A physiognomy of vice. The angry grimace (τὸ ἐπίκοτον τοῦ προσώπου) is "utterly DOGMAagainst nature" (λίαν παρὰ φύσιν) — and the unnatural has a price, legible right off the skin: with frequent repetition "the countenance's grace dies within it" (ἐναποθνῄσκει τὸ πρόσχημα) — or "has at last been quenched so that it cannot be kindled again." The fire lexicon (ἀπεσβέσθη, ἐξαφθῆναι — quenched, kindled) recalls the image of 7.2: as dogmas go out without rekindling, so the human countenance goes out from the habit of anger. The grimace is not a symptom but a training: the face memorizes the passion, and one day the mask no longer comes off. The nearest neighbour is Seneca, whose treatise On Anger opens with the portrait of a face disfigured by rage (De ira I 1; cf. II 35: show the angry man a mirror).

From the face to reason. The instruction: αὐτῷ γε τούτῳ EXERCISEπαρακολουθεῖν πειρῶ — "try to track this very point: that [anger] is against TERMreason." The argument is built from the body: reason could debate the harm of anger at length, but the dying face is the empirical proof of παρὰ φύσιν — and by the axiom of 7.11 what is against nature is against reason. Watching one's own grimace becomes an exercise of the discipline of assent.

Worse than anger. The close takes an unexpected step deeper: "if even the consciousness of TERMdoing wrong (συναίσθησις τοῦ ἁμαρτάνειν) departs — what cause is left for living?" So long as vice is felt as vicious, the person is alive as a moral being; the irreversibly extinguished face is the image of the state in which one sins without noticing. This is the twin of 3.1: there the faculties of reason "give out before" the body; here, before the person, dies his moral sensitivity. Life without συναίσθησις is not life but its mask. The governing discipline is assent; the sustaining one, action. The text of the second sentence is corrupt (our source prints ‹δὲ›, †, ‹τὸ› and the lacuna ‥); Long and Rogovin render the general sense from smoothed editions.