Galen’s court career apparently continued through the reigns of Marcus’ successors, Commodus (180–92) and Septimius Severus (193–211); this later phase of his career includes some of his major medical writings, including the completion of the magnum opus The Method of Healing (MM), as well as the production of much of his extremely voluminous series of works on drugs, and equally voluminous body of commentaries on Hippocrates (together constituting nearly half his extant output). Galen lived through both Commodus’ notorious reign of terror and a disastrous fire, in 192, in which he lost a substantial personal library: both experiences are described in a recently-discovered ethical work, Avoiding Distress (Ind.), which also adds to our knowledge of his extraordinary scholarly activity, including not least his work on the Aristotelian tradition (see Petit 2019). It is possible, but not certain, that Galen’s extant ethical writings should also be dated to this later phase of his life (after 192). Towards the end of his life, certainly, he wrote a “philosophical testament”, My Own Doctrines (Prop. Plac.), which gives a concise but important insight into his attitudes to a range of philosophical questions (see below, §3.4).