Six consolation letters written by Seneca exist today. For instance, he wrote to a woman called Marcia who had recently lost her son. Seneca’s consolations to her include the argument that death is a release from all the pain of life, a barrier beyond which our suffering cannot extend, which returns us to the same restful state we were in before we were born. Moreover, Epictetus told his students that one of the Stoics he held in particularly high regard, Paconius Agrippinus, used to write similar letters to console himself whenever any hardship befell him.33
