Can't we say, with nearly as much accuracy, that this life is an epilogue to eternity?

I don’t think so. Eternity, by definition, never ends, so this life couldn’t come after the end.

Mmm. That presupposes infinite linear time. By most accounts, "this life" bookends about 13.7 billion years of linear time, but how do we understand the state of things before that?

How could we understand the state of things once the heat death of the universe is a distant cosmic memory, and entropy no longer provides an "arrow of time"?

Everything we know about time is total order, but partial order is also possible.

it's a stop along the way from infinity to forever

stretch your legs :)

Either case sounds like some fancy mental gymnastics to feel good about uncertainty. Much better to embrace it and admit, "I don't know."

Tried looking for a source to this quote by Seneca (the Younger, I assume) and couldn't find one anywhere. Do you have a source ganzuul? The WikiQuote entry is quite expansive and thorough, yet I was unable to <ctrl + f> your provided quotation — even in the "Discussion" tab. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger