Beginning of Decline--Neoplatonism--Antyllus--Oribasius--Magnus-- Jacobus Psychristus--Adamantius--Meletius--Nemesius--Ætius-- Alexander of Tralles--The Plague--Moschion--Paulus Ægineta--Decline of Healing Art. The death of Galen marks the beginning of the decline of medical science in ancient times, and this decline was contemporaneous with the overthrow of the Roman State. As everybody knows, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire resulted from the profligacy and incapacity of the emperors, luxurious living and vice among the people, tyranny of an overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell quickly into the hands of the barbarians, and her power was broken. In A.D. 395, was founded the Byzantine Empire, also styled the East Roman, Greek, or Lower Empire, which lasted for more than a thousand years, and took its name from the capital, Byzantium or Constantinople. In this empire medical science maintained a feeble and sickly existence. During this _Byzantine Period_ there were a few physicians of note, but they were mainly commentators, and medical science retrograded rather than progressed. _Neoplatonism_ exerted a powerful influence upon the healing art. It was founded by Plotinus, and was for three centuries a formidable rival to Christianity. The Neoplatonists believed that man could intuitively know the absolute by a faculty called _Ecstasy_. Neoplatonism is a term which covers a very wide range of varying thought; essentially, it was a combination of philosophy and religion, arising from the intellectual movement in Alexandria. It covered a great deal of mysticism, magic and spiritualism, and the followers of the system, as it developed, became believers in the efficacy of certain exercises and symbols to cure diseases. They entered as Kingsley wrote, "the fairy land of ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom." It is wonderful how mankind in their pursuit of knowledge seem to have progressed in a circle. The influence which Christianity exerted upon the investigation of medical science during the early centuries of our era will be considered at length in a subsequent chapter.