A good death. Seneca, Epistulae 1.4.3-5

Seneca ultimately took his own life, not because he was tired of breathing but because his pupil Nero wanted him gone. History records that he lived up to the advice given here to Lucilius (see Tacitus, Annales 15.60-64). You can listen to me read this passage <here>.

Profice modo: intelleges quaedam ideo minus timenda quia multum metus afferunt. Nullum malum magnum quod extremum est. Mors ad te venit: timenda erat si tecum esse posset: necesse est aut non perveniat aut transeat. 'Difficile est,' inquis, 'animum perducere ad contemptionem animae.' Non vides quam ex frivolis causis contemnatur? Alius ante amicae fores laqueo pependit, alius se praecipitavit e tecto ne dominum stomachantem diutius audiret, alius ne reduceretur e fuga ferrum adegit in viscera: non putas virtutem hoc effecturam quod efficit nimia formido? Nulli potest secura vita contingere qui de producenda nimis cogitat, qui inter magna bona multos consules numerat. Hoc cotidie meditare, ut possis aequo animo vitam relinquere, quam multi sic complectuntur et tenent quomodo qui aqua torrente rapiuntur spinas et aspera. Plerique inter mortis metum et vitae tormenta miseri fluctuantur et vivere nolunt, mori nesciunt.

Advance toward your fears. You will soon understand that some of them are much less frightening than reputation suggests. No evil is great if it is the last. Death herself approaches you: she would be a terrible thing if she could remain with you, but she must necessarily pass by or fail to arrive. “It is hard,” you say,  “to lead the mind all the way to contempt of the breath of life.” Don't you see what trifling reasons drive us to despise this breath? One fellow hangs dead before the doors of his girlfriend. Another has cast himself from the roof, lest he hear his master grumble again. Yet another has put a sword through his guts, lest he be arrested in flight from his old life. Don't you think that virtue has the power to carry out a task that great fear has already achieved? Life is never secure in the grasp of one who thinks too much of prolonging it, who counts many consuls (†) among his vast possessions. Think on this today and every day, that you may be capable of relinquishing life with a calm mind, as others cling to it desperately, seizing it the way folk caught in a flash flood lay hold of anything that comes to hand, no matter how hard or rough. Floundering between the fear of death and the torments of life, many wretches refuse to live without knowing how to die. 

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(†) The consuls were chief magistrates in the old Roman republic, and continued to be appointed regularly under the Principate. Years were named by their consuls, so the reference to counting consuls here indicates that Seneca's worrier is old: he has lived many years, counting many consuls.