The body seen by the "bare view" — not as an organism, the bearer of beauty or grace, but as material: λύθρος καὶ ὀστάρια καὶ κροκύφαντος, ἐκ νεύρων, φλεβίων, ἀρτηριῶν πλεγμάτιον. Every word works to deflate: λύθρος — "blood-slime," the clotted blood of a slaughtered animal; ὀστάρια — a diminutive of ὀστᾶ, "little bones"; κροκύφαντος — a ragged scrap of cloth, fluff; πλεγμάτιον — "a little weaving," a diminutive of πλέγμα. The lexicon is anatomical, the morphology deprecatory: what is usually exalted is described in the vocabulary of the butcher's stall and the seamstress's workshop.

Med. 2.2: the main unfolded formulation. Cf. Med. 4.41 (with the Epictetan ψυχάριον εἶ βαστάζον νεκρόν — "you are a little soul carrying around a corpse"); 6.13 (wine as "the juice of a rotting cluster of grapes," purple as "wool stained with the slime of a sea-snail"); 8.24 (the man leaving the bath); 9.36 (the entrails hidden beneath the skin). The Socratic roots: Phaedo 80c–d; Alc. I 130c.

In 02-02 the image is the working body of the exercise of physical definition. Marcus's strategy: in order to establish that the "I" = the ruling part, one must first show that flesh (TERMsarx) and breath (TERMpneuma) are not the "I" but material. The description of the flesh as a "weaving" performs precisely this work: it is hard to identify oneself with "blood-slime and little bones," and the gaze automatically shifts to the third element — the rational part proper. The paired image is puppet: the marionette is made of the same sinew-strings; the only question is who is pulling them.