One sentence, two imperfects. The passage consists of a single clause, and its whole force lies in two past-imperfective verb forms: DOGMAπροκατεσκευάζετο ("was being prepared beforehand") and DOGMAσυνέκλωθε ("was being spun together"). Not the aorist ("it was decreed once"), but the imperfect — a durative, unfinished action. The event was not enacted by decree at some moment; it was being prepared all along, for as long as the world has run.

A definition in place of a term. ἡ ἐπιπλοκὴ τῶν αἰτίων, "the interlacing of causes," is the school's Stoic definition of fate; εἱμαρμένη itself is never named in the passage. Marcus gives not the name but the mechanism, and so the text reads not as a dogmatic assertion but as a description of a structure. The verb συνέκλωθε (from κλώθω, "to spin") is the verb of the Fates: the metaphor of the thread is here not ornament but load-bearing (cf. 2.3, where destiny likewise συγκλώθεται; 7.57 — "love only what happens to you and is spun with your thread").

Two objects of one spinning. The decisive subtlety is that συνέκλωθε has two objects: τήν τε σὴν ὑπόστασιν, "your own subsistence," and τὴν τούτου σύμβασιν, "the befalling of this." Not "first there was you, and then this happened to you" — both threads are twisted at once, ἐξ ἀιδίου. Hence the therapeutic conclusion that the passage does not spell out but rests upon: what has happened has not intruded into your life from outside — it is your coeval. To resent it is to resent your own existence, since the two were spun on one twisted thread.

A doubling of eternity. ἐξ αἰῶνος and ἐξ ἀιδίου, one in each half of the sentence, are not tautology but a frame: the first governs the preparing of the event, the second the spinning of your being. Eternity closes in from both sides, and no room is left between them for any contingency (cf. 5.8: what happens to each has been "prescribed" for him, as a physician prescribes a treatment). The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one assent.