Genre and place in the book. A brief doctrinal gnome on death — the counterpart of the cosmopolis (04-04): there the question was whence the elements and reason come into us, here it is whither they disperse. Both chapters rest on the same physics of the TERMelements, and 4.5 directly continues the imagery of 4.4.

The symmetry of birth and death. θάνατος and γένεσις are two sides of one process: σύγκρισις (a composition) of the same TERMelements and λύσις (a dissolution) back into the same. This is the doctrine of transformation (μεταβολή): birth is the composition of matter into a compound body (συγκρίμα), death its decomposition back into the elements. Nothing is lost (cf. 02-03: "the cosmos is preserved by the changes of the elements"; Med. 8.18; 4.14). Death is therefore not an ontological loss but a normal mode of nature.

μυστήριον — a mystery. Death is called a "mystery of nature" (φύσεως μυστήριον) — a metaphor of initiation into the mysteries: not a horror and not a disgrace, but a hidden yet wholly natural rite through which all that lives passes, as it does through birth.

"Nothing to be ashamed of." The ethical conclusion: there is nothing αἰσχρόν (shameful) in death, for it is contrary neither to the nature of a TERMrational living being (τὸ νοερὸν ζῷον — again νοερόν, a bridge to 04-04) nor to the TERMλόγος of our constitution (κατασκευή). Death occurs κατὰ φύσιν → it is DOGMAaccording to nature → and so no evil. The verbatim parallel is Med. 2.12: "nothing is evil which is according to nature."

The disciplines. The principal one is desire: acceptance of what does not depend on us, ultimately of one's own death. The secondary is assent: the correction of the false judgement (ὑπόληψις) that death is an evil or a disgrace. The exercise is EXERCISEthe memory of death.

Parallels. Death as the dissolution of the same elements — Med. 2.12; 8.18; 4.14; 02-03. Welcoming death as a work of nature — Med. 9.3; what ceases in due season suffers no evil — 12.23. Death among the indifferents (ἀδιάφορα) — DL 7.102; LS 58; Sen. Ep. 77; Epict. Ench. 21. The Heraclitean background of transformation — DK 22 B76.