How to Die, By Seneca. A Puke(TM) Audiobook

He lives badly who does not know how to die well.
ON SERENITY OF MIND 11.4.

One. PREPARE YOURSELF.
Seneca’s greatest prose work, the Moral Epistles, is a collection of letters addressed to a close friend, Lucilius, who like Seneca was in his 60s at the time the Epistles were composed, AD 63 to 65. Death and dying are a prominent theme in these letters and several deal almost entirely with that theme, including letters 30, 70, 77, 93, and 101, all represented in this volume either in whole, as signaled by the inclusion of their salutations and sign-offs, or in large part.
The letters usually take as their point of departure an event in Seneca’s daily life, such as a visit to an ill friend, or, as in the case of the excerpt below, an idea Seneca had encountered in his reading. Though they take the form of an intimate correspondence, the Epistles were primarily written for publication, and the “you” addressed in them is sometimes Lucilius but at other times the Roman public, or even humanity generally.
Epicurus says, “Rehearse for death,” or, if this conveys the meaning better to us, “it’s a great thing to learn how to die.” Perhaps you think it useless to learn something that must only be used once; but this is the very reason why we ought to rehearse. We must study always the thing we cannot tell from experience whether we know. “Rehearse for death”; the man who tells us this bids us rehearse for freedom. Those who have learned how to die have unlearned how to be slaves. It is a power above, and beyond, all other powers. What matter to them the prison-house, the guards, the locks? They have a doorway of freedom. There’s only one chain that holds us in bondage, the love of life. If it can’t be cast off, let it be thus diminished that, if at some point circumstance demands it, nothing will stop or deter us from making ourselves ready to do at once what needs to be done.
Epistle 26.8 to 10.
In the letter excerpted below, Seneca coaches Lucilius as to how he should advise an unnamed friend who has withdrawn from public life into quieter pursuits.
If [your friend] had been born in Parthia, he would be holding a bow in his hands right from infancy; if in Germany, he would brandish a spear as soon as he reached boyhood; if he had lived in the time of our ancestors, he would have learned to ride in the cavalry and to strike down his foe in hand-to-hand combat. Each nation has its own training to coax and command its members. Which one, then, must your friend practice? The one that has good effect against all weapons and against every kind of enemy: contempt of death.
No one doubts that death has something terrible about it, such that our minds, which Nature endowed with a love of itself, are disturbed by it. Otherwise there would be no need to make ourselves ready and hone ourselves for that which we might enter by a certain voluntary impulse, just as we all are motivated by self-preservation. No one learns to lie down contentedly in a bed of roses, if the need arises, but rather we steel ourselves for this: to not betray a confidence under torture, or to stand on guard, though wounded, through the night, if the need arises, without even leaning on an upright spear, since sleep has a way of sneaking up on those who lean against some support.
But what if a great yearning for longer life holds you in its grip? You must believe that none of the things that depart from your sight, and that are subsumed into the universe from which they sprang (and will soon spring again), is used up; these things pause, but do not die, just as death, which we fear and shun, interrupts but does not strip away our life. The day will come again which will return us into the light. Many would reject that day, were it not that it returns us without our memories.
But I will instruct you carefully in the way that all things that seem to die are in fact only transformed; thus the one who will return to the world should leave it with equanimity. Just look at how the circuit of the universe returns upon itself. You will see that nothing in this cosmos is extinguished, but everything falls and rises by turns. The summer departs, but the year will bring another; winter falls away, but its own months will restore it. Night blocks the sun, but in an instant daylight will drive that night away. Whatever movement of the constellations has passed, repeats; one part of the sky is always rising, another part sinking below the horizon.
Let me at last come to an end, but I will add this one thought: neither infants, nor children, nor those whose minds are afflicted, are afraid of death; it would be repellent, if our reason did not offer us the same contentment to which they are led by their folly. Farewell. (Epistle 36.7 to 12)
Seneca suffered his whole life from respiratory illness, probably including tuberculosis, and from asthma. His discomfort was such that, in young adulthood, he contemplated suicide, according to his own report. He must have experienced attacks like the one described below throughout his life, but they took on added significance as he grew older, especially given that the name doctors gave to them (according to Seneca) was meditatio mortis, “rehearsal for death.”
Dear Lucilius,
Ill health had granted me a long reprieve; then it came on me suddenly. “What sort of illness?” you ask. It’s an apt question, since there’s none that I haven’t experienced. But one alone is, you might say, my allotment. I don’t know what its Greek name is, but it could be fittingly called suspirium. It comes on with sudden and brief force, like a tornado; it’s nearly over within an hour, for who could die for a long time? Every physical discomfort and danger passes through me; there’s nothing I find more aggravating. And how could I not? This is not illness, that’s something else entirely, but loss of life and soul. Therefore the doctors call it “rehearsal for death,” and sometimes the spirit accomplishes what it often has attempted.
Do you suppose I’m cheerful as I write these things, because I’ve escaped? I think it would be ridiculous to delight in this outcome as though it were a form of good health, just as ridiculous as to proclaim victory when one’s court case has been postponed. Yet, even in the midst of suffocation, I did not cease taking comfort from brave and happy thoughts. “What’s this?” I say to myself. “Does death make trial of me so frequently? Let it: I’ve done likewise to death, for a long time.” When was that, you ask? Before I was born: for death is nonexistence. I know what that’s like. It will be the same after me as it was before me. If death holds any torment, then that torment must also have existed before we came forth into the light, but, back then, we felt nothing troubling. I ask you, wouldn’t you call it a very foolish thing if someone judges that a lamp is worse off after it’s snuffed out than before it has been lighted? We too are snuffed out and lighted. In the time in between, we have sense and experience; before and after is true peace. We go wrong in this, Lucilius, if I’m not mistaken: we think that death comes after, whereas in fact it comes both before and after. Whatever existed before us was death. What does it matter whether you cease to be, or never begin? The outcome of either is just this, that you don’t exist.
I kept telling myself these encouragements, and others of the same kind, silently, for there wasn’t space for words. Then little by little the suspirium, which had already turned into a kind of panting, gave me longer respites and slowed down. But it hung on, and even though it has ceased, I do not yet have natural, easy breathing; I feel a certain break in its rhythm, a delay between breaths.
