DIRECT 9which they had gone to limits allowed by their law in recognizing his
sovereignty. They had taken this decree to Flaccus and asked him to
forward it to Gaius. Flaccus had promised to do so, and then had sup
pressed the document, making it appear, says Philo, that the Jews were
the only disloyal and ungracious subjects of the new emperor. When
Agrippa came to Alexandria the Jews showed him a copy of the decree,
and Agrippa himself sent it on to Gaius with a statement of how Flac
cus had withheld it. The story of the honorific decree breaks off in
Philo's narrative with no especial connection with what follows. As the
text now is the reader might assume that it was the arrival of this de
cree to Gaius which prompted him to come to the rescue of the Jews in
Alexandria. For when matters were at their worst Gaius suddenly sent
from Rome a centurion with his guard to arrest Flaccus. In the trial
which followed the two men who had led him to turn against the Jews
were his chief accusers. Flaccus was condemned, humiliated, exiled, and
soon afterwards executed.
With this In Flaccum closes. Why did Philo write it, and for whom?
At first sight it appears far indeed from being a "cautious" treatment of
politics or of politicians, but its purpose and audience are concealed by
the fact that its beginning is lost. This loss of the first part of the work,
together with the problem of fitting what we have of it into Eusebius'
report of Philo's writings,^14 has made considerable controversy. It seems
useless to go over the ground in detail again. In spite of the fact that
Lewy^15 still oddly seems to follow Schiirer,^16 on this point Massebieau^17
and Cohn^18 seem certainly to have been right. Their conclusion is that
Philo originally wrote a work in five books describing the misfortunes
of the Jews under Gaius, of which we have an abridgment in Legatio.
But, says Eusebius, Philo wrote a "second treatise" (Seurspov OUYYP^MM^,
which could not possibly mean the second book of the first treatise, as
Schiirer understood it) describing in greater detail the sufferings of
- HE, II, v, vi.
- Hans Lewy, Philon von Alexandrien VON DEN MACHTERWEISEN GOTTES, Berlin,
- History of the Jewish People, II, iii, 349-354. This represents the point of view of the
second German edition. In later editions he slighdy modified his judgment, but not essentially,
because of the arguments of Massebieau in the study cited in the following note. His modifica
tions are available in English in the Index Volume, 97-99. - "Le Classement des oeuvres de Philon," Bibliothbque de 1't.cole des Hautes Etudes, Sci
ences Religieuses, I (1889), 65-78. - Einteilung und Chronologte der Schriften Philos, Leipzig, 1899, 421-424: reprint from
Philologus, Supplementband VII.