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

io6 PHILO'S POLITICS

there are certain royal potencies (Suva|j£ic J3aoiAiKa!) in the sperm of rulers
from their first ejection. For as the bodily and spiritual resemblances are pre­
served in form and shape and motion, in actions and activities, within the
seminal principles (Aoyot onepnaTiKo!), so it is likely that resemblance with
respect to leadership would be sketched at least in outline in the same seminal
principles.^87 Who then would dare to teach me when even before my birth,
while I still lay in the womb, nature's workshop, I was framed into an auto­
crat? It is ignorance teaching one who knows! Where do private citizens get
the slightest right to peek into the purposes of a ruling soul (yjyqioviKK)
tyvxh)? Yet in their shameless presumption they dare act as hierophants and
mystagogues of the secrets of rulership though they are barely listed among
the initiates.^88

This is a statement of the current royal philosophy in the form which

we have seen Philo can use for allegorizing the Patriarchs, and which
he has admitted in theory for kings. But when Gaius bases his claim to

royal right not on his official position, but on his peculiar nature and

constitution, Philo regards it as sacrilege. Again when Marcus Silanus,
the emperor's father-in-law, repeated Macro's mistake and tried to be­

come Gaius' mentor, Gaius resented the admonitions on the ground,
Philo says, that he himself embodied the four virtues of wisdom, con­

trol, courage, and justice in the superlative degree.^89 And Silanus, like
Macro, was put out of the way.

These murders, together with the earlier one of the co-emperor, the

young Tiberius, were by no means popular, says Philo, but came to be
generally condoned, the executions of Macro and Silanus for their pre­

sumption, that of young Tiberius as forestalling possible civil wars be­
tween the two emperors later. For "that rulership cannot be shared is

an unchangeable law of Nature."^90

Gaius had only begun setting himself off from other men. He no longer
thought it right that he should abide within the limits of human nature, but
began to lift his head in aspiration of being recognized as a god.^91

87. On the ^oyoi CftSQfAOiTixoC, a spiritual quality in the seed by which resemblance was
    passed on from one generation to the next, see Max Heinze, Die Lehre vom Logos (1872), 107-
    125; Hans Meyer, Geschichte der Lehre von den Keim\raften (1914), 5-75. The idea was pri­
    marily Stoic, but was widely adopted by other schools. On Gaius' glorifying and deifying his
    ancestors see Suetonius, Caligula, 23.


88. Legat., 54-56. 89. Ibid., 64.


89. Ibid., 68: dxoiv(Dvr|TOV &QXTJ, Geo*N,dg tpwyewc; dxCvnroc;.


90. Ibid., 75.