Take this on faith from me: I won’t tremble, at the last moments; I’m prepared. I don’t think at all about the entire day ahead. Praise and emulate that man who does not disdain to die, though it’s pleasant to live; what virtue is there in leaving by being thrown out? Yet here too is a virtue: I’m being thrown out, but let me take my leave nonetheless. The wise man is never thrown out, for to be thrown out is to be expelled from a place that you leave unwillingly; the wise man does nothing unwillingly; he flees from necessity, since he desires that which it will force upon him. Farewell.
Epistle 54.
Nothing can be of such great benefit to you, in your quest for moderation in all things, than to frequently contemplate the brevity of one’s life span, and its uncertainty. Whatever you undertake, cast your eyes on death.
Epistle 114.27.

Two. HAVE NO FEAR.
By the time Seneca began his magnum opus, the Moral Epistles, in AD 63, he had been writing ethical treatises for more than a quarter of a century. His earliest surviving works, from the early 40s AD, are consolations, designed to offer comfort to friends or relations (including his own mother) who were mourning the death or absence of a loved one. In the Consolation to Marcia from which the passage below and several others in this volume are taken, Seneca addresses a mother grieving for the loss of a teenaged son.
Consider that the dead are afflicted by no ills, and that those things that render the underworld a source of terror are mere fables. No shadows loom over the dead, nor prisons, nor rivers blazing with fire, nor the waters of oblivion; there are no trials, no defendants, no tyrants reigning a second time in that place of unchained freedom. The poets have devised these things for sport, and have troubled our minds with empty terrors. Death is the undoing of all our sorrows, an end beyond which our ills cannot go; it returns us to that peace in which we reposed before we were born. If someone pities the dead, let him also pity those not yet born.
To Marcia 19.4.
In his essay On Serenity of Mind, Seneca makes the case that fear of death not only makes dying more difficult but diminishes the nobility and moral integrity of all of life. In the second passage below he uses Julius Canus, a man otherwise barely known to us, to illustrate the “greatness of mind” found in those unafraid of death.
What’s to be feared in returning to where you came from? He lives badly who does not know how to die well. Thus we must, first and foremost, reduce the price we set on life, and count our breath among the things we think cheap. As Cicero says, gladiators who seek by every means to preserve their life, we detest, but we favor those who wear their disregard of it like a badge. Know that the same outcome awaits us all, but dying fearfully, often, is itself a cause of death. Dame Fortune, who makes us her sport, says: “Why should I keep you alive, you lowly, cowering creature? You’ll be more wounded and slashed if you don’t learn how to offer your throat willingly. But you’ll live longer, and die more easily, if you accept the sword-stroke bravely, without pulling back your neck or holding up your hands.” He who fears death will never do anything to help the living. But he who knows that this was decreed the moment he was conceived will live by principle and at the same time will ensure, using the same power of mind, that nothing of what happens to him comes as a surprise.
On Serenity of Mind 11.4.
Julius Canus, an exceptionally great man got into a long dispute with Caligula. As he was leaving the room, Caligula, that second Phalaris, said: “Just so you don’t take comfort from an absurd hope, I’ve ordered you to be led away for execution.” “Thank you, best of rulers,” Canus replied. I’m not sure what he was feeling; I can imagine several possibilities. Did he want to give insult by showing how great was the emperor’s cruelty, that it made death seem a boon? Or was he reproaching the man’s habitual insanity (for those whose children had been executed, or whose property had been taken away, used to give thanks in this way)? Or was he embracing the sentence joyfully, like a grant of freedom? Whatever the reason, his reply showed a greatness of mind. He was playing a board game when the centurion in charge of leading off the throngs of the condemned told him it was time to move. Hearing the call, Canus counted up the pieces and said to his partner: “See that you don’t cheat and say you won, after my death.” Then he turned to the centurion and said, “You’re my witness; I was ahead by one.”
On Serenity of Mind 14.4.
In later life, to judge by the Moral Epistles, Seneca witnessed the illnesses and deaths of many close contemporaries, and made careful note of how each man faced his final challenge. He then held up these examplars for the edification of his friend Lucilius and, through the publication of the Letters, the entire Roman world.
Dear Lucilius,
I went to see Aufidius Bassus, a very noble fellow, stricken and struggling with his advancing years. But already there is more to weigh him down than lift him up, for old age is leaning upon him with its huge weight, everywhere. The man’s body, as you know, was ever weak and dessicated; he held or even patched it together, as I might more accurately say, for a long time, but suddenly it gave out. Just as, when a ship has got water in the hold, one crack or another can be stopped up, but once it has begun to come apart in many spots and to go under, there’s no more help for the splitting vessel, just so, in an old man’s body, weakness can be supported and propped up for a time. But when, just as in a rotting house, every join is coming apart, and a new crack opens up while you’re patching the old, then it’s time to look around for a way to leave.
But our friend Bassus stays sharp minded. Philosophy furnishes him with this: to be cheerful when death comes in view, to stay strong and happy no matter what one’s bodily condition, and not to let go even when one is let go of. A great ship’s captain continues the voyage even with a torn sail, and if he has to jettison cargo, he still keeps the remainder of the ship on course. This is what our friend Bassus does. He looks on his own end with the kind of attitude and expression that would seem too detached even if he were looking on someone else’s. It’s a great thing, Lucilius, and always to be studied: when that inescapable hour arrives, go out with a calm mind.
Other kinds of death are intermingled with hope. Illness lets up, fires are put out, ruin bypasses those whom it seemed about to sink; the sea spits out, safe and well, those whom it had just as violently swallowed down; the soldier retracts his sword from the very neck of the doomed man. But he whom old age leads toward death has nothing to hope for; for him alone, no reprieve is possible. No other way of dying is so gradual and so long lasting.
Our Bassus seemed to me to be laying out his own body for burial, and accompanying it to the grave; he lives like one surviving himself, and bears the grief over himself as a wise man should. For he talks freely about death and bears it so calmly that we are led to think that, if there’s anything troubling or fearsome in this business, it’s the fault of the dying man, not of death. There’s nothing more worrisome in the act of dying than there is after death; it’s just as insane to fear what you’re not going to feel as to fear what you’re not even going to experience. Or could anyone think that it will be felt, the very thing that will cause nothing at all to be felt?
