Birth and parentage.
Galen—he does not seem to have been called Claudius until the time of the Renaissance—was born about 129 A.D.[532] at Pergamum in Asia Minor. His father, Nikon, was an architect and mathematician, trained in arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Much of this education he transmitted to his son, but even more valuable, in Galen’s opinion, were his precepts to follow no one sect or party but to hear and judge them all, to despise honor and glory, and to magnify truth alone. To this teaching Galen attributes his own peaceful and painless passage through life. He has never grieved over losses of property but managed to get along somehow. He has not minded much when some have vituperated him, thinking instead of those who praise him. In later life Galen looked back with great affection upon his father and spoke of his own great good fortune in having as a parent that gentlest, justest, most honest and humane of men. On the other hand, the chief thing that he learned from his mother was to avoid her failings of a sharp temper and tongue, with which she made life miserable for their household slaves and scolded his father worse than Xanthippe ever did Socrates.[533]
Education in philosophy and medicine.
In one of his works Galen speaks of the passionate love and enthusiasm for truth which has possessed him since boyhood, so that he has not stopped either by day or by night from quest of it.[534] He realized that to become a true scholar required both high natural qualifications and a superior type of education from the start. After his fourteenth year he heard the lectures of various philosophers, Platonist and Peripatetic, Stoic and Epicurean; but when about seventeen, warned by a dream of his father,[535] he turned to the study of medicine. This incident of the dream shows that neither Galen nor his father, despite their education and intellectual standards, were free from the current belief in occult influences, of which we shall find many more instances in Galen’s works. Galen first studied medicine for four years under Satyrus in his native city of Pergamum, then under Pelops at Smyrna, later under Numisianus at Corinth and Alexandria.[536] This was about the time that the great mathematician and astronomer, Ptolemy, was completing his observations[537] in the neighborhood of Alexandria, but Galen does not mention him, despite his own belief that a first-rate physician should also know such subjects as geometry and astronomy, music and rhetoric.[538] Galen’s interest in philosophy continued, however, and he wrote many logical and philosophical treatises, most of which are lost.[539] His father died when he was twenty, and it was after this that he went to other cities to study.
First visit to Rome.
Galen returned to Pergamum to practice and was, when but twenty-nine, made the doctor for the gladiators by five successive pontiffs.[540] During his thirties came his first residence at Rome.[541] The article on Galen in Pauly-Wissowa states that he was driven away from Rome by the plague, and in De libris propriis he does say that, “when the great plague broke out there, I hurriedly departed from the city for my native land.”[542] But in De prognosticatione ad Epigenem his explanation is that he became disgusted with the malice of the envious physicians of the capital, and determined to return home as soon as the sedition there was over.[543] Meanwhile he stayed on and gained great fame by his cures but their jealousy and opposition multiplied, so that presently, when he learned that the sedition was over, he went back to Pergamum.
Relations with the emperors: later life.
His fame, however, had come to the imperial ears and he was soon summoned to Aquileia to meet the emperors on their way north against the invading Germans. An outbreak of the plague there prevented their proceeding with the campaign immediately,[544] and Galen states that the emperors fled for Rome with a few troops, leaving the rest to suffer from the plague and cold winter. On the way Lucius Verus died, and when Marcus Aurelius finally returned to the front, he allowed Galen to go back to Rome as court physician to Commodus.[545] The prevalence of the plague at this time is illustrated by a third encounter which Galen had with it in Asia, when he claims to have saved himself and others by thorough venesection.[546] The war lasted much longer than had been anticipated and meanwhile Galen was occupied chiefly in literary labors, completing a number of works. In 192 some of his writings and other treasures were lost in a fire which destroyed the Temple of Peace on the Sacred Way. Of some of the works which thus perished he had no other copy himself. In one of his works on compound medicines he explains that some persons may possess the first two books which had already been published, but that these had perished with others in a shop on the Sacra Via when the whole shrine of peace and the great libraries on the Palatine hill were consumed, and that his friends, none of whom possessed copies, had besought him to begin the work all over again.[547] Galen was still alive and writing during the early years of the dynasty of the Severi, and probably died about 200.
His unfavorable picture of the learned world.
Although the envy of other physicians at Rome and their accusing him of resort to magic arts and divination in his marvelous prognostications and cures were perhaps neither the sole nor the true reason for Galen’s temporary withdrawal from the capital, there probably is a great deal of truth in the picture he paints of the medical profession and learned world of his day. There are too many other ancient witnesses, from the encyclopedist Pliny and the satirist Juvenal to the fourth century lawyer and astrologer, Firmicus, who substantiate his charges to permit us to explain them away as the product of personal bitterness or pessimism. We feel that these men lived in an intellectual society where faction and villainy, superstition and petty-mindedness and personal enmity, were more manifest than in the quieter and, let us hope, more tolerant learned world of our time. Selfishness and pretense, personal likes and dislikes, undoubtedly still play their part, but there is not passionate animosity and open war to the knife on every hand. The status belli may still be characteristic of politics and the business world, but scholars seem able to live in substantial peace. Perhaps it is because there is less prospect of worldly gain for members of the learned professions than in Galen’s day. Perhaps it is due to the growth of the impartial scientific spirit, of unwritten codes of courtesy and ethics within the leading learned professions, and of state laws concerning such matters as patents, copyright, professional degrees, pure food, and pure drugs. Perhaps, in the unsatisfactory relations between those who should have been the best educated and most enlightened men of that time we may see an important symptom of the intellectual and ethical decline of the ancient world.