The one real dialogue at the end of the book. The passage is not a saying but a scene of dispute1: a remark of Epictetus, an objection from an unnamed interlocutor (δύσφημα ταῦτα — "those are words of ill omen"), a reply. The objection is left standing rather than removed: Marcus copies out not a thesis but the handling of resistance, because the resistance here is natural.
Where exactly it is to be said. EXERCISEΚαταφιλοῦντα … EXERCISEἔνδονEXERCISE ἐπιφθέγγεσθαι — "while kissing, to say it within." Two conditions at once: not instead of the caress but during it (καταφιλέω is to kiss warmly, not in passing), and not aloud. The exercise does not cancel tenderness and is not shared with the child; it is performed in the very same motion as the embrace.
The caution of the formula. αὔριον ἴσως ἀποθανῇ — "tomorrow, perhaps, you will die." Not "he will certainly die," nor "all men are mortal": EXERCISEthe premeditation works on possibility, not on prophecy. To assert the death would be to lie; to hold it possible is exact. DOGMAThe acceptance is thus directed not at the event but at its possibility.
The answer to the objection: a dispute about the word δύσφημον. Δύσφημος means "of ill utterance," a term of ritual: what must not be spoken lest it be drawn down. Epictetus does not deny the fear of the word; he redefines the term: οὐδὲν δύσφημον … TERMφυσικοῦ DOGMAτινος ἔργου σημαντικόν — "nothing that signifies some work of nature is a word of ill omen." An ill omen is possible only where the word bears on the outcome; where it merely names the course of nature, there is nothing to bear on.
And a test by example. EXERCISEἢ καὶ τὸ τοὺς EXERCISEστάχυας θερισθῆναιEXERCISE δύσφημον — "or else 'the ears of corn are reaped' is an ill-omened word too." An argument from absurdity, and with precisely the image Marcus had already copied at 11.6 from Euripides: βίον θερίζειν ὥστε κάρπιμον στάχυν, "life is reaped like a ripe ear of corn." There the harvest consoled; here it disarms speech: if it is not frightening to speak of the ear of corn, then what frightens is not death but our relation to the word for it. The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one assent.