“Therefore,” Bassus declares, “death is as far beyond all other evils as it is beyond the fear of evils.” I know such things are often said and often must be said, but they have never done me so much good, either when reading them or hearing people say that we must not fear things that don’t hold any terrors. It’s the man who speaks from death’s own neighborhood that has the most authority in my eyes. I’ll say plainly what I believe: I think that the man in the midst of death is braver than the one who skirts its edges. The approach of death lends even to the ignorant the resolve to face inevitabilities, like a gladiator who, though very skittish throughout his combat, offers his neck to his enemy and guides the sword toward himself if it strays off-target. But the death that is only nearby (though sure to arrive) does not grant that steady firmness of resolve, a rarer thing that can only be exhibited by a sage. I would gladly listen therefore to one who can, as it were, report on death, giving his opinion about it and showing what it’s like as though having seen it close up. You would, I suppose, put more trust and give more weight to someone who had come back to life and told you, based on experience, that death holds no evils; but those who have stood in front of death, who have seen it coming and embraced it, can best tell you what sort of upset its approach brings with it.
You can count Bassus among these, a man who doesn’t want us to be deceived. Bassus says that it’s as silly to fear death as to fear old age, for just as age follows youth, so death follows age. Whoever doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want to live. Life is granted with death as its limitation; it’s the universal endpoint. To fear it is madness, since fear is for things we’re unsure of; certainties are merely awaited. Death’s compulsion is both fair and unopposed, and who can complain of sharing a condition that no one does not share? The first step toward fairness is evenhandedness. But there’s no need now to plead the case of Nature; she wants our law to be the same as hers. Whatever Nature puts together, she undoes, and what she undoes, she puts together again. Truly, if it happens that old age dispatches someone gently, not suddenly tearing him away from life but little by little releasing him, that person ought to thank the gods for bringing him, after he’s had his fill of life, to a rest that is needed by all and welcomed by the weary.
You see people who long for death, more so indeed than life is usually sought. I don’t know which imparts to us a greater resolve: those who beg for death or those who await it calmly and cheerfully. The former happens occasionally, owing to madness or some sudden outrage, while the latter is a kind of serenity born of steady judgment. Some arrive at death in a rage, but no one greets death’s arrival cheerfully except those who have long prepared themselves for it.
I confess that I had gone to see Bassus, a dear friend, rather often, for multiple reasons; in part, to learn whether I would find him the same on every occasion, or wouldn’t the power of his will diminish along with the strength of his body? In fact it only increased in him, just as the joy of chariot drivers is often seen more clearly as they approach the seventh and last lap of victory. He would say, in accord with the teachings of Epicurus, that he hoped, first of all, there would be no pain in his final breath; but if there was, he had a certain comfort in its very brevity, for no pain is long lasting if it is great. Moreover there would be relief for him in this thought, even if his soul was torturously torn from his body: that after this pain, he could no longer feel pain. But he had no doubt that his elderly soul was already on the edge of his lips, and no great force would be needed to pull it away. A fire that has gotten control of ready tinder must be put out with water, or sometimes by tearing down buildings, he said; but the fire that lacks fuel dies down by itself. I listen to these words gladly, Lucilius, not because I’m hearing something new, but because I’m being drawn toward what is, as it were, right before my eyes.
What then? Have I not seen many others cutting their lives short? Indeed I have, but those who come to death with no hatred of life, who receive death rather than drawing it toward them, make a deeper impression on me. Bassus used to say that the torment we feel is of our own making; we tremble when we believe death is near. But whom is it not near, when it’s ready and waiting at every moment, in every place? “Let’s consider,” he says, “at the point when something seems to draw near that might cause our death, how many other causes there are, even close at hand, which we don’t fear.” An enemy threatens someone with death, but an upset stomach beats him to it. If we want to separate into categories the reasons for our fear, we will find some that exist, others that merely seem to. We don’t fear death but the contemplation of death. Death itself is always the same distance away; if it is to be feared, then it should be feared always. What time is there that’s exempt from death?
But I ought to be afraid that you’ll hate this lengthy letter even more than death! So I’ll come to an end. As for you: study death always, so that you’ll fear it never. Farewell.
Epistle 30.
It’s not death that’s glorious, but dying courageously. No one praises death; rather, we praise the person whose soul death stripped away before causing it any turmoil. The death that was glorious in Cato’s case was base and worthy of shame in Decimus’s. This is Decimus: the man who, while seeking postponements of death, though destined to die, drew apart in order to empty his bowels, and, when summoned to his death and ordered to bare his neck, said “I’ll bare it if I can live.” What madness, to take flight when there’s no going backward! “I’ll bare it if I can live.” He almost added “even under Antony.” That’s a man worthy to be allowed to live, alright!
But, as I was discussing earlier, you see that death, in itself, is neither good nor bad; Cato made the most honorable use of it, Decimus the most shameful. Anything that has no glory of its own takes on glory when virtue is added to it. Metal is neither cold nor hot in itself; it grows hot when stuck in a furnace, and cools off again when plunged into water. Death is honorable by way of what’s honorable, namely virtue and a mind that disdains outward appearances.
But, Lucilius, even among the things we call “intermediate” between good and bad, there are distinctions to be made. Death is not “indifferent” in the same way as whether you have an odd or even number of hairs on your head. Death is among those things that are not bad but, nevertheless, have an outward appearance of badness. For the love of one’s own self, and the desire to maintain and preserve oneself, are deeply rooted, along with an aversion to annihilation, which seems to strip away many good things from us and take us away from that abundance of things to which we are accustomed. And this too estranges us from death: that we know what is here before us, but don’t know what the things are like that we will cross over into, and we dread the unknown. Then too our fear of darkness is a natural fear, and death is thought to be leading us into darkness. So, even if death is an “indifferent,” it’s not the kind of thing that can be easily ignored. The mind must be hardened by a great training program to endure to look on it and see it approach.
Death ought to be scorned more than it customarily is. We take many things about it on faith, and the talents of many strive to increase its ill reputation. There are descriptions of a subterranean prison-house, and a realm shrouded in eternal night, in which:
the huge door-guard of Orcus,
stretched out over half-eaten bones in a gore-spattered cave,
barks forever to frighten the bloodless shades of the dead.
And even if you believe that these are fables, and that nothing remains in the afterlife to frighten the dead, a different terror creeps in: people are just as afraid of being in the underworld as of not being anywhere.
With these things working against us, poured into our ears over long stretches of time, why would it not be glorious to die courageously, one of the greatest achievements of the human mind? The mind will never strive for virtue if it thinks death is an evil thing; it will, though, if it considers death an indifferent. Epistle 82.10 to 17.
