In 157 he returned to his home city, taking up an official post as doctor to the gladiators, before moving to Rome in the early 160s, where—after one more brief period back in Pergamon—he settled permanently. At Rome Galen seems to have developed his status very quickly amongst the socio-intellectual elite—which significantly included devotees of philosophy, in particular Aristotelians (Singer 2014). He soon shone as a self-publicizing medical practitioner; he also gave public lectures and anatomical demonstrations in a highly competitive intellectual environment (see Lib. Prop. 1; Praen. 4–5; Barton 1994; von Staden 1995, 1997; Mattern 2008; Gleason 2009; Salas 2020). Much of his anatomical work, as well as the inception of two great works central to the establishment of his reputation, The Function of the Parts of the Body (UP) and The Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (PHP), belongs to this early period. The former text aims to establish the purposive, indeed divine, construction, understood in relation to its particular function (chreia), of every anatomical feature of the body (see further section 5 below), and explicitly models itself on Aristotelian biological work. The latter constitutes both an exposition of Platonic tripartite psychology, with a vigorous polemic against the Stoic monist alternative, and a synthesis of this Platonic view with Galen’s physiology of brain, heart and liver (see further below, section 7); it contains an account of the famous experiment whereby the function of the brain—in Galen’s terms, the fact that it is the seat of the “leading-part” of the soul—is demonstrated by ligation of the spinal cord of a live pig.