cases of senicide which the people of antiquity believed happened.[10]^:265 Of these cases, only two of them occurred in Greek society; another took place in Roman society, while the rest happened in other cultures. One example that Parkin provides is of the island of Keos in the Aegean Sea. Although many different variations of the Keian story exist, the legendary practice may have begun when the Athenians besieged the island. In an attempt to preserve the food supply, the Keians voted for all people over 60 years of age to commit suicide by drinking hemlock.[10]^:264 The other case of Roman senicide occurred on the island of Sardinia, where human sacrifices of 70-years-old fathers were made by their sons to the titan Cronus.

The case of institutionalized senicide occurring in Rome comes from a proverb stating that 60-year-olds were to be thrown from the bridge. Whether or not this act occurred in reality was highly disputed in antiquity and continues to be doubted today. The most comprehensive explanation of the tradition comes from Festus writing in the fourth century AD who provides several different beliefs of the origin of the act, including human sacrifice by ancient Roman natives, a Herculean association, and the notion that older men should not vote because they no longer provided a duty to the state.[10]^:267 This idea to throw older men into the river probably coincides with the last explanation given by Festus. That is, younger men did not want the older generations to overshadow their wishes and ambitions and, therefore, suggested that the old men should be thrown off the bridge, where voting took place, and not be allowed to vote.