DIRECT 5
only as a last and most desperate measure. This is not nebulosity in
politics but the shrewdest practicality. Plato and Aristotle had no suc
cessors as political theorists in the Hellenistic Age largely because the
hellenistic rulers wanted to hear, if anything, only flattering descrip
tions of ideal kingship, so that politicians had to put their criticisms or
suggestions in the form of almost imperceptible innuendoes within
idealistic rhetoric.
Philo was keenly aware that it was suicide for one in his position to
speak his mind frankly,^10 and thereby at once shows his political real
ism. In the midst of his allegories Philo has concealed a statement
which is so much the epitome of his whole attitude toward the politics
of his day that it must be quoted at length:
As the good man is an observer not only of human life but also of things in
the universe, he is well aware how much has on occasion been blown in by
necessity, chance, opportunity, force, and lordly power (Suvaotxia), as well
as what plans and achievements, though mounting to heaven, these same
forces have scattered and destroyed by merely holding their breath. Conse
quently he will feel obliged to shield himself with caution (z\j\a$z\a.), for
caution is the proper protection against one's suffering sudden calamity, since
it seems to me that caution is for an individual what its wall is for a city. So
then are those people not out of their wits, completely mad, who are rash
enough to display inopportune frankness, and dare at times to speak and act
in defiance of kings and tyrants? They do not seem to perceive that they are
not only like animals putting their necks under the yoke, but that they are
betraying their whole bodies and souls, as well as their wives and children
and that especially kindred crowd and community of companions and rela
tions. Now it is possible for the charioteer and driver with all freedom to
goad his horses and urge them on, or to check them and hold them back
just as he wishes. So they are branded and beaten and mutilated and suffer
before they die every savage and pitiless torture, and then are led away to
execution and killed.
These are the rewards of untimely frankness, not of frankness as used by
people of discriminating judgment, but the rewards allotted to silliness, mad
ness, and incurable insanity. What do you mean? When a person sees a win
ter storm raging, and a heavy adverse gale, and a hurricane rushing down
and piling up the sea with waves, a time when one ought to lie in a harbour,
does he set sail and put out to sea? What pilot or skipper was ever so drunk
io. Although JiapQTjaia was in general an ideal of Philo which he frequendy praised (Spec,
iv, 74; Prob., 99 ff.; Heres, 5 ff.). See Geiger, 76 f.; E. Peterson, "Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte von
Ji<XQQr|0*ia" (in the Reinhold Seeberg Festschrift, 1929).