When Death Becomes Freedom — Letters from a Stoic

The Alexandrian mail-boats sail into view, and the crowd rushes to the docks. Seneca stays put. Letter 77 opens with that contrast, everyone racing toward news from the world, Seneca content to be left behind, and builds from it into one of his most direct arguments about death and readiness. The story at the letter's centre is Julius Montanus, who postponed his death until it suited others rather than himself, and Tullius Marcellinus, who chose to starve himself to death over a lingering illness and did so with great deliberateness and an unexpected peace. Seneca's argument: life is not to be measured by length but by quality of acting.

A play is not better for being longer. Neither is a life. The moment of stopping matters less than how the stopping is done. He demolishes the common consolation that there is always more time: every day has a sunrise and a sunset; every day is complete in itself.

There is no definite number you are bound to reach. Dying is one of life's duties. No one deserts their post by performing it well. The letter closes with an image: it is with life as it is with a play, it matters not how long the action is spun out, but how good the acting is.

Stop whenever you choose. Only see to it that the closing period is well turned.