Fortune favored him… in the opportune moment of his death.

Tacitus is expressing a characteristically Roman and Tacitean irony: “fortune” (fortuna) can be said to “favor” someone not only through success in life but by granting a timely death that spares them later humiliation, political reversal, or punishment. The line implies that the subject’s end came at a moment when dying was preferable to living on—perhaps before a regime change, a purge, disgrace, or the collapse of their reputation. In Tacitus’s moral universe, this is a bleak kind of luck: it underscores the instability of public life and the way survival itself can become a liability under tyranny or volatile politics.