The last entry of the Meditations. It is addressed not "to himself," as almost everything else is, but to a human being as such: Ἄνθρωπε — the vocative with which a grave inscription or an address to a passer-by begins. And the verb stands in the aorist: ἐπολιτεύσω, "you have finished being a citizen" — the thing is done, the account is closed.

The argument from citizenship. DOGMAἐν τῇ μεγάλῃ ταύτῃ πόλει — "in this great city": the cosmos as a city, cf. 6.44. And the measure taken is a civic one: τὸ κατὰ τοὺς νόμους ἴσον ἑκάστῳ — by law each has an equal share. Not "life is short" but "the term is by right the same for all"; the length of one's citizenship does not enter the reckoning, any more than it does in the execution of a law.

Who does the sending away. The negations are precisely chosen: οὐ τύραννος οὐδὲ δικαστὴς ἄδικος — no tyrant and no unjust judge, but TERMφύσις ἡ εἰσαγαγοῦσα, "she who brought you in." The one who admitted also dismisses; there is no arbitrariness here and no miscarriage of justice, and so no ground for grievance.

The theatre and the quarrel about acts. οἷον εἰ κωμῳδὸν ἀπολύοι τῆς σκηνῆς ὁ παραλαβὼν στρατηγός — "as if the praetor who engaged an actor were to release him from the stage." Στρατηγός is here the Greek name for the Roman praetor, who paid for the games and hired the company; to dismiss an actor in mid-play is within his rights. The objection is put into the actor's own mouth — the only direct speech in the passage: "I have not spoken five parts but three." And the answer καλῶς εἶπας, "well said," disarms by agreeing: the dispute is not about how many acts there are but about who determines the whole. ὁ τότε μὲν τῆς συγκρίσεως, νῦν δὲ τῆς διαλύσεως αἴτιος — he who was the cause of the compounding is now the cause of the dissolving; σὺ δὲ οὐδετέρου αἴτιος — "and you are the cause of neither."

The last word of the corpus is ἵλεως. MOTIFἄπιθι οὖν ἵλεως· καὶ γὰρ ὁ ἀπολύων ἵλεως. The word belongs to cult: "gracious," as of a god well disposed toward you; and it was the word that closed 12.3 — to live out the remainder ἵλεως τῷ σαυτοῦ δαίμονι. Here it stands twice, and the second half is not a repetition but a ground: go graciously, for he who releases you is gracious too. The book ends neither with a command nor with a consolation, but with a reciprocity. The governing discipline is desire, the sustaining one assent.