A comparison that is almost unbearable. Two things are equated: looking for a fig in winter and looking for a dead child. The harshness is deliberate, and it rests not on callousness but on the logic of the impossible: both are a demand for what is not there. Cf. the tenth gift of the Muses at 11.18: τὸ μὴ ἀξιοῦν ἁμαρτάνειν τοὺς φαύλους μανικόν, "to require that bad men not go wrong is madness, for it wants the impossible." Here the same word — μαινομένου — and the same argument.

Precision in the choice of fruit. Σῦκον, a fig: the commonest and cheapest of fruits, but strictly seasonal. The example is deliberately taken from the harmless: nobody is angry at winter for having no figs, everybody understands that the season is past. The equation is meant to work through that obviousness.

The word that softens everything. ὅτε οὐκέτι δίδοται — "when it is no longer given." Not "when he is gone," nor "when he has died," but a passive with no agent: the child was given and is given no longer. The same manner of speech as in the Stoic formula about the return of what was lent (10.14: nature does not take away but receives back). Loss is described as a supply ceasing, not as a seizure — and so it has no culprit.

What is not said. Marcus does not say that grief is forbidden. What is said is that to look for (ζητεῖν) is madness: what is condemned is not the feeling but the act directed at what is not there. Cf. 11.34, where Epictetus is already named and where the remedy is offered: to say this to oneself beforehand, while kissing the living child. The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one assent.