Genre and place in the book. A brief maxim of physics, in the clipped manner of Book VI (cf. 06-03): a single thesis on universal impermanence. The dogma of physics works for ethics — contemplating the swift TERMchange grounds the discipline of desire: not to cling to what vanishes so fast.

Universal change (τάχιστα μεταβαλεῖ). "All that underlies (τὰ ὑποκείμενα) will change most swiftly." The adverb τάχιστα ("most swiftly") sets the tone: change is not only universal but rapid. Behind it stands the Heraclitean-Stoic doctrine of TERMμεταβολή as the very mode of the cosmos's being: every thing is only a temporary configuration in the flow, the "river of substance" (05-23). τὰ ὑποκείμενα are the "underlying things," the material substrates of things.

The disjunction: vaporization or dispersion. Marcus sets two cosmologies as the outcome of change. (1) It will "be exhaled" (ἐκθυμιαθήσεται), "if substance is one" (ἥνωται ἡ οὐσία) — Stoic monism: through exhalation (ἐκθυμίασις) the thing returns into the single substance, reabsorbed into the whole. (2) Or it will "be scattered" (σκεδασθήσεται) — the Epicurean dispersion of atoms. The same disjunctive figure as "providence or atoms" (06-10 — unity and order, or a mixing and dissolution) and Med. 7.32 ("about death: a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or extinction"). The point: both branches lead to one practical conclusion.

The practical upshot. Under either cosmology nothing abides: the individual is a transient assemblage, bound either to return into the one or to fall apart. Hence the discipline of desire: what dissolves so quickly deserves neither greedy clinging nor fear of loss. Death, on this view, is not a "loss" but a particular case of μεταβολή, the very process that produced us (cf. the memory of death and acceptance of what happens).

Disciplines and parallels. The principal one is desire (contemplating impermanence teaches non-attachment). Parallels: Med. 2.3 (the cosmos is preserved by the changes of the elements and of compound bodies); 04-36 (everything is the seed of what will come from it); 05-23 (substance a river in ceaseless flow); 04-42 (change is neither evil nor good); 05-13 (the parts of the self into the parts of the cosmos). The doctrine of the transformation of the elements — SVF II 413 ff.; LS 47, 52.