Death as Life's Greatest Teacher — Letters from a Stoic

Seneca was in the middle of a pleasant meditation on the immortality of the soul when Lucilius's letter arrived and pulled him out of it. Letter 102 opens with that mild complaint and then turns to the actual question at hand: can posthumous fame be a good? The puzzle is Stoic in flavor, a good must be something the person can actually possess, and the dead cannot possess anything.

Seneca works through the argument carefully, distinguishing between goods that are present and goods that are coming, and between what we have and what we anticipate. But the letter lifts out of the technical question and into something larger: what does it mean to contemplate your own death, and can that contemplation be genuinely pleasant? Seneca finds that it can.

He is not performing equanimity; he is describing what it actually feels like to be weary of the fragments of a shattered existence and ready to pass into infinity. The letter ends where it began, with the idea that a great man serves as an example even after death, and that memory of a noble life is as useful to us as his presence was. Often our thoughts run back to the hero.

Often the glory won by his race recurs to the mind. This is why it matters how we live.