Death in one line. The first of four consecutive headed memoranda «Περὶ …» (on death — on pain — on fame): the format of a school thesaurus, with a folded answer ready for each of the chief terrors. The answer on death is a disjunction across cosmologies: if atoms (ἄτομοι — the Epicurean picture) — death is a "dispersal" (σκεδασμός) of clustered particles; if a unity (ἕνωσις — the Stoic continuum) — then either "extinguishing" (σβέσις — dissolution into the whole, as a fire goes out) or "removal" (μετάστασις — the soul's passage to another place or state). This is the doctrine of DOGMA"providence or atoms" (cf. 4.27; 06-10) applied to the last fear.

A closed table of outcomes. The therapeutic force lies in the list's exhaustiveness: there is no third case, and none of the three outcomes is fearful. Dispersal and extinction are no evil, for they leave no subject to whom it could be bad (the Epicurean argument); removal is no evil, for the one removed lives elsewhere (the Socratic alternative of the Apology, to which Marcus will return in the Plato series — 7.35). Cf. 06-24 (Alexander and his groom — "taken back into the same seminal logoi or scattered into atoms") and 8.25. The EXERCISEmemory of death is here compressed into a formula to carry on one's person: any metaphysics whatever suffices for not being afraid. The discipline is desire.