Against a change of place. EXERCISEἘναργὲς ἔστω ἀεί — "let it always be evident to you": the demand is not to work it out but to keep it before one's eyes. What is to be evident is that "this estate is just such another" as any other, and DOGMAthat "everything here is the same" as on a mountain top, on the sea-shore, "or wherever you please". The classic argument against flight into a change of scene (cf. 4.3 — "Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains"; 10.15 — "live as on a mountain").

The quotation from Plato. Marcus cites PERSONPlato by name (τὰ τοῦ Πλάτωνος) and gives the image from the Theaetetus: the philosopher, hearing a tyrant or king praised, sees in him a herdsman "fencing a fold in the mountains and milking bleating things." The word βληχήματα — "bleatings" — names the sheep by their noise rather than by their name: the same device as "the callosities of the earth" for marble at 9.36. Power is reduced to the sound of stock behind a fence.

What the translations do. Long gives "Dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd's fold on a mountain" — importing a city from Plato's original (τὸ τεῖχος) that is not in Marcus, and turning the picture into a simile. Rogovin has «о пастухе, заключенном в стенах горной хижины и доящем овец» — making the shepherd a prisoner and losing the irony: in Plato it is not a shepherd but the king who, in the philosopher's eyes, is indistinguishable from one. The modernization restores the literal image. The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one desire.