Five words without a verb. The opening is an asyndeton of five nouns: μῖμος, πόλεμος, πτοία, νάρκα, δουλεία. Not abstract vices but an inventory of the day: μῖμος — the "mime," a farce (the theatricality of court life); πόλεμος — war, for Marcus no metaphor but the Danube; πτοία — fluttering fright; νάρκα — numbness, torpor; δουλεία — servitude, dependence on another's will. Rogovin renders the first as «ненависть», smoothing away the theatrical sense.

The teachings are rubbed out like writing. The verb ἀπαλείψεται — "will wipe out": as one erases what is written on a wax tablet. The teachings are not refuted but effaced by the everyday, and that καθ’ ἡμέραν, day by day. The cause is named exactly: EXERCISEἀφυσιολογήτως TERMφαντάζῃ καὶ παραπέμπεις — "without physiology you form impressions and let them pass." The impression is taken untested and released; nothing stays, because nothing has been brought under a knowledge of nature.

Three things at once. The prescription demands simultaneity: πᾶν οὕτω βλέπειν καὶ πράσσειν ὥστε ἅμα… ἅμα — so to look and so to act that at once the practical is carried through and the contemplative is at work. The Stoic objection to dividing life into business and reflection: physics is not a leisure activity but a way of looking while you act.

A confidence that does not hide. The subtlest formula in the passage: αὔθαδες σῴζεσθαι λανθάνον, οὐχὶ κρυπτόμενον — the assurance that comes of knowledge is kept "unnoticed, not concealed." The difference between the two participles is the whole ethical point: not a feigned modesty that hides, but a fullness that simply has no need of display.

The full catechism of definition. The close is EXERCISEsix questions put to a thing: what it is in substance (κατ’ οὐσίαν), what place it holds in the cosmos, how long it is formed to subsist, of what it is compounded, to whom it can belong, who can give it and take it away. This is the fullest form of the exercise in the corpus (cf. 3.11; 8.11; 6.13). And it is set down not as a method but as a promise: πότε… πότε… πότε — "when will you at last enjoy it?" The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one action.