Genre and place in the book. A definition (EXERCISEphysical definition) of death: death is a "rest" (ἀνάπαυλα) from four functions of life. Thus the EXERCISEmemory of death rests on a sober definition: death, "stripped" to what it is, ceases to frighten. The principal discipline is desire; the sustaining one is assent (the bare view).

The four functions. Death puts an end to: (1) sensory impression (αἰσθητικὴ ἀντιτυπία — the "counter-shock" of sensation); (2) impulsive twitching (ὁρμητικὴ νευροσπαστία) — impulse jerks us like a MOTIFmarionette on its strings (cf. 06-16); (3) the run of discursive thought (διανοητικὴ διέξοδος); (4) the service of the flesh (TERMσάρξ). None of these functions is, in itself, the "I" — all of them cease, and the "I" is deprived of them.

The meaning — rest (ἀνάπαυλα). The key word is not "annihilation" but "rest": death gives rest from what, in life, was either labor (the service of the flesh) or unfreedom (impulse jerking one like a puppet). The definition dispels the terror by redescribing death as the cessation of processes, not as an "evil" (cf. 04-05 — death is the composition and dissolution of the elements, a thing κατὰ φύσιν).

Disciplines and parallels. The principal one is desire (the acceptance of death through its definition); the secondary is assent (the bare definition, EXERCISEdefinitio). Parallels: 04-05 (composition/dissolution; death κατὰ φύσιν); 02-02 (the definition of the human being — flesh, breath, ruling part); the MOTIFmarionette image — 06-16, Med. 2.2; Med. 2.17 (the body a river, all transient). (Rogovin drops the marionette image — "the impulses that determine us.")