Death is less bitter punishment than death’s delay.

The line contrasts the finality of death with the torment of anticipating it. Ovid’s aphorism suggests that prolonged suspense—waiting for an inevitable end, sentence, or catastrophe—can be more psychologically punishing than the event itself. The “delay” becomes a kind of living death: fear, uncertainty, and imagination magnify suffering beyond what the actual moment of death can inflict. Read more broadly, it speaks to how human distress often arises less from pain itself than from expectation and protraction, a theme common in ancient moral reflection: dread and postponement can intensify punishment by stretching it across time.