Julius Canus had quarrelled with Caligula, and that ended as such quarrels ended under that emperor: he was sentenced to death. As he walked away Caligula said something mocking about the consolation that the sentence had been passed. Canus answered that he thanked him.
Between sentence and execution lay ten days. That was a customary cruelty: the condemned man was allowed to wait.
Canus spent those days as he had spent the previous ones. On the last day he was playing a board game, probably latrunculi, a game with stones on a grid. When the centurion came by to collect the condemned, he counted his stones, turned to his opponent and said: mind you do not claim after my death that you won. Then he asked the centurion to bear witness that he was one piece ahead.
Seneca tells the story in his book on tranquility of mind, written for his friend Serenus who complained of inner restlessness.
What stands out in his version is what is not in it. Canus is not presented as a martyr, not as a hero and not as someone proving a point. Seneca describes a man in good spirits who arranged his last days no differently from his first.
On the way a philosopher asked him what he was thinking about now. Canus answered that he intended to pay attention to whether he would notice, at the moment itself, that he was leaving. He treated his own death as the next investigation.
You have ten days. You can spend them on what is coming, or on what is still here.
The tempting sorting is that Canus was indifferent. Indifference does not play board games; it puts the game away because nothing matters anymore. He did the opposite.
The cut is simple and heavy. The sentence, the ten days and the ending lay with Caligula. What remained were the days themselves, and those were his: how he spent them, and who he was in them.
The joke about the board game is therefore not bravado but an indication. A man who still thinks, in his last minute, that a game should be finished fairly has not put death at the centre of his attention. He did not let his final hour be claimed by what came after it.
And his remark to the philosopher is the sharpest. He intended to pay attention. That is the stance of someone who regards his curiosity as his last possession, and curiosity is indeed the one thing a centurion cannot take away.
The story comes from Seneca, who had an interest in it having gone that way; he wrote to console a friend and chose his examples. Whether Canus was really that calm nobody knows, and the ten days between sentence and execution will not all have passed like this.
There is moreover something uncomfortable about admiring stories of this kind. They turn dying into a performance at which you can succeed or fail, and that is exactly the pressure people at a deathbed do not need. What does make the story usable is the smaller version: not how you die, but whether you let today be claimed by what comes tomorrow.
Which outcome are you waiting for, and how many of your days are you paying forward already? What is your game that you could simply play out?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions