It’s a bit wordier (well, most people are wordier than the stoics lol) but Socrates had the right idea too I think:
Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to
hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of
nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change
and migration of the soul from this world to another.
Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep
of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an
unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep
was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other
days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and
nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly
than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even
the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with
the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is
then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and
there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges,
can be greater than this?
If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from
the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are
said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and
Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life,
that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he
might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if
this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful
interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son
of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an
unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in
comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to
continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in
that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not.
What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of
the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others,
men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing
with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a
man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that
world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.
It’s a bit wordier (well, most people are wordier than the stoics lol) but Socrates had the right idea too I think: