A roll-call of the buriers. The passage is a file of pairs on a rigid formula, "A buried B, then A too" (Λούκιλλα Οὐῆρον, εἶτα Λούκιλλα…): Lucilla and Verus, Secunda and Maximus, Epitynchanus and Diotimus, PERSONAntoninus and Faustina, Celer and Hadrian. He who yesterday stood at another's deathbed is tomorrow on his own; the mourner becomes the mourned. Marcus takes the faces of his own circle — kin, courtiers, recent sovereigns — so that death ceases to be an abstraction: it has already passed through these very names.

Where the "keen wits" went. The second move goes from the powerful to the famed: "where are those keen (δριμεῖς) — the seers or the proud?" Named are Charax, Demetrius the Platonist, Eudaemon — recent celebrities of intellect. The answer is annihilating: "all ephemeral, dead long ago" (πάντα ἐφήμερα, τεθνηκότα πάλαι); some not remembered even a little while, others "turned into fables" (εἰς μύθους), others "faded even from the fables" (ἐκ μύθων ἐξίτηλοι) — three grades of oblivion, below which there is nothing.

The conclusion about oneself. Hence EXERCISEthe memory of death in pure form: "remember that you too are bound" for one of three — "the compound to be scattered" (σκεδασθῆναι τὸ συγκριμάτιον), "the breath to be quenched" (σβεσθῆναι τὸ πνευμάτιον), or "to move on and be stationed elsewhere" (μεταστῆναι). The diminutives συγκριμάτιον/πνευμάτιον ("little compound," "little breath") deflate the "I": what fears death is a small clot of elements and a bit of air. The threefold fork is the standard disjunction on death (cf. 7.32; the dispersal of atoms or elements), and all its outcomes are harmless. The roll-call of the dead is a recurring device of the book (cf. 06-47; 07-19 — "How many a Chrysippus, how many a Socrates, how many an Epictetus has time already swallowed up!"). There are no term-lemmata in the text (πνευμάτιον is a diminutive, not the lemma πνεῦμα). The governing discipline is desire (to accept one's end), the sustaining one assent (not to judge death an evil).