Not the glory but the soul. The passage is methodological: how is virtue to be measured? Marcus takes Socrates, the paradigm sage, and the obscure Telauges¹ — and asks: how do we know Socrates was "superior in disposition (διάθεσις)"? He then lists everything usually counted to Socrates' credit — and declares it insufficient (οὐ γὰρ ἀρκεῖ): the noble death, the disputes with sophists, the night in the frost (Plato, Symposium 220a–b), the refusal to arrest Leon of Salamis², the swaggering gait (ἐβρενθύετο — from Aristophanes' Clouds 362, a comic image). All of it is external, and half-legendary at that ("and one may greatly doubt whether it was even true").

The one measure. ἀλλ’ ἐκεῖνο δεῖ σκοπεῖν — "this is what we must look at": what kind of TERMsoul Socrates had. And the criterion is unfolded as a list of inner states: DOGMAwhether he could be content with being just toward men and pious toward the gods (δίκαιος… ὅσιος — the whole of ethics in two words); whether he was not idly vexed at TERMvice (πρὸς τὴν κακίαν ἀγανακτῶν); whether he was not a slave to anyone's TERMignorance (δουλεύων τινὸς ἀγνοίᾳ — not letting another's folly govern him); whether he did not receive what fell from the Whole as strange or intolerable (the love of fate); whether he did not let his TERMmind sympathize (συμπαθῆ) with the affects of the "poor little flesh" (σαρκίδιον). Five inner tests — and not one outer. The greatness of the sage is invisible and therefore incontestable only from within; celebrity and virtue are different axes, and the second cannot be read off the first (cf. 03-06, 7.34). The discipline is desire.