Ten words, and everything in a single apposition. The build of the sentence: a subject (PERSONSocrates), a verb (ἐκάλει, "used to call"), and two predicates for one object — Λαμίας and, glossing it, παιδίων δείματα, "children's frights." The second is not a metaphor of the first but its decoding: a lamia is terrible only so long as one believes in her.

What exactly is equated with a bogey. Not blame, nor rumor, but τὰ τῶν πολλῶν δόγματα — "the teachings of the many." The word δόγμα in Marcus ordinarily means a principle, what the ruling part lives by (cf. 11.18: οἵας ἀνάγκας δογμάτων κειμένας ἔχουσι). Here it is handed to the crowd — and thereby deflated: the many have their δόγματα too, only theirs are bogey-teachings.

An argument from age. A lamia works on children, that is, on someone not yet able to separate an impression from the judgment about it. So fear of the opinion of the many is neither a vice nor faint-heartedness but something unexamined: a residue of a child's optics in an adult. Hence the therapy is not courage but analysis.

Why Socrates. Marcus cites him as the source of the saying without rehearsing any argument: the device of the neighboring 11.22, 11.24, 11.25 — a EXERCISEtag pointing to common property. Of the four exempla in this run, two (this one and 11.25) are Socratic. Cf. 9.34 ("Imagine that thou seest their poor souls laid bare"; "When they think that they do harm by their blame or good by their praise, what an idea!") and 10.13. The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one action.