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

no PHILO'S POLITICS

way to recall to his Roman readers their own objections to Caligula, but

from the point of view of the religious Jew. To this he skillfully brings

around the argument. For hoary and familiar as the identification of a

ruler with deity might be, and much as the Jews themselves had

adopted of the current theories of kingship in the East, they had never

taken this last step. Augustus and Tiberius might be divine in office and

in function, but the Jew, for reasons of his own, refused to admit divin­

ity in them. For Philo says that what Jewish Law Gaius tried to destroy

was not non-essential,

but the greatest point of all, for he had deified, at least in appearance, the
nature of man, which has come into existence and will perish, into the nature
which has no beginning or end. And this the Jewish nation judged to be the
most horrible form of sacrilege.^100

That is, Philo persists to the end in refusing to allow the Greek and
Roman in politics to use the word "divine" with the same freedom he
himself uses it for the Patriarchs. Yet I cannot read Legatio with a sense

that I am reading "mere" theory. Philo draws a very fine line between
the true "animate law" and the "counterfeit" one. But I am confident
that if Philo was ready to face death rather than endure the "counter­
feit," he was just as sincere in believing that the salvation of society lay
in the true king.

But why did Jews like Philo, who described the king in exactly the
same terms as the Pythagoreans, refuse, when claimed for an actual
Roman emperor, to recognize the divinity they otherwise theoretically
admitted? The conventional answer to this question is that worship of
the king, or any form of veneration which indicated that the king was

super-human, was an offence against Jewish, and later against Chris­
tian, monotheism. However true this may have been for orthodox Jews,
for Philo and the Christians it seems to me very dubious. In the first
place, it is certain that no intelligent Greek or Roman dreamed that in
calling the king "divine," and giving him ritualistic tribute, he was

identifying the king with supreme deity, or setting up a rival or parallel
to the Creator and Lord of the universe. "Divine," Oeloc, is really a
word which must often be translated by our word "godly," a word
which etymologically might give as much offence when applied to a hu­
man being as "divine" has done. Yet "godly" can be used by us freely

109. Legat., 118.