A double picture of aimless motion, both halves of which Marcus sets side by side in the single passage 02-07:

• drift (ῥεμβόμενος, from ῥέμβεσθαι — "to wander, roam, ramble") — a boat carried away by the current; a leaf driven by the wind; a person whose attention is swept off in every direction by every external impression;
• circling (περιφορά, from περιφέρομαι — "to be whirled," "to be carried round") — a carousel, an ant running on a wheel; a person worn out by activity in which there is plenty of motion and no direction.

Outwardly these pictures look opposed: drift is a passive, slack lack of will; circling is bustling activity. The Stoic diagnosis lays bare that they are one and the same defect — the absence of a TERMσκοπός. Without a centre, activity is as meaningless as inactivity: both are motion without a vector. This is a typically Stoic move: the outwardly different turns out to be structurally identical, once one looks at the disposition of the ruling part.

Med. 2.7 — the one place where Marcus sets both images side by side, as the two poles of one pathology: παῦσαι ῥεμβόμενος ("stop wandering") + τὴν ἑτέραν περιφορὰν φυλακτέον ("guard against the other kind of circling"). Each image recurs separately: Med. 2.16 (the one who lives without a σκοπός); 4.46 (Heraclitus and the river one cannot step into twice); 12.21 (aimless thoughts). The Greek background: Sen. Ep. 23.7 — "aliud agere et aliud, hoc est insanire" ("to do one thing and then another — this is what madness is"); Ep. 71.3 — "ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est" ("for the one who does not know which port he is making for, no wind is his").

In 02-07 the image is argumentative. Marcus does not say "define a σκοπός" in declarative form; he shows the alternative — two outwardly opposite pictures of a worthless existence — and leaves the reader to see for himself that both reduce to one. This is more effective than direct preaching: the patient diagnoses himself. The construction "two different symptoms, one cause" is characteristic of Marcus as a diagnostic instrument: see also the opposition of anger at others (02-01) and contempt for oneself (02-06) — both the result of a wrongly drawn boundary "mine / not mine" (dichotomy-of-control).