Genre and place in the book. The fifth entry in the catalogue of debts. Structurally — a pivot: 01-01 through 01-04 are devoted to kin and the elders of the household (grandfather, father, mother, great-grandfather), while 01-05 opens the long sequence of teachers and tutors (1.5–1.13), which extends up to the transition to Antoninus Pius in 01-16. The pivot is motivated directly by the preceding passage 01-04: the great-grandfather laid down the principle (home tuition, do not stint on expense); now Marcus enumerates the specific people who shaped him within that principle.

Who is the τροφεύς. Τροφεύς (from τρέφω, "to nourish, to bring up") is normally a household servant or freedman responsible for the day-to-day care and early upbringing of an aristocratic child. The Latin equivalent is nutritor (or, in a wider sense, paedagogus). He is not the rhetoric teacher, nor the philosophy teacher; he is a close, everyday figure responsible for how the child is dressed, fed, what he plays at, with whom he keeps company, and how he behaves. In social rank — usually not a free citizen. This is a figure of the highest importance in the formation of the child, but a figure whose name historical sources usually do not preserve.

Anonymity. Marcus does not name the τροφεύς — unlike every other person of Book I, save the gods in 01-17. This anonymity most likely reflects the social standing: a freedman or slave whose name had no public weight. But the anonymity is at the same time substantive: what is ascribed to the τροφεύς is not the individual doctrines of a particular school, but the general layer of everyday formation Marcus received "from the one who raised him" — without crediting that formation to any personal authority.

A correction to Rogovin's note. Footnote ⁶ suggests: "perhaps the Stoic Apollonius of Chalcedon." This conjecture is rejected by the modern consensus (Birley, Farquharson, Hadot, Hard) on two grounds: (a) Apollonius is mentioned separately at 01-08 as one of Marcus's philosophical teachers — to identify the same figure with two distinct paragraphs of Book I runs against the composition of the catalogue itself; (b) Apollonius is a free Greek philosopher of high social rank, whereas the τροφεύς in the Roman household structure is a domestic figure of a different, lower standing. The identification remains open; most probably a freedman whose name is not known to the sources.

The five qualities.

1. τὸ μήτε Πρασιανὸς μήτε Βενετιανὸς μήτε Παλμουλάριος ἢ Σκουτάριος γενέσθαι — "not to have become a Green, a Blue, a Parmularian, or a Scutarian." Πρασιανοί and Βενετιανοί were the two principal factions at the chariot races (of four — Greens, Blues, Whites, Reds — the Greens and Blues had by the second century come to dominate, absorbing the popularity of the other two). Παλμουλάριοι and Σκουτάριοι were the two main groups of supporters at the gladiatorial games, named after the type of shield used by their favourites: parma (the small round shield of the Thracian thraex) versus scutum (the large oblong shield of the Murmillo). The circus and gladiatorial factions in second-century Rome were a mass social institution with their own political weight; the question of an emperor's sympathy with one or another faction was politically significant. From the τροφεύς Marcus inherits a principled detachment from this mass partisan culture — for a future emperor, also a politically prudent inheritance.
2. τὸ φερέπονον — "endurance under labour" (φέρω + πόνος, literally "bearing the weight"). A classical Stoic (and, before them, Cynic-Socratic) virtue, akin to the πόνος-ethos of Heracles, by which the Stoics liked to illustrate ἀρετή. For an aristocratic Roman this is the more substantive: his social class did not require physical labour, and the habit of it is a deliberate choice.
3. τὸ ὀλιγοδεές — "wanting little," literally "few-needing" (ὀλίγος + δεῖ). A classical topos: Stoics, Cynics, and Epicureans agree that needs are to be cut down rather than satisfied. This virtue continues the thematic line of the mother's simplicity (01-03) and the great-grandfather's frugality in superfluities.
4. τὸ αὐτουργικὸν καὶ ἀπολύπραγμον — two connected qualities: αὐτουργικός ("self-working," doing one's business with one's own hands) + ἀπολύπραγμος ("not-meddlesome," the negation of πολυπράγμων). The first is the Roman cura sui, doing one's own work and not handing it off. The second is a classical Greek topos: ἀπραγμοσύνη / refusal of πολυπραγμοσύνη ("a fussy occupation with many things, especially with what is not one's own") — a whole moral programme, developed by Plutarch in De curiositate. The virtue will recur in Marcus (cf. Med. 3.4, 4.18, 7.31): not to enter into others' affairs.
5. τὸ δυσπρόσδεκτον διαβολῆς — "hard to receive slander," that is, slow and reluctant to credit accusations against others. δυσπρόσδεκτος is literally "hard to receive" (δυσ- + προσδέχομαι). Διαβολή is accusation, slander, calumny. For an aristocrat surrounded by clients and informants, the ability not to credit slander on hearsay is a practical (and not only ethical) virtue: the foundation of right administrative and judicial judgment. For a future emperor, on whom this stream of information will be of a different order of intensity, it is critical.

The shape of the inheritance from the τροφεύς. If 1.1–1.3 ascribe to the kin qualities of character (good nature, αἰδώς, piety), and 1.4 ascribes to the great-grandfather a principle (about education), then 1.5 ascribes to the τροφεύς a behavioural habitus in three planes: (a) toward mass culture — detachment; (b) toward one's own body and needs — endurance and frugality; (c) toward other people — to do one's own, not enter into theirs, not listen to slander. This is not a philosophical doctrine but a practical ethics for life, the ground on which the school doctrines of Junius Rusticus, Apollonius, and Sextus will later be laid down.

Parallels. SHA Marcus, ch. 4 — the general picture of a serious, early-formed Marcus from childhood, consistent with what is ascribed to the τροφεύς here. Med. 6.46 — Marcus's own statement on the spectacles of the circus and the theatre: "they grow stale and become tedious" — exactly the position that he ascribes here to his tutor. Pliny the Younger, Ep., book 9 — the famous letter against the passion for the circus, giving a contemporary voice to the same aristocratic position of detachment. Plut. De curiositate (in the Moralia) — the canonical treatment of ἀπολυπραγμοσύνη as an ethical programme (Marcus in 01-07 will mention that Junius Rusticus gave him his own copy of Epictetus's Discourses — Plutarch belonged to the same circle of reading).