Three words and a manuscript fork. The shortest passage of the book — and one of its textually disputed ones. The standard reading (Perseus, Loeb/Haines; Long follows it) is Ὀρθός, ἢ ὀρθούμενος: "upright — or set upright." The aphorism then continues the line of 7.5 and 7.7: stand straight yourself, and if you cannot — accept the hand that straightens you; what is shameful is crookedness, not help. The other reading — Ὀρθός, μὴ ὀρθούμενος: "upright, not set upright" — is the one Rogovin translates («правым, а не исправляемым»), and Marcus himself speaks for it at 3.5: ὀρθὸν εἶναι χρή, οὐχὶ ὀρθούμενον — "one must be upright, not held upright." We print the Greek after our standard source (ἢ) while keeping Rogovin's Russian verbatim: the translation here is a witness to the other branch of the tradition.

Uprightness. In either reading one figure is at work — ὀρθότης, erectness: the bodily vertical as the image of the moral one. It has already appeared at 7.2 (τοῦτο μάθε καὶ ὀρθὸς εἶ — "learn this, and you stand upright"). The readings differ over the source of the vertical: μή demands autonomy (stand by yourself, without props — the ideal of 3.5), ἤ admits a fellow-worker (like the lame soldier on the wall of 7.7). Stoic thought holds both poles at once: the goal is to stand on your own; the way is not to disdain the hand that sets you on your feet. The discipline is action.