The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory, with a General Bibliography of Philo

90 PHILO'S POLITICS

do both Tacitus^17 and Suetonius^18 speak, and legal language long kept

the same usage.^19 Since this is true, Greek writers who wished to abuse

mob rule could hardly berate democracy in the traditional way, else

people might think it a slur on the Roman government. And just as

obviously it was excellent politics to praise monarchy or kingship as the

ideal polity, doing it, as the Romans themselves would have had to do,

in the form of praise of ideal democracy. We need not then be con­

fused any longer by Philo's language. To him "ochlocracy" was anath­

ema. The ideal government was monarchy in its Roman form of "de­

mocracy," kingship in its best sense, and it is as kingship that we shall

discuss it hereafter.

Much of Philo's theory of the king has already appeared in connec­
tion with his discussions of Joseph.^20 It has been seen that his thought of
the king was determined by the current hellenistic notions best pre­
served in the Neo-Pythagorean fragments on kingship, and that in pre­
senting the ideal prefect in an allegory of Joseph Philo used almost
every aspect of the royal theory, even to calling the ruler Seek, to show
how Joseph was the true pattern for the ruler to follow. More directly
stated, he wanted the prefect to be a ruler after the categories of the
kingly ideal, and forced the details of that ideal into the traditional nar­

rative of the career of Joseph so that the gentile reader might suppose
that the real source of the conception was in the Jewish Bible, and that
Roman rulers might feel themselves in sympathy with Jews.
But the theory appears in many other connections in Philo's writings,
the more important of which must be recalled. God is the ideal king,

for example. This I have already discussed at length elsewhere,^21 and so
will here quote but a single instance, one not previously cited. God, says
Philo,

has no such autocratic rule as a despot, but exercises the beneficent (cuepy£-
TIKOV) rule characterized by a power which is uniformly merciful and gives

17. See Annates, I, 12 and passim.


18. See for example Caligula, 26. In Divus Augustus, 28, Augustus despaired, it is said, of
    "restoring the republic," and took the primacy only to establish the Republic on a safe and per­
    manent basis.


19. See for example the Lex de imp. Vesp. v. 16. 119 Br.; in J. N. Madvig, Die Verfassung und
    Verwaltung des romischen Staates, I, 541. It is one of the many accurate reflections of Philo's
    usage in Bellier's dedication, quoted in the Appendix (see below, pp. 121 ff.), that Bellier refers
    to the French kingdom of the XVI. century as the Republique.


20. See above, pp. 44 ff. 21. See my By Light, Light, chapter I.