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

DIRECT 19

their seemingly impossible mission they would be a symbol of the fall

of the Jewish race before the mobs of any city who wanted to repeat the

plunder and violence of the Alexandrians. His last statement is that he

is now ready to go on to the "palinode," a word whose possible meaning

here has raised many interpretations. It is likely that it was some sort of

conclusion which told of the fall of Gaius, and which went back to the

theme of the introduction, the protecting providence of God for the

mystic suppliants and intercessors of humanity, the Jewish race.

What is most interesting for our purpose is to ask of Legatio as of In
Flaccum what Philo's purpose was in writing it, and for what audience
he intended it.
Philo wrote Legatio after the accession of Claudius,^60 and, it seems to
me, for presentation to that emperor, just as In Flaccum seems to be
designed for some new prefect in Alexandria. The latter is full of sug­
gestions for the proper conduct of the prefect's office, as well as of warn­
ing to one who would abuse his privileges. The same is true of Legatio

for the emperor. It has the most elaborate formulation of what was the
function of a proper ruler, and what effect he should have upon his sub­
jects and realm, though such formulation Philo himself never expresses

in his own name, but always puts into the mouth of another, such as
Macro. All that he will say in his own person about rulers appears in
the quite unexceptionable praise of the almost divine rules of Augustus

and Tiberius,^61 a passage which, I am sure, represents the Jewish com­
promise with the divinity of kingship as officially pronounced in the
honorific decree from Alexandria. The point is that Philo has so con­
structed the treatise, just as he did In Flaccum, that without writing a

passage in which he presumes to play the part of Macro and advise the
ruler, or speak out unsolicited on matters beyond his province, he has
written what in the end is a treatise almost directly concerned with the

province of rulership, and certainly one which leaves the clearest im­
pression of his ideas.

In both documents, too, the official function, for its success or failure,
is represented as hinging directly upon the attitude the ruler takes
toward the Jews. Philo's hatred of the Empire is veiled in his flattery of

a Roman who would respect Jewish "rights," but there is recurrent in-

60. Legat., 206.


61. Ibid., 136-161. On the way in which this passage harmonizes with Philo's political phi­
    losophy see below, pp. no ff.