“What?” I say to myself; “does death so often test me? Let it do so; I myself have for a long time tested death.” “When?” you ask. Before I was born…. Unless I am mistaken, my dear Lucilius, we go astray in thinking that death follows, when it has both preceded and will follow. Whatever condition existed before our birth, was death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin at all, or whether you end, when the result in either case is non-existence? Seneca, Epistles 54.4–5
