28 PHILO'S POLITICS
and beset by great uncertainty, and like the blind I need a staff and guide;
for perhaps if I had support I should not stumble or slip.^30The passage that follows is too long to quote.^31 Philo points out that
these people who know the ideal way of life are the only guides through
its complexities, but he admits that when he does temporarily come out
of his habitual intoxication with political concerns he is torn between
regarding the best guides who counsel detachment as friends or ene
mies. His own life is of course not the ideal. But now for the moment
(KOU VUV), while he is temporarily writing in quiet he will renounce the
dreaming Joseph of politics no less sharply than the true counsellors
do.^32
To this struggle between Philo the philosopher and Philo the man of
public affairs we shall return in the next chapter. Here Philo's hope of
not being utterly condemned for his political activities lies in the change
of Joseph's own later life. In his old age Joseph turned to better things.
Beginning with his rejection of bodily pleasure as represented in Poti-
phar's wife he, an exile in Egypt from his brethren who typified the
nobler counsellors, asserted
his desire for continence and zeal for piety; he claimed the goods of his kins
men and father from which he seemed disinherited, and deemed it right
that he should again possess that portion of virtue which was properly his
own. So gradually going on to better things, as though he were seated upon
the pinnacle and ultimate goal of his own life, he announced what he had
accurately learned from his own experience, namely that he belonged to
God.^33
Once he had reached this condition his brothers could return to him
and be reconciled. So Philo, who also follows these men, at whatever a
distance, finds comfort in Joseph's change of mind. At the end Joseph's
ultimate alienation from material things was victoriously symbolized by
the fact that his bones were carried off and buried with his fathers, not
left in fleshly Egypt. Such, we understand, is Philo's ultimate hope. He
must carry on his present mode of life still for a time. Yet he knows that
the life of detachment is far superior, and hopes at the end to be able to
return to it. When one reflects that Philo as an old man has to become
involved in the most perilous political undertaking of his career, one
- Som., ii, 101 f. 31. Ibid., 103-109.
- Ibid., 104. 33. Ibid., 106 f. Cf. Gen. 1, 19.