Condemned to death by Caligula, Canus finished the board game he was playing, spent the ten days that remained without visible unrest, and walked to his execution intending to observe what dying was like.
Almost nothing is known about Julius Canus beyond one scene, and that scene comes from a single source: Seneca, writing perhaps twenty years after the fact. He was a Roman of standing who fell out with the emperor Caligula. Seneca reports the exchange that ended it. Canus had argued with the emperor; as he left, Caligula told him not to flatter himself with hope, since the order for his death had been given. Canus thanked him.
Whether he was formally a Stoic is not stated. Seneca mentions that a philosopher accompanied him on the last walk, and treats him throughout as an example of the composure the school aimed at. Later readers have counted him among the Stoics on the strength of the behaviour rather than any school membership, and that is the honest way to describe him.
The detail that made the story famous is small and domestic. When the centurion came to collect the day's condemned, Canus was in the middle of a board game, the Roman game of latrunculi. He counted the pieces, saw that he was one ahead, and told his opponent not to claim after his death that he had won. Then he went.
Seneca's point is not bravado. The counting of the pieces is the demonstration: a man who could still attend to something that trivial, on that morning, was not being governed by what was about to happen to him.
Seneca writes that the ten days between sentence and execution passed without agitation. On the way to the execution ground his own teacher of philosophy asked what he was thinking about. Canus answered that he had decided to watch, in that fastest of moments, whether the soul would notice itself leaving; and he promised that if he found anything out he would come round to his friends and report.
Seneca calls this tranquillity in the middle of the storm, and admires the specific thing it does: it turns a man's own execution into an object of study.
The whole of Canus rests on Seneca. There is no independent confirmation of the game, the ten days, or the remark on the walk, and Seneca was writing a consolation, not a chronicle. That does not make it fiction, but it does mean the sharpest details are the ones most likely to have been improved in the telling. What can be said is that a Roman audience of the first century was expected to find the scene credible.
Canus is the cleanest illustration of the division this site is built on, because his case removes every consolation. There was no reprieve, no reversal, no lesson learned by the tyrant. Nothing in the outcome was his. What remained his was narrow and complete: the attention he paid to the last ten days, the accuracy of the piece count, and the question he chose to occupy his final minutes with.
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