The Stoic philosophy, especially as we see it represented in the tragedies attributed to Seneca, rang with the glorification of it.

Men ran to death because their mode of life had left them no other refuge.

They died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous to be seeing and doing and saying the same things over and over again; and because they had exhausted the very possibility of the only pleasures of which they had left themselves capable.

The satirical epigram of Destouches,-- "Ci-git Jean Rosbif, ecuyer, Qui se pendit pour se desennuyer," was literally and strictly true of many Romans during this epoch.
Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble, starved himself, and then had himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a perfectly curable illness.

The philosophy which alone professed itself able to heal men's sorrows applauded the supposed courage of a voluntary death, and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too purely theoretical a character to furnish them with any real or lasting consolations.