It’s fitting for you to experience pain, and thirst, and hunger, and old age, if, that is, a long delay in the human world befalls you, and illness, and loss, and death. But there’s no reason to trust those who make a great din all around you: nothing of these things is bad, nothing is unbearable or harsh. Fear attaches to them only by consensus. You fear death, but your fear is only of a rumor, and what could be more foolish than a man who’s afraid of words? Our friend Demetrius often says that the words of the ignorant issue from the same place as the rumblings of their guts. “What matter to me,” he says, “whether they sound off from up top or from down below?”
It’s altogether mad to fear being disgraced by the disgraceful. And likewise, just as you have no cause to fear evil rumors, so you have none to fear the things you would not fear unless rumor had commanded it. No good man would take harm from getting spattered by nasty rumors, right? Death too has a bad reputation; but let’s not allow that to harm it in our eyes. None of those who bring charges against it have ever tried it, and it’s impudent to condemn what you know nothing of. But you do know, at least, how many have found death helpful; how many it has released from tortures, poverty, lamentation, punishments, fatigue. We are in no one’s power, if death is in our power.
Epistle 91.18 to 21.
The passage below is preceded by a description of the celestial plane of serene contemplation to which the philosopher’s mind can rise. In its final sentence, Seneca demonstrates one of his greatest rhetorical talents, a sharp eye for trenchant, pointed analogies.
When the mind raises itself to this sublime level, it becomes a manager, not a lover, of the body, as though this were its necessary burden; it does not become subject to what it was put in charge of. No free man is slave to the body. No need to mention the other masters that emerge from an excessive concern over it; the body’s own dominion is gloomy and demanding. The man of temperate mind leaves his body, the great-minded man7 leaps out of it; no one asks what its end will be, after it’s been left behind, but just as we ignore the clippings from our beards and hair, just so, that divine sort of mind, as it prepares to leave its human form, judges that the destination of its container, whether fire burns it, or earth covers it, or wild beasts tear it apart, matters as little to it as the afterbirth does to an infant. Epistle 92.33 to 34.

Three. HAVE NO REGRETS.
In his earliest surviving work, the Consolation to Marcia, Seneca took on the stern challenge of convincing a mother not to be grieved by the loss of a son. In this and other works, Seneca insists, using various arguments, that the value we place on length of life, and our sense that something has been lost when life is cut short, are fundamentally mistaken.
“He died too soon, still a youth.” Suppose he had still had ahead of him, well, reckon up the longest that’s allowed to a human being to keep going. How long is it? We are born into the briefest space of time, soon to make way for the next arrivals. Am I speaking only of our life spans, which, we know, roll on with incredible speed? Consider the ages of cities: you’ll see how even the ones that take pride in their antiquity have stood only a short time. All human affairs are short, transitory, bounded in a negligible space of endless time. We consider this earth, with its cities, peoples, and rivers, enclosed by a circle of sea, as a tiny dot, if it’s compared with all of time, time, that stretches out longer than the world, especially since the world’s age is redoubled so many times within its span. What difference does it make to extend something, if the amount of added time is little more than nothing? There’s only one way we can say that the life we live is long: if it’s enough. You can name for me vigorous men, men whose old age has become legendary; you can count off their sets of a hundred and ten years; when you let your mind roam across all of time, there’s no difference between the longest and the shortest life, if you survey how long a person lived and compare it with how long he didn’t live.
To Marcia 21.1 to 3.
In the four Epistles below, each presented mostly or wholly complete, Seneca strives to convince his readers that life should be measured by quality, not quantity, and that prolongation of life is not desirable in and of itself. This point, so clear cut yet so difficult to embrace, is fundamental to his philosophy. Other kinds of enjoyment, or physical experience, have a natural terminus, a point at which we are content to have them cease. We should strive to reach a similar satiety of living, as Seneca claims that he himself has done.
Dear Lucilius,
Let’s cease to want what we wanted. For my part, I arrange things such that, being an old man, I don’t want the same things I did as a child. My days have this one goal, as do my nights; this is my task and my study, to put an end to old evils. I make it so that my day is a small version of my whole life. I don’t, by Hercules, grab at it as though it were my last one, but I look upon it as though it could be my last. Indeed I’m writing this letter now as though death were coming to call for me in the very midst of writing it; I’m ready to depart. I enjoy my life thus far because I don’t spend too much time measuring how long all this will remain.
Before I became old, I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well. And dying well means dying willingly. Let’s compose our minds such that we want whatever the situation demands, and in particular that we contemplate our end without sadness. We must prepare for death before life. Our life is well furnished, yet we’re greedy for its furnishings; something always seems to be lacking, and always will. It’s not years nor days, but the mind, that determines that we’ve lived enough. I, my dearest Lucilius, have lived as much as is enough. Full, I await my death. Farewell. Epistle 61.
Tullius Marcellinus, whom you knew very well, a quiet young man who soon became an old man, was taken ill with a disease that, though not without remedy, was long lasting and discomfiting and made many demands on him; so he began to weigh the possibility of death. He gathered together a large group of friends. Each of them, out of timidity, either urged on him the same thing he would have urged on himself, or else played the flatterer and yes-man, and gave the advice he guessed would be more pleasing to the one weighing his options. But our Stoic friend, an outstanding fellow, and a brave and vigorous man, to praise him in the words with which he deserves to be praised, advised him the best, as it seems to me. He began as follows: “Marcellinus, don’t torment yourself as though you were pondering a great matter. Living is not a great matter; all your slaves do it, and all the animals. To die honorably, prudently, bravely, now that is great. Consider how long it is now that you’ve been doing the same things; food, sleep, the act of love, this is the cycle we move through. So it’s not just a prudent or brave or wretched man, but even one who’s merely fussy, who might want to die.”
The man no longer needed a spokesman, but rather, an assistant; the slaves refused to obey. So he began by taking away their fear; he pointed out that the household staff only got into trouble when it was unclear whether the master’s death was his own choice. Otherwise, he said, it would have set just as bad an example to kill a master as to prevent him. Then he turned to Marcellinus himself, advising him that it would be not inhumane, just as at the conclusion of a dinner party the leftovers are divided among the attendants, so now, at the conclusion of life, to offer something to those who had been his assistants throughout life. Marcellinus was a man of easygoing mind, and generous even when his own estate was at stake, so he parceled out little amounts to his weeping slaves, and freely offered comfort to them.
