Honoring his tutors without delay, and finding his teachers
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τὸ φθάσαι τοὺς τροφέας ἐν ἀξιώματι καταστῆσαι, οὗ δὴ ἐδόκουν μοι ἐπιθυμεῖν, καὶ μὴ ἀναβαλέσθαι ἐλπίδι τοῦ με, ἐπεὶ νέοι ἔτι ἦσαν, ὕστερον αὐτὸ πράξειν. τὸ γνῶναι Ἀπολλώνιον, Ῥούστικον, Μάξιμον.
That I was quick to raise my tutors to a place of honor, which they plainly seemed to want, and did not defer it on the hope that, since they were still young men, I could do it later on; and that I came to know Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus.
Continues the closing catalogue of debts to the gods (1.17): thanks for prompting him to honor his tutors without delay, and for the philosophical company of Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus.
This fragment continues the closing catalogue of 1.17, where Marcus tallies debts owed not to any one teacher but to the gods collectively. The debt named here is procedural rather than substantive: he thanks them for his own promptness. He did not let the honor his tutors visibly wanted sit unclaimed on the excuse that, since they were still young men, there would be time enough later. ἀναβάλλω, "to put off," is a verb Marcus treats with wariness throughout the notebook, and the ἐλπίς that rationalizes delay is, in Stoic terms, itself a species of desire reaching into a future no one controls — postponement dressed up as patience.
The second sentence is deliberately bare: τὸ γνῶναι, "that I came to know," followed by three names and nothing else. Each man has already received his own entry — Rusticus in 1.7, Apollonius in 1.8, Maximus in 1.15 — so the terseness here is not omission but recall: Book 1 folds back on itself, treating the mere fact of having known these three as a distinct gift, separable from anything they taught him. It closes the roll call the way it opened, by naming a person rather than a lesson, and by crediting the gods for the accident of proximity that put good teachers within reach at all.
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