From my father's memory
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Παρὰ τῆς δόξης καὶ μνήμης τῆς περὶ τοῦ γεννήσαντος τὸ αἰδῆμον καὶ ἀρρενικόν.
From my father's reputation and the memory men kept of him: modesty, and a manly character.
His father died young; Marcus knew him mostly through the reputation others kept of him. From that remembered example he takes modesty and a manly bearing.
Marcus's father, Annius Verus, died while Marcus was a boy, so the inheritance here is indirect — not the man himself but ἡ δόξα καὶ μνήμη, the good name and the memory others kept of him. A reputation, handled this way, becomes a moral instrument: the son measures himself against a father he must reconstruct from testimony.
What he takes is a pair that later moralists would have set at odds — τὸ αἰδῆμον, the modesty or sense of shame that checks a person before something base, and τὸ ἀρρενικόν, a manly firmness. For Marcus they belong together: the reverence is not softness and the manliness is not swagger. It is the same balance he will later demand of the ruling faculty — restrained and unyielding at once.
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