14 PHILO'S POLITICS
senators for the death of their colleague Silanus, the knights for their
most conspicuous member, Macro, and the royal family because they
did not know who of them might not follow Tiberius' grandson.^40
It was because he saw himself becoming shut out from his human as
sociations, Philo says, that Gaius began to associate himself with divin
ity.^41 He first compared himself to the demigods (Oh that he had imi
tated their benefactions to mankind)^42 then to Hermes, Apollo, and
Ares.^43 By the time Philo has reached this stage in the narrative, his in
vective knows no restraint. He heaps upon Gaius every appalling name
for villain and public enemy he can muster. He a god indeed who was
not only a human being, but in his humanity was one who flouted every
virtue manifested by a deity!
While Gaius' character was thus decaying, the rest of the world de
plored the change, but met the mad man with flattery and acquiescence
in his raving pretensions. Only the Jews, because of their strict mono
theism, refused to concede an inch beyond what was lawful for them.^44
Accordingly they were left helpless. For Gaius had declared himself the
Law of the Empire, which meant, in his interpretation, that all previous
legal guarantees were done away, and royal favor become the only pro
tection. The old guarantees of rights given the Jews went with all the
others, and no royal favor took its place.^45 The Alexandrians were quick
to seize the opportunity to begin a pogrom. The preliminaries, as re
ported in In Flaccum, are omitted, but the sufferings themselves vividly
described. The culminating horror was not murder, pillage, rape, burn
ing alive, mutilation of corpses, but the setting up of images of Gaius as
deity in the synagogues, especially a great bronze statue of him in a
four-horse chariot, apparently as Apollo.^46
Such horrors, arising from the mad claims of Gaius, Philo goes on
elaborately to contrast with the characters and regimes of Augustus and
Tiberius. None of the hatred of the Roman rule as such, which has ap
peared and will appear more fully from the Allegorical Writings, is
here suggested. Instead, with rhetorical fulsomeness, Philo describes the
ideal Roman ruler as an instrument in God's hands to bring men all the
- LegaU, 74-75. 41. Ibid., 75. 42. Ibid., 78-92.
- Ibid., 93-113. 44. Ibid., 114-118.
- Ibid., 119. On these Jewish rights at Alexandria see the stele of Julius Caesar as reported
by Josephus, C. Ap., II, 37 (iv); Antiq., XIV, 188 (x, 1). - Legal., 120-137. Philo's horror at the representation of this sun god in a chariot within a
synagogue contrasts strangely with the mosaics in synagogues of Galilee a few centuries later
where the sun god in a four-horse chariot was depicted by Jews themselves on the floors!