From Catulus
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Παρὰ Κατούλου τὸ μὴ ὀλιγώρως ἔχειν φίλου αἰτιωμένου τι, κἂν τύχῃ ἀλόγως αἰτιώμενος, ἀλλὰ πειρᾶσθαι ἀποκαθιστάναι ἐπὶ τὸ σύνηθες· καὶ τὸ περὶ τῶν διδασκάλων ἐκθύμως εὔφημον, οἷα τὰ περὶ Δομιτίου καὶ Ἀθηνοδότου ἀπομνημονευόμενα· καὶ τὸ περὶ τὰ τέκνα ἀληθινῶς ἀγαπητικόν.
From Catulus: not to shrug off a friend's complaint, even when it happens to be voiced without good reason, but to try to set things back on their usual footing; to speak warmly and generously of one's teachers, as the stories of Domitius and Athenodotus record; and to feel a true, unfeigned love for one's children.
One of Book 1's roll of personal debts: what the little-known teacher Catulus taught Marcus about mending a friendship, praising teachers without stint, and loving his own children.
Catulus is one of the shadowy figures in Book 1 — named once, glossed by no other surviving source — and what Marcus takes from him is not doctrine but a habit of repair. Don't shrug off a friend's grievance as beneath notice, even when the grievance is plainly unfair; work instead to bring things back to their usual footing. The verb ἀποκαθιστάναι, elsewhere used of restoring exiles or realigning stars to their courses, is applied here to something as unglamorous as smoothing over a friend's bad mood. The underlying assumption is Stoic without being stated as such: the friend's unfairness lies outside Marcus's own moral choice and isn't worth managing; the relationship itself is the thing worth actively tending, and passive offense-taking is simply not on offer as a response.
The sentence then folds in two smaller debts almost as an afterthought — full-hearted praise for teachers, illustrated by anecdotes about Domitius and Athenodotus that Marcus assumes need no explanation and that no other text preserves, and plain, unqualified affection for his own children. Neither is hedged: ἐκθύμως is "with the whole θυμός," not half of it, and ἀγαπητικόν is a rare coinage built directly on ἀγαπάω, love as a settled valuing rather than a passing feeling. Read against the popular caricature of Stoicism as emotional withdrawal, this brief entry is some of the plainest evidence in the whole notebook that Marcus understood rational self-command as a discipline for protecting real attachments — to friends, teachers, and children alike — not a license to feel less about them.
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