On his return to his own country he was charged by its ruler to dress the wounded in the great circus, which furnished him opportunity for displaying all his anatomical knowledge and surgical skill. Not remaining long at home, he went to Rome, where his renown had preceded him, and where, by his brilliant elocution, his accurate logic, and{038} his profound erudition, as well as his versatility and practical skill, he at once took the highest place. But here his rapid success, his vanity, his disdain for his colleagues, and his useless boasting, as well as his natural jealousy, gained him the enmity of nearly all his contemporaries, and his stay at Rome was thereby made very disagreeable. In his work on _Prenotions_ he accuses his colleagues of base jealousy and stupid ignorance, lavishes upon them such epithets as "thieves" and "poisoners," and closes by saying that after having unmasked them he would leave them to their evil designs by abandoning the great city to seek a home in a smaller place, where the surroundings would be to him more congenial. This threat he carried out, but soon returned to Rome upon the invitation of the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Yerus, whose confidence, as well as that of their successors, he enjoyed. He is supposed to have lived to the age of seventy-one, and to have died about 200 A.D. Galen strongly denied being attached to any of the sects of his day, and regarded as slaves those who took the title of Hippocratists, Praxagoreans, Herophilists, and so on. Nevertheless, his predilection in favor of the Hippocratic writings is well marked, for lie explains, comments upon, and expands them at length, refutes the objections of their adversaries, and gives them the highest place. He says: "No one before me has given the true method of treating disease; Hippocrates, I confess, lias heretofore shown the path, but as he was the first to enter it he was not able to go as far as he wished.... He has not made all the necessary distinctions, and is often obscure, as is usually the case with ancients when they attempt to be concise. He says very little of complicated diseases; in a word, he has only sketched what another was to complete; he has opened the path, but has left it for a successor to enlarge and make it plain." This implies how he regarded himself as the successor of Hippocrates, and how littleweight{039} he attached to the labors of others. He held that there were three sorts of principles in man: spirits, humors, and solids. Throughout his metaphysical speculations Galen reproduces and amplifies the Hippocratic dogmatism. Between perfect health and disease there were, he thought, eight kinds of temperaments or imperfect mixtures compatible with the exercise of the functions of life. With Plato and Aristotle, he thought the human soul to be composed of three faculties or parts: the vegetative, residing in the liver; the irascible, having its seat in the heart; and