Return to the sources. Three verses from Euripides' Chrysippus (fr. 839 Nauck), conveying the cosmology of Anaxagoras: what is born of earth (ἐκ γαίας) goes to earth, what has sprung from "aetherial seed" (αἰθερίου γονῆς) returns "to the vault of heaven" (οὐράνιον πόλον). Death as a sorting of the compound back to its domiciles: the bodily downward, the fiery-pneumatic upward; nothing perishes, all returns to its lender (the same move as in 7.10 — matter into substance, cause into the Logos; 7.23 — the wax remelted). A textual detail: in the third verse the editions diverge: Haines (Loeb) reads οὐράνιον, other editions αἰθέριον ("to the aetherial vault," repeating αἰθερίου from the second line); we print οὐράνιον.

"Either… or." To the poetic picture Marcus adds his signature disjunction (cf. 7.32): even if this is not a teleological return but merely "a dissolution of the interlacings in the atoms (τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἀτόμοις ἀντεμπλοκῶν) and a dispersion of the unsentient TERMelements (ἀπαθῶν στοιχείων)" (in the Greek the "or" sets the atomist picture against the verses; the "either… or" inside the sentence is the translators') — the conclusion is unchanged. DOGMAProvidence or atoms: both cosmologies yield one practical result — death is a sorting, not a catastrophe, and there is nothing in it to fear. The Stoic picture (return into the living Logos) is preferable, but even the Epicurean σκορπισμός is harmless to the one who will no longer be. Ἀπαθῶν — "impassive, non-sentient": the scattered elements have no subject of suffering, and so no evil. The EXERCISEmemory of death here rests at once on poetry, on physics, and on the disjunction. The discipline is desire.