He didn’t need a sword, or the spilling of blood. He fasted for three days, and then ordered a tent to be set up in his bedroom. A bath was then brought in; he lay in it a long time, and as hot water was added, he slipped away, little by little, not without a certain pleasure (as he said), the pleasure that a gentle loss of consciousness, not unknown to us (whose mind has sometimes slipped away), can bring.
I’ve digressed, but the story is one you will find not unpleasing, for you will learn that the death of a man who was your friend was neither difficult nor painful. Although he made a conscious decision to die, he nonetheless left the world in the gentlest way, and merely slipped out of life. But the story will not be without its applications, for necessity often drives such instances. Often we ought to die but don’t wish to, or are dying but don’t wish to. No one is so naïve as not to recognize that he must die at some point, yet when he approaches that point he turns back, trembles, pleads. But wouldn’t a man seem to you the greatest of all fools, if he wept because for a thousand years previously, he had not been alive? He’s just as great a fool if he weeps because he won’t live for a thousand years to come. It’s just the same: you won’t exist, just as you didn’t exist; neither past nor future is yours. You were thrust into this brief moment; how long will you prolong it? Why weep? What are you looking for? Your efforts are wasted.
Stop hoping to bend the fates of the gods
by prayer.
Those fates are determined and fixed, guided by a great and eternal necessity. You’ll go to the same place that all go. What’s so strange about that? You were born under this law; it happened to your father, your mother, your ancestors, everyone before you, everyone after you. An unbreakable sequence, which no effort can alter, binds and tows all things. How great a throng of those yet to die will follow your footsteps! How great a crowd will accompany you! You would bear up more bravely, I imagine, if many thousands of things were dying along with you. In fact, many thousands, both men and animals, are giving up the ghost in all kinds of ways, at the very moment when you are hesitating to die. Don’t you think you are going to arrive someday where you were always headed? No journey is without an endpoint.
Do you suppose I’m now going to recount the examples of great men? I’ll tell you of youths instead. There’s that Spartan whom legend tells of, still a boy, who, when captured by enemies, shouted, in his native Doric dialect, “I won’t be a slave!” and then made good on his words: the first time he was ordered to perform a slavish and demeaning task, he was told to bring the chamberpot, he broke his skull by dashing it against a wall. That’s how near at hand freedom is, so should anyone be a slave? Wouldn’t you rather your son die like that, than live to old age through inaction? Why then are you troubled, when dying bravely is a task even for boys?
Let’s say you refuse to follow; you’ll be led against your will. So make your own the rules that belong to another power. You won’t take up the boy’s attitude and say, “I am no slave”? You poor man, you’re a slave to people, to things, to life, for a life lived without the courage to die is slavery. What do you have to look forward to? You’ve exhausted those pleasures that delay and detain you in life. There’s nothing you would find new, nothing with which you’re not sated to the point of disgust. You know the taste of wine and of mead. It doesn’t matter whether a hundred amphoras’ worth passes through your bladder, or a thousand; you’re just a wineskin. You know very well the taste of the oyster and the mullet; your self-indulgence has set nothing aside, untried, for coming years. Yet these are the things you are torn away from only against your will.
What else is there that you might be pained to see torn away from you? Your friends? But do you know how to be a friend? Your country? Do you value that highly enough to postpone your dinner for? The sunlight? You’d snuff that out if you could; for what have you ever done that’s worthy of light? Admit it: it’s not the yearning for the senate house, or for the forum, or even for the natural world that makes you reluctant to die; it’s the grocery market you leave behind unwillingly, a place from which you’ve left nothing behind. You fear death; but look how you scorn it, amid your banquet of mushrooms! You want to live, but do you know how? You’re afraid to die: why is that? Isn’t this life of yours a death?
Julius Caesar, when going along the Via Latina, was met by one from a file of guarded prisoners, a man whose beard trailed down to his chest, who asked him for death. “So you’re living now?” Caesar said. That’s how we must respond to those whom death is coming to aid. “You’re afraid to die, but are you living now?” “But I want to live,” the man says; “I’m doing honorable things. I don’t want to leave behind the duties of life, which I’m carrying out faithfully and diligently.” What, do you not realize that dying, too, is one of those duties of life? You’re not abandoning any duty. There’s no set number of these, no limit you have to reach.
There’s no life that’s not short. If you examine the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, or that of Sattia, who ordered inscribed on her tombstone that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see in her someone glorying in a long old age. But who could have endured her, if she had filled out a full century? Just as with storytelling, so with life: it’s important how well it is done, not how long. It doesn’t matter at what point you call a halt. Stop wherever you like; only put a good closer on it. Farewell. Epistle 77.5 to 20.
Dear Lucilius,
In the letter you wrote complaining about the death of the philosopher Metronax, saying that he could have and should have lived longer, I missed the even disposition you have in abundance in every matter, and toward every person, but lack in this one matter, just as everyone lacks it. I’ve seen many who kept a calm mind when facing human beings, but none who did so facing gods. Instead, we berate Fate every day: “Why was that man taken off in the middle of his journey? Why is that other not taken off? Why does he prolong his old age, making it troublesome to himself and others?”
Which do you think more fair, I ask you: that you obey Nature, or that Nature obey you? What difference does it make how fast you depart a place that must, without doubt, be departed? We ought to take care that we live not a long time, but enough; for we need Fate to help us live long, but our own minds, to live enough. Life is long if it is full, and it gets filled when the mind returns its own good to itself and passes over into control of itself. In what way were eighty years, passed in sloth, a benefit to someone? He didn’t live but only lingered in life; he didn’t die late, but died for a long time. “He lived eighty years.” Yes, but it matters up to what point of death you are counting. “He died in his prime.” Yes, but he had carried out the duties of a good citizen, a good friend, and a good son; he lacked nothing in any of these paths. His lifetime was cut short, but his life was completed. “He lived for eighty years.” No, he merely was for eighty years, unless you say “he lived” in the same way we say that trees live.
As for myself, I wouldn’t refuse the addition of more years. But if my span of life is cut short, I will say that I lacked nothing that would render that life happy. I did not prepare for that far-off day that my greedy hopes had promised would be my last, but rather I regarded every day as though it were my last.
Just as a man of smaller stature can be complete, so a life can be complete in a smaller stretch of time. Life span stands outside our control. It’s not in my power how long I will exist, but rather how long I will truly exist. Demand this of me: that I not pass through a base life span as though passing through shadows, but that I live my life, not skip past it.
