Endurance, restraint, and time with his mother
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τὸ ἀντισχεῖν μοι τὸ σῶμα ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον ἐν τοιούτῳ βίῳ· τὸ μήτε Βενεδίκτης ἅψασθαι μήτε Θεοδότου, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὕστερον ἐν ἐρωτικοῖς πάθεσι γενόμενον ὑγιᾶναι· τὸ χαλεπήναντα πολλάκις Ῥουστίκῳ μηδὲν πλέον πρᾶξαι, ἐφ’ ᾧ ἂν μετέγνων· τὸ μέλλουσαν νέαν τελευτᾶν τὴν τεκοῦσαν ὅμως οἰκῆσαι μετ’ ἐμοῦ τὰ τελευταῖα ἔτη.
That my body held out so long in such a life; that I laid a hand on neither Benedicta nor Theodotus, and that even later, when I was caught up in amorous passions, I got well again; that, often vexed with Rusticus, I never went further than I would afterward have repented; and that my mother, though fated to die young, still spent her last years living with me.
Continues the closing catalogue of thanks to the gods that fills the second half of Book 1 (1.17), immediately following the long tribute to his adoptive father Antoninus Pius in 1.16.
This item continues the closing list of thanks that fills the second half of Book 1 (1.17), the counterpart to the long portrait of Antoninus Pius that occupies 1.16. It is compound: Marcus is grateful that his body held out through so demanding a life, that he never became entangled with Benedicta or Theodotus — otherwise unknown figures, presumably members of the imperial household — and that even a later lapse into erotic passions (ἐρωτικὰ πάθη) resolved into recovery rather than ruin. πάθος is the Stoic technical term for an irrational, excessive impulse, a misjudgment of the soul rather than a mere feeling; casting the recovery as ὑγιᾶναι, "to get well again," keeps the medical metaphor for virtue and vice that runs throughout the work.
The next two items move from body to temper and from erotic entanglement to filial debt. Rusticus — praised at length in 1.7 as the teacher who pointed Marcus toward Epictetus — is here the object of real anger, χαλεπαίνειν, not retrospective piety; the mercy Marcus counts is only that no action followed the feeling, nothing he would later have had to repent (μετέγνων). The final clause names no one, but "she who bore me," ἡ τεκοῦσα, is Domitia Lucilla, whose early death is softened only by the fact that she lived long enough to spend her last years with him rather than dying before he had them. Read together, the four clauses insist that gratitude here is not for achievements but for things that might easily have gone otherwise — a body, a temper, a mother's borrowed time — held together as much by fortune as by will.
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