Anger with no addressee. The first verse of the poetic anthology (7.38–7.42) — two lines from Euripides' Bellerophontes (fr. 287 Nauck): "with things one ought not to be TERMenraged (θυμοῦσθαι) — they care nothing at all." The argument is disarmingly simple: anger is an address to someone, and πράγματα have no ear. Things are ἀπαθῆ: the storm, the illness, the broken axle receive neither fury nor entreaty; θυμός aimed at them is a letter with no recipient, returned to sender with all costs charged. Cf. 5.19: things "do not touch the soul, have no access to it" — here the same truth from the other side: neither has the soul any access to things through passion.

The tragedian in therapy's service. Marcus will return to this very verse at 11.6 — there he explains what tragedy is for: it reminds us that what happens "comes to pass thus by nature," and that the stage trains us to bear the same on the greater stage of life. A verse copied out twice belongs to the ready store: short, metrical, instantly retrievable at the moment of the flare. The book's therapeutic chain: anger at people is dissolved by their ignorance (7.22, 7.26), anger at one's own face by its unnaturalness (7.24), anger at things by their deafness. No one is left to be angry with. The discipline is assent.