What’s the most complete span of a life, you ask? To live until attaining wisdom. Whoever reaches that goal ends at a point not furthest, but greatest. Let that man rejoice boldly in the truth, and give thanks to the gods, and to himself among these; let him credit the cosmos for his creation, and deservedly so, for he returns to the cosmos a better life than the one he got. He has set the template of the good man, and revealed its measure and its quality. If he had added anything to it, the addition would have been similar to what came before.
How long is our life? We have enjoyed an understanding of all things; we know from what origins Nature brings itself forth, how it orders the world, through what changes it recalls the seasons, how it contains everything that will ever come to be and makes itself its own endpoint; we know that the stars move by their own force, that nothing is stationary except the earth, and that everything else races along at constant speed; we know how the moon outruns the sun and why, though slower, it leaves the faster object behind; we know how it takes on or loses its light, what cause brings on night and what restores the day. A journey awaits, to where you can see these things more closely.
The wise man says, “It’s not for this that I depart with greater courage, that I think I have a clear path toward my gods. I deserve to be admitted to their company, and I have already been among them; I have sent my mind there, and they have sent theirs to me. But supposing I am destroyed and that nothing of my human nature remains after death: I possess a great mind nonetheless, even if it’s not going anywhere when I depart.”
Surely you don’t think the man happier who died on the last day of the games, than he who died in the middle? By no less an interval than that does each of us precede the next to die. Death makes its way through all; the killer follows on the heels of his victim. We get most anxious over the thing that is least important. What does it matter how long you dodge the thing you cannot escape? Farewell.
Epistle 93.
Dear Lucilius,
Every day, every hour reveals how we are nothing, and brings new arguments to convince those who have forgotten their fragility; it compels those who have contemplated eternal things to look toward death. What is this prelude driving at, you ask? You once knew Cornelius Senecio, an illustrious and dutiful Roman knight. He advanced himself from slender origins, and was coasting downhill toward better things, for stature increases more easily than it gets started. Wealth, also, tends to linger a long time in poverty’s realm, and hangs on there even while it is struggling out; but Senecio was on the point of gaining riches, led there by two very effective things, expertise in getting wealth and in managing it; either one might have made him rich. This man of highest thriftiness, who cared for his physical health no less than for his estate, after coming to see me in the morning (as was his habit), and then sitting by the side of a suffering, terminally ill friend all day and (with greater dejection) into the night, and then taking a cheerful meal, was seized by a sudden attack of ill health, angina, and barely kept breathing, through choked airways, until the dawn. Thus only a few short hours after he had carried out the duties of a sound and healthy man, he was dead.
He was taken off, a man who was managing business on both land and sea, who had made a start in civic affairs and left no source of revenue untapped, at the consummate moment of good fortune, at the flood tide of incoming wealth.
Sow your pear trees, Meliboeus, and set your vines in a row.
How foolish to set things in order, when we’re not lords of tomorrow! What madness is the far-reaching hope of those who begin things! “I’ll buy things, build things, lend and collect, accrue honors, and finally I’ll spend my worn-out, filled-up old age in idle leisure.” Listen to me: everything is doubtful, even for the fortunate; no one should promise himself anything regarding the future; the thing held in the hands slips away, and chance cuts short the very hour we hold before us. Time proceeds by a settled law, but it moves through darkness. What does it matter to me that something is clear to Nature, if it’s opaque to me? We plan long sea voyages and late returns to our native land after traversing foreign shores; military campaigns and the slow payoff of building fortifications; governorships and attainment of one office after another, meanwhile death stands by our side; and since death is never contemplated except as another’s fate, instances of mortality pile up before us but don’t abide any longer than our astonishment at them.
But what could be more foolish than to marvel that something will happen on a certain day, when it could happen on any day? Our end-point is fixed where the inescapable necessity of the fates has planted it, but none of us knows how far off from that endpoint our course lies. Therefore let’s shape our minds as though we’d arrived at the last lap.
Make haste to live, Lucilius, and think each of your days to be an individual life. The man who accustoms himself to this way of thought, for whom life is complete each day, is free of worry; but to those who live for hope, each moment, as it draws near, slips away, and in steals greediness and, the thing most wretched and cause of all most wretched things, the fear of death. Thence comes that most debased prayer of Maecenas, in which he accepts weakness and disfigurement and the freshly sharpened stakes of the cross, so long as, among these evils, he is spared the breath of life:
Make my hand feeble,
make my foot feeble;
give me a swelling hunchback,
knock out my loosening teeth;
as long as life remains, it’s fine.
Just preserve my life, even if
I sit on a sharpened stake.
Here, he desires the thing that would bring the most wretchedness, had it happened, and seeks a postponement of torment as though it were life itself. Imagine that Vergil had once recited to him this line:
Is it so very wretched a thing, this dying?
He desires that the worst of evils, things that are the hardest to endure, be continued and prolonged, and for what reward? A longer life, as it seems. But what is living, if it’s only a lengthy dying? Is there anyone who would want to be mutilated by tortures, to perish limb by limb, and to give up the ghost many times on the rack rather than simply breathe it out a single time? Is there anyone who would prefer, when driven forward to that grim piece of wood, already bent, enfeebled, and puffed out into vile swellings of his chest and shoulders, having amassed many causes of death even apart from the cross, to drag out a life that will feel so many torments?
Go ahead, then, deny that it’s a great gift of Nature that we must die. But many are ready to swap worse things for it: to betray a friend in order to live longer, or to hand over their children, with their own hands, for lechery, just to see the next dawn, a dawn that’s privy to their many sins.
This desire for life must be knocked out of us. We must learn that it makes no difference when you undergo the thing that must be undergone some time or other; that it matters how well you live, not how long. And often the “well” lies in not living long. Farewell.
Epistle 101.

FOUR. SET YOURSELF FREE.
In the passage below, Seneca again consoles Marcia on the death of her teenaged son. At one point he also refers to Marcia’s father, who some years earlier had starved himself to death to escape persecution by the emperor Tiberius; his suicide was completed just as his senate colleagues, obeying the will of the emperor, were voting to have him executed. That sort of death, freely chosen rather than imposed by a greater power, had particular resonance for Seneca in the era of Caligula, during which the Consolation to Marcia was likely written, and again in the second half of Nero’s reign, during which he wrote the Epistles. Both emperors were prone to paranoia and forced many citizens they suspected of disloyalty, including ultimately Seneca himself, to take their own lives or else face both execution and confiscation of property. That recurring pattern helped define suicide as a path to self-liberation, in Seneca’s mind.
