The core of the Plato series. A verbatim excerpt from the Apology (28b) — Socrates' reply to an imagined opponent who reproaches him for having led a life that brought him to a death sentence. Socrates' move: you "speak not well" (οὐ καλῶς λέγεις) if you suppose that a man "of even the smallest worth" (ὅτου τι καὶ σμικρὸν ὄφελος) ought to weigh the risk of life or death (κίνδυνον ὑπολογίζεσθαι τοῦ ζῆν ἢ τεθνάναι). Life and death are struck out of the decision — that is DOGMAnot our business and not the criterion of an act.

The single question. In their place, one sole object of consideration (ἐκεῖνο μόνον σκοπεῖν): "whether I act justly or unjustly, and whether this is the work of a good man or a bad" (πότερον δίκαια ἢ ἄδικα… ἀγαθοῦ ‹ἔργα› ἢ κακοῦ). This is the Platonic source of the Stoic DOGMAself-sufficiency of virtue: the only variable of an act is its moral quality; survival is an indifferent. Marcus, for whom "to live or die" was a daily military and political reality, copies out of Socrates the very frame of his discipline of action. The direct continuation is 7.45 (the image of the post), and then 7.46 (the Gorgias: not to cling to length of life). Strictly: δίκαια/ἄδικα are adjectives, a theme, not the term δικαιοσύνη; the tag is withheld, the link kept to the commentary. The governing discipline is action; the sustaining one, assent.