physician had spread to Asia Minor, for we are told that Mithridates, King of Pontus, who reigned from 120 B. C. to 63 B. C., and who was a man of great ability and great energy, invited him to take up his residence at his court; but Asclepiades refused. Perhaps a still stronger evidence of his real worth as a man is to be found in the fact that he was the physician and personal friend of Cicero.
Notwithstanding these strongly favorable estimates of the ability of Asclepiades there were not a few men, and they too men of great authority, who were indisposed to give him so conspicuous a place in the temple of fame. Galen, for example, while admitting that he was a very eloquent physician, maintained that he was a sophist, given to quibbling, and disposed to contradict everybody. Caelius Aurelianus, a contemporary of Galen and the author of the most important practical treatise on Methodism that has come down to our time, appears to have held the same opinion as Galen with regard to Asclepiades. The complete disappearance of all the writings of the latter author makes it impossible for us at the present time to form an independent judgment as to the merits of these conflicting estimates of the man's character. Galen was a great admirer of Hippocrates and it is very likely that he took offense at the failure of Asclepiades to accept all the teachings and therapeutic methods of his hero. As to the reasons which led Caelius Aurelianus to agree with the estimate made by Galen, we know absolutely nothing.
Toward the middle of the seventeenth century there was discovered at Rome, not far from the Capena gate, a portrait bust in white marble of Asclepiades. It was probably executed by a Greek sculptor residing in Rome, for, if the work had been done in Greece, the face would have been represented with a beard, as are the heads of Hippocrates, Soranus and other celebrated physicians of antiquity. The absence of the beard, furthermore, shows—according to the opinion of antiquarian experts—that the bust must have been sculptured before the time of the Emperor Claudius (41-54 A. D.), as he was the first of the Caesars to wear a beard. This bust, which is a little larger
