234 JEROME CARDAN 



of whom he speaks in terms of praise inflated enough 

 to be ridiculous, were it not for the accompanying note 

 of pathos. After celebrating the almost divine char- 

 acter of this nobleman, his munificence and his super- 

 human abilities, he goes on : " What could there be in 

 me to win the kindly notice of such a patron ? Certainly 

 I had done him no service, nor could he hope I should 

 ever do him any in the future, I, an old man, an outcast 

 of fortune, and prostrated by calamity. In sooth, there 

 was naught about me to attract him ; if indeed he found 

 any merit in me, it must have been my uprightness." 



Powerful friends are never superfluous, and Cardan 

 seems to have needed them in Rome as much as in 

 Bologna. In 1573 he again hints at plots against his 

 life, but almost immediately after recording his suspicions 

 he goes on to suggest that his danger had arisen chiefly 

 from his ignorance of the streets of Rome, and from the 

 uncouth manners of the populace. " Many physicians, 

 more cautious than myself, and better versed in the 

 customs of the place, have come by their death from 

 similar cause." The danger, whatever its nature, seems 

 to have threatened him as a member of the practising 

 faculty at Rome rather than as the persecuted ex-teacher 

 of Pavia and Bologna. Rodolfo Sylvestro was not 

 the only one of his former associates near him in his 

 old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who had been 

 his famulus at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at 

 Rome. 



In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring 

 about his dismissal from the Professorship at Bologna, 

 Cardan indulges in the reflection that these men unwill- 

 ingly did him good service, that is, they procured him 

 leisure which he might use in the completion of his un- 

 finished works, and in the construction of fresh monu- 



