Key Arguments

• He introduces a theatrical analogy: 'As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.'
• He concludes, 'It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending,' directly tying acceptability of a short life to the moral and aesthetic quality of its conclusion.
• This restates and reinforces his earlier thesis that 'life is never incomplete if it is an honourable one,' using a vivid image accessible to his audience.

Source Quotes

In Sattia, who ordered that her epitaph should record that she had lived to the age of ninety-nine, you have an example of someone actually boasting of a prolonged old age – had it so happened that she had lasted out the hundredth year everybody, surely, would have found her quite insufferable! As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop.

As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

Key Concepts

• As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.
• It is not important at what point you stop.
• Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

Context

Closing lines of the excerpt from Letter LXXVII, summing up Seneca’s teaching on the relative unimportance of life’s duration compared to the nobility of its ending.