Galen's father, Nicon, mathematician, architect, astronomer, philosopher, and devotee of Greek literature, was not only his sole instructor up to the age of 14, but the example of Stoic virtues on which Galen consciously modeled his own life. In his book On the Passions and Errors of the Soul he says he was "fortunate in having the least irascible, the most just, the most devoted of fathers," but of his mother he says "she was so very much prone to anger that sometimes she bit her handmaids; she constantly shrieked at my father and fought with him." Galen continues, "When I compared my father's noble deeds with the disgraceful passions of my mother I decided to embrace and love his deeds and flee and hate her passions." He defined passion as "that unbridled energy rebellious to reason" and had its control as one of his life's aims. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he himself remained unmarried.
Philosophical and Medical Training
In his fourteenth year Galen attended lectures given by Stoic, Platonic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean philosophers from Pergamon. Encouraged by Nicon, he refused to "proclaim [himself] a member of any of these sects" and said "there was no need for [the philosophy] teachers to disagree with one another, just as there was no disagreement among the teachers of geometry and arithmetic." Later in life he adopted the same attitude to the medical sects, and he urged physicians to take whatever is useful from wherever they find it and not to follow one sect or one man because that produces "an intellectual slave."
Galen relates that Nicon "advised by a dream made me take up medicine together with philosophy ...
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