Oh, how ignorant they are of their troubles, those who do not praise and await death as the finest device of Nature! Whether it closes off happiness or drives away disaster; whether it ends the satiety and torpor of the old, or reduces the bloom of youth when better things are looked for, or calls back adolescence before it embarks on harsher paths, it is an end for all and a remedy for many, and for some the answer to a prayer, better deserved by no one more than those to whom it comes before it is summoned. Death releases those enslaved to a hated master; it lightens the chains of prisoners; it frees from prison those whom an unopposable authority had forbidden to leave; it demonstrates, to exiles who bend their eyes and thoughts always to their homeland, that there’s no difference in what nation one makes one’s home; it evens everything out, when Fortune has made a bad division of shared property and given one man to another, though both were born with equal rights; it’s the point past which no one ever again does another’s bidding, the state in which no one is aware of his lowliness, the path which is closed to no one, the end your father, Marcia, eagerly desired; it’s death, I declare, that makes being born something other than a torment, that allows me not to collapse in the face of menacing events, that lets me keep my mind intact and in control of itself; I have a court of appeal. Lo, over here, I see crosses of torture, and not all of one kind, but different ones from different makers. For some men hang others upside down, head facing the earth; others drive a stake through the genitalia; still others stretch the arms on the crossbeam. I see the “lyres,” I see beatings, and instruments devised for every different limb and joint; but I see death as well. Over there, there are bloodthirsty enemies and imperious fellow citizens; but I see death is there also. Slavery is no burden, provided that, if your master disgusts you, you can cross over into freedom with a single step. I hold you dear, life, by virtue of the boon of death.
To Marcia 20.1.
The passage below, from Seneca’s early work De Ira (“On Anger”), represents his most striking equation of suicide and personal freedom. It comes directly after Seneca’s discussion of two Near Eastern tyrants, Cambyses and Astyages, who had committed outrages on their chief ministers: Cambyses had killed the son of Prexaspes by using him as an archery target, while Astyages had fed to Harpagus a stew of his own butchered children. These stories, and Seneca’s response to them here, take on special point given that Seneca would later, perhaps soon after this passage was composed, become a chief minister himself, at the court of the young Nero.
We will not urge our readers to follow the commands of torturers; we will show instead that, in every kind of enslavement, the road to freedom lies open. If one’s mind is ill and wretched from its own failings, it can make an end of its own sufferings. I will say to one who has fallen in with a king who fires arrows into the chests of his friends, or to another whose master gluts fathers on the guts of their children, “What do you groan for, senseless man? What hope do you have that some foe will liberate you, by destroying your whole family, or some king will wing his way to you, extending his power from afar? Anywhere you cast your glance, the end of your troubles can be found. You see that high, steep place? From there comes the descent to freedom. You see that sea, that river, that well? Freedom lies there, at its bottom. You see that short, gnarled, unhappy tree? Freedom hangs from it. Look to your own neck, your windpipe, your heart; these are the paths out of slavery. Are these exits I show you too laborious, demanding of resolve and strength? Then, if you ask what is the path to freedom, I say: any vein in your body.”
On Anger 3.15.3.
Seneca often pointed to the death of Marcus Porcius Cato, an event that took place a century before his own time, as a model of self-liberation by suicide. Cato, a devoted Stoic, had opposed Julius Caesar both in the senate and on the battlefield, in hopes of preventing Rome from becoming an autocracy. After he lost a crucial battle in North Africa, near Utica, Cato withdrew to a private room and disemboweled himself with a sword. His friends found him still alive and had a doctor sew up his wound, but Cato resolutely pulled out the stitches and finished himself off. Seneca found this death exemplary because of its political motivation, its philosophic inspiration (Cato had been reading Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue that discusses the immortality of the soul, just before undertaking his deed), and above all because of the resolve required to bring it to completion.
I tell you, I can’t see anything Jupiter would consider more lovely anywhere on earth, if he should turn his attention here, than the sight of Cato, standing upright amid public disasters even though his faction had been wrecked more than once. “Let everything submit to the control of one man,” he said, “let the lands be guarded by troops and the seas by fleets, let Caesar’s soldiers blockade the ports, yet Cato has a means of escape: he’ll forge a broad path to freedom with a single hand. This sword here, thus far harmless and free from the taint of civil war, will finally accomplish brave and noble deeds; it will give to Cato the freedom it could not give to his homeland. Go forth, my soul, toward the deed you have long contemplated; tear yourself away from human affairs. Petreius and Juba have met in combat, and lie dead, each killed by the other’s hand; that’s a bold and illustrious pact of death, but not the kind that suits our greatness. It’s just as base for Cato to seek death at another’s hands as it is to seek life.” It’s clear to me that the gods looked on with great joy while that man, his own harshest avenger, took thought for others’ safety and helped those who left him prepare their escape; while he pored over his studies in his final night; while he stuck his sword into his holy breast; while he scattered his own organs and drew out with his hand that beatified soul, a thing too good to be tainted by a metal blade. For this reason, I could believe, his wound was not sure or effective enough: to watch Cato once was not enough for the immortal gods; his virtue was held back and recalled, so that it might reveal itself in a more difficult role. To seek death a second time takes a greater mind than to enter it once. Why else would the gods not have looked on with approval as the one they nurtured got away by means of a brilliant and memorable escape? Death sanctifies those whose exit wins praise even from those in whom it inspires fear.
On Providence 2.9.
Having explored Cato’s demise in the opening section of On Providence, above, Seneca returns to the idea of suicide as self-liberation in the closing section of the work, where an unnamed god is speaking to humankind.
