At the end of four years there broke out in Pergamum a riot which rendered residence there, at least for a certain length of time, undesirable. Accordingly Galen, who was now thirty-two years old, and who was probably glad of an excuse for leaving a place where a physician of his education and talents had so few opportunities for gaining distinction, decided to visit Rome, and--if circumstances appeared to favor the plan--to settle there. His first impressions after arriving in that metropolis were favorable to the plan of establishing himself there permanently, but at the end of a few years he became conscious of the growing hostility of those practitioners who had been for a longer time than he well established in that city. This hostility increased as he rose in favor and esteem with people of position and influence. He had treated skilfully and with success Eudemus, a peripatetic philosopher of great celebrity, for a quartan fever. He had also cured the wife of Boëthus (a patrician who belonged to the consular class) of a serious illness and had received as an expression of appreciation a gift of four hundred pieces of gold. He had won the friendship and esteem of such men as Sergius Paulus, the Praetor; of Barbaras, the uncle of the Emperor Lucius; and of Severus, who was at that time Consul, but who later became Emperor. These very influential men took an active interest in Galen’s scientific work, having been invited by him on more than one occasion to witness his dissections of apes,--dissections which he made for the particular purpose of demonstrating the organs of respiration and of the voice. All these facts soon became known to Galen’s rivals and probably helped to fan the spark of their envy into a flame; but it is very doubtful whether he was justified in saying that the ill feeling thus engendered threatened to end in some act of personal violence, for which reason he decided to leave Rome and return to Pergamum. His secret manner of departure, without taking leave of anybody, and the fact that the Plague was just at that time rapidly approaching Rome, justify the belief, says Neuburger, that it was not fear of personal violence at the hands of his jealous rivals that drove Galen away so mysteriously from the city in which, in the short space of four or five years, he had won so great professional success, but an unwillingness to face his duty, which was, to remain and aid in the approaching fight against the great destroyer--the Plague. If Galen had been a simple physician, one of the great body of medical practitioners in Rome, no one would be disposed to question the justice of the criticism which the distinguished Viennese historian makes of his decision to abandon that city at the moment of her distress and peril. But, as a matter of fact, Galen was not a practitioner of medicine in the full sense of that term. He treated cases of illness because in no other way