A craftsman's question. Τίς σου ἡ τέχνη; — "what is your craft?" It is what one asks a stranger: cobbler, helmsman, physician. The answer breaks the expectation: TERMἀγαθὸν εἶναι — "to be good." Being virtuous is placed not among vocations but among skills: it has a subject matter, rules and an apprenticeship, and one can be unskilled at it. The same move at 10.16: enough of discussing what a good man is like — be one.

An answer by way of "otherwise than." πῶς ἄλλως γίνεται ἢ ἐκ θεωρημάτων; — "how else does this come about than out of principles?" A rhetorical question in place of an assertion: Marcus does not enumerate conditions, he closes off every other road. Virtue is not reached by good intention, nor by habit, nor by imitation — only through EXERCISEθεωρήματα, "things discerned" (from θεωρέω).

Two branches — and that is the whole curriculum. τῶν μὲν περὶ τῆς τοῦ ὅλου TERMφύσεως — about the nature of the Whole (physics); DOGMAτῶν δὲ περὶ τῆς ἰδίας τοῦ ἀνθρώπου κατασκευῆς — "about the constitution proper to a human being" (κατασκευή, "rigging, construction," a word from the workshop rather than from philosophy). The τέλος-formula is folded into a single sentence: to live according to nature means according to both natures, the common one and one's own. Neither branch suffices alone: physics without anthropology yields contemplation without obligation; anthropology without physics, morality without a ground. Cf. 10.2, where "one's own constitution" is unfolded into the ladder of three natures, and 2.9, where the formula is given as the structure of a meditation.

What is absent here. Not a word about an example, a teacher, or the will. One instrument only is named — knowledge, and knowledge of a construction at that, not of rules of conduct. The governing discipline is action, the sustaining one assent.

Textual note. ἄλλως ("otherwise") is printed here, with el.wikisource: the correlative pair ἄλλως … ἢ ("otherwise … than") both makes the sentence cohere and is what Rogovin renders («иначе, нежели»). Long read καλῶς ("well"): "how is this accomplished well except by…". The stub had καλῶς, and the conjunction ἢ had been corrupted to ὴ — both places corrected.