“Above all, I took care that no one would detain you against your will; the exit stands open. If you don’t want to fight, you’re allowed to flee. Thus out of all the things I wanted you to go through by necessity, I made dying the easiest. I put your soul on a downhill slope. If it’s a drawn-out death, just wait a bit, and you’ll see how short and easy is the path to freedom. I put much shorter delays in your way as you leave the world than as you enter. Otherwise Fortune would have held great power over you, if the human race took as long dying as being born. Let every time and every place instruct you on how easy it is to renounce Nature and to press back on it its gift. Among the very altars and the solemn rites of those making sacrifice, there where life is prayed for, study death. See how the sleek bodies of bulls are felled by a small wound, and the blow of a human hand dispatches animals of great strength. The ligaments of the neck are severed by a small blade, and when that joint that connects the head and neck is cut, the creature’s bulk, however huge, collapses. The breath of life does not lurk in some deep place; it does not need to be dug out with tools. Your organs don’t need to be searched out by a stab wound deep within. Death is as near as can be. I set no fixed spot for these killing blows; wherever you want to strike, the way lies open. That thing we call dying, the moment when the soul leaves the body, is too quick for the speed of its exit to be felt. If the noose breaks the neck, or if water blocks your breathing, or if the hard ground beneath you breaks your head as you fall, or if a draught of flame cuts off the course of your returning breath, whatever form death takes, it comes quickly. So aren’t you ashamed? You fear for so long that which takes only a short time!”
On Providence 6.7.
As Seneca aged and his physical condition deteriorated, he increasingly confronted the question of self-euthanasia. His feelings on the subject were conflicted, and not always consistent. Whereas in Epistle 77 part three, Seneca seemed to approve of the suicide of Tullius Marcellinus, who had been plagued by a painful but temporary illness, he says in Epistle 58 below that only in the case of an incurable condition would suicide be justified. Then in the letter that follows, Epistle 70, presented here in its entirety, Seneca explores both sides of the problem of self-euthasia and decides that the choice is contingent on circumstances.
On this question, whether one ought to disdain the exigencies of old age and not wait for their end but make an end with one’s hand, I’ll tell you what I think. The man who lingers and awaits his fate is near to being a coward, just as the drinker who drains an entire amphora, and even sucks down the dregs, is too much devoted to wine. But that raises the question whether the end of life is the dregs or something very clear and fluid, if, that is, the mind stays free of damage, the senses stay intact and give delight to the spirit, and the body is not worn out or dead before its time; it makes a great difference whether what one prolongs is life or death.
But if one’s body becomes useless for performing its functions, is it not fitting to draw the struggling mind out of it? And, perhaps, the deed must be done a little before it ought, lest, when it ought to be done, you’re no longer able to do it. And when the danger of living badly is greater than that of dying soon, only a fool would not buy his way out of a great risk at the price of a small moment of time. A very long old age has brought few men to death’s threshold without debilities, whereas for many, life lies there motionless, unable to make use of what makes it life. Do you think there is anything crueler to lose from life than the right to end it?
Don’t begrudge me a hearing, as though my opinion were meant for your own case; take the full measure of my words. I won’t depart from old age as long as it leaves me intact, or at least whole in that better portion of myself. But if it begins to destroy my mind and to tear away parts of it, if what is left to me is not life but mere breath, I’ll jump out of the rotten and collapsing building. I won’t use death to escape illness, so long as the illness is curable and does not occlude my mind. I won’t use my hand against myself merely on account of pain; to die for that reason is to admit defeat. But if I know that my condition must be endured forevermore, I’ll leave, not because of the pain itself, but because it will cut me off from everything that gives one a reason to live. It’s a weak and idle man who dies on account of pain, but it’s a fool who lives for pain’s sake.
Epistle 58.32 to 36.
Dear Lucilius,
After a long time away, I have visited Pompeii, your hometown. I was brought back within view of my young adulthood; whatever I had done as a youth, it seemed I was able to do again or had just recently done. We have sailed on past in the voyage of life, Lucilius; just as, when one is at sea (as Vergil says), the lands and the towns fall away,
so have we watched drop from sight, as time sails hurriedly on, first our boyhood, then our adolescence, then whatever lies between youth and mid-life, spanning the gap between them, then the best years of old age, until at last the common end of all humankind hoves in view. We are deluded to think this a perilous reef. It’s a harbor, sometimes to be sought, never to be shunned; someone who drifted there, in the first years of life, has no more cause to complain than one who sailed there at speed. For as you know, lazy breezes sport with some men, holding back their progress and tiring them with the boredom of a gentle calm, while an unceasing gale sweeps other men along most swiftly. Consider that the same thing happens to us: life brings some very quickly to where even those who tarry must eventually go; others it first tenderizes and ripens. Life, as you know, is not a thing that should be held onto forever. Merely to live is not in itself good, but rather, to live well.
Thus the sage will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. He’ll examine where he will live, with whom, and how, and what he will do. He’ll think about what kind of life is his, not what length. If a host of troubles arise and roil his serenity, he’ll set himself free; and he won’t do this only in the final exigency; rather, when his fortune first begins to seem suspect to him, he’ll look around to see whether he’s at a good stopping point. He judges that it makes no difference whether he fashions his end or receives it, whether it happens later or sooner. He does not fear it as he would a great setback, for no one can lose much out of a tiny dribble. It’s of no matter whether one dies sooner, or later; dying well or badly is what matters. And to die well is to escape the danger of living badly. Thus I think that that man of Rhodes spoke a most unmanly word; when he had been thrown into a hole by the tyrant, and was being kept alive like some animal, he said, to someone who urged him to stop eating, “So long as one lives, one must hold onto every hope.” Though there’s truth to that, life should not be bought at any price.
It’s folly to die from the fear of death. Your executioner is coming; wait for him. Why get a head start? Why take on the task of inflicting cruelty that belongs to another? Are you jealous of your butcher, or do you seek to spare him his efforts? Socrates could have ended his life by fasting and abstinence, rather than dying by poison; yet he spent thirty days in prison awaiting death, not in the belief that anything was possible, as though such a long stretch of time might give room for hopes of all kinds, but so that he might submit to the laws, and allow his friends to take joy in the last days of Socrates. Nothing could have been sillier than to have contempt for death but also to fear poison!
Scribonia, a solid, serious woman, was the paternal aunt of Drusus Libo, a youth high in rank but low in intelligence, who had greater hopes for himself than anyone of that time had reason to entertain, greater indeed than he himself had reason to hold at any time. When Drusus was carried out of the senate, ailing, lying on a litter, with only a few to attend him (for his inner circle had wickedly deserted a man who was no longer a defendant but a terminal case), he began to consider whether to take his own life or wait for death to arrive. Scribonia said to him, “What joy is there for you in taking care of someone else’s job?” But she failed to sway him; he did away with himself with his own hands. And he had reason: if he had lived another three or four days, doomed to die by the sentence his enemy had passed, he would indeed have taken care of someone else’s job.
One can’t generalize and say that, in a situation where