Letters 122.10

Such men are, in my opinion, as good as dead. Are they not all but present at a funeral—and before their time too—when they live amid torches and tapers? I remember that this sort of life was very fashionable at one time: among such men as Acilius Buta, a person of praetorian rank, who ran through a tremendous estate and on confessing his bankruptcy to Tiberius, received the answer: “You have waked up too late!”

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 122.10, translated by Richard Mott Gummere