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

DIRECT II

Jews, and the fatality of a prefect's abusing them. With it went another
and similar section which demonstrated that the fall of Sejanus had
been due to his having persecuted the Jews.^28
If the treatise was thus written for a gentile audience after the death
of Gaius, for whom could it have been devised if not for the new prefect

himself? Its thesis, which Schiirer rightly called "de mortibus perse-
cutorum," might well have been acceptable to Jewish readers, but in
that case the treatise would have been written for Jewish readers as this
is not. But under what circumstances would Philo, with his boasted
"caution," have dared write and publish such a document? Under few
circumstances, it must be admitted, except those of the few months suc­
ceeding the fall of Gaius, when Jewish chauvinism for once rose to the
surface in Alexandria. For when the Jews heard of Gaius' death they
actually took up arms against their former persecutors, and Claudius
had to instruct the new prefect to quiet the fighting. Then both Greeks

and Jews again sent an embassy to Rome, and this time Claudius up­
held the Jews in their claims of exemption from the imperial cult, and
in their traditional privileges. The Alexandrians, still not content, tried
to involve Agrippa, but Claudius vindicated him and instead con­
demned the arch conspirators in Alexandria, Isadore and Lampo, to

death. A final letter from the emperor to both Greeks and Jews in
Alexandria warned both parties to keep the peace, and so the trouble
was ended.^29 That is, following the tragedies of the pogroms came a pe­
riod in which the Jews were entirely vindicated, given imperial protec­
tion, and their chief enemies killed. At such a time it would not be at all

impossible that Philo wrote In Flaccum and published it. He may even
have taken it, at the head of a Jewish committee, and presented it to the
new prefect as the Jews' account and explanation of the earlier stages of
the controversy, an account in which a new confidence was but thinly
concealed.

The original title of In Flaccum was probably the title given the "sec­

ond treatise" by Eusebius, De Virtutibus, "On the Virtues," which now
appears as the alternate title of Legatio. It is very unlikely that Philo
would have published this writing with a title, "Against Flaccus,"
which simply made it a denunciation of Flaccus. The earlier part of the

28. Flac., 1.


29. See H. J. Bell, Juden und Griechen in romische Alexandrien, Leipzig, 1926. (Alte Orient,
    Beiheft ix.)