Two grades of a good exit. The best lot is to leave life having had no "taste" (ἄγευστον) of lying, hypocrisy, luxury, and conceit (τῦφος). But that is the lot of "the most perfect"; for the rest there is the δεύτερος πλοῦς — the "second voyage" (a proverbial idiom: when the wind drops, take to the oars): to leave at least sated with these things and turned away from them. EXERCISEThe departure is measured not by its term but by its cleanness — by what one "breathes out one's life" (ἀποπνεῦσαι) with.

The plague of the mind. A sharp turn: the real λοιμός (plague) is not the "bad temperament" (δυσκρασία) of the surrounding air but the corruption of the understanding (διαφθορὰ διανοίας). The bodily infection destroys the animal as animal; TERMvice destroys the human as human — by his own, rational, mark. Marcus writes in the midst of the Antonine Plague (cf. Carnuntum) and inverts the literal pestilence into a measure: flee not the air but the TERMκακία that alone makes you worse (cf. 8.55; 4.8 — harm belongs only to what spoils the ruling part). The governing discipline is desire (what to flee), the sustaining one assent (to reckon vice the one true infection).