Stupid Deaths

A small handful of individuals are not content with achieving their names in the footnotes of history and then quietly expiring, no these few top it off by kicking the bucket in a way so ridiculously implausible that people would have talked about them for years even if they hadn't done anything else.
In 612bc Greel lawgiver Charondas issued a law that anyone who brought weapons into the Assembly must be put to death which probably worked well for him until ran into the Assembly to seek help with some thieves, forgetting he had a knife still attached to his belt and oops, he was made to commit suicide to uphold his own law.
Aeschylus was the famous Athenian man who had his bald head mistaken by an Eagle for a rock suitable for breaking a tortoise upon but around the same time Philosopher Empedocles of Akragas considered himself immortal and jumped into a volcano to prove it where he quickly found out he definitely wasn't.
The first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, swallowed pills of Mercury in the belief that they would give him eternal life but they had the exact opposite effect and killed him while Milo of Croton, a 6th century bc Olympic champion wrestler proved his strength by attempting to split a tree stump in half but he got it stuck fast and unable to move, a pack of wolves had Croton's for dinner that night
In 882, King Louis III of France chased a girl into a house and hit his head on the lintel above the door and cracked his skull which might have been less painful than Basil I of Byzantine who shot an arrow at an Antler which was so enraged it charged him, caught its horns in the mans belt and dragged him along, shaking the now dead Emperors body off 16 miles later.  
Béla I of Hungary must have had too many feasts because after a particularly heavy one his Throne collapsed beneath him but it was the weight of the crowd who gathered to hear Henry VI, the King of Germany speech that made the floor give way and straight down into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.
Italian Author Pietro Aretino died after falling off his chair and fracturing his skull after laughing too much and the 1559 jousting tournament was memorable for Henry II of France when a fragment of splintered lance pierced his eye and killed him while Hans Staininger was proud of having the longest beard in Bavaria until he tripped over it and broke his neck in 1567.
Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally stabbed and killed himself with his own baton while over vigorously conducting an orchestra and nobody dared to touch Queen Sunanda Kumariratana when she fell out her boat and drowned as it was punishable by death to place hands upon her.
Inventor Franz Reichelt leapt to his death from the Eiffel Tower to show off his parachute invention which it turned out wasn't quite ready and in 1983 a Tennis linesman was killed by a serve which struck him in the groin and made him collapse in pain, striking his head on the hardcourt surface.
In America, convicted murderer, Michael Godwin's death sentence by electric chair was reduced to life imprisonment but in a real Final Destination moment, he was electrocuted to death anyway when  he attempted to fix a TV and in 1998 Portuguese dance instructor, Alberto Fargo, danced straight out of his 5th floor dance studio whilst demonstrating to his students how to keep their head towards the ceiling whilst doing the Waltz.
Ukrainian student, Vladimir Likhonos, dipped his chewing gum into an explosive powder mistakenly in 2009 and blew his head off  when he chewed it but in Brazil, a nurse got the drip feed and food feed confused and intarvenously injected soup into 88 year old Ilda Vitor Maciel.

Obviously all very sad, funny but very very sad. Funny though.