Abstract Roman philosophical authors inherit a set of arguments and claims about death from their Greek predecessors but develop and modify them in important ways. Most obviously, they take on the central disagreement between those who believe that after death the soul remains and those who believe that death is the total annihilation of the person. They also think about the nature and value of death in the context of standing Roman notions of duty, pietas, and courage. Roman writers influenced by Stoicism, often looking back to the examples of Socrates and Cato, make more prominent the theme of philosophically justified suicide.