32 PHILO'S POLITICS
remain Jews, to conciliate the Romans when necessary, but to live confi
dent within themselves of their own unmeasured superiority, and as
sured that the God of justice would some day overturn these Roman up
starts and give to Jews their proper place at the head of the world.
Joseph appears in other parts of the great Allegory with the same sig
nification. In the first book of De Somniis, Joseph is explained as
belonging not to the pure ascetic, not to the utterly base. His coat of
many colors represents the fact that he is a mixture of the two.
He wore the extremely variegated web of the politeia, in which a very tiny
portion of truth is mingled with many and large portions of lies, probabilities,
plausibilities, and conjectures, the sort of things from which all the sophists of
Egypt sprang up, as well as the augurs, ventriloquists, soothsayers, and those
skilled decoyers, enchanters, and spell-binders from whose insidious arts it is
very difficult to escape. Wherefore Moses showed the insight of a philosopher
in introducing this cloak as being defiled with blood, since the whole life of a
man engaged in political affairs is defiled, for he makes war and others make
war on him, and he is the target for missiles and weapons thrown by unreck-
oned chance contigencies. Just scrutinize the too imbroiled leader of the
people upon whom the affairs of the state depend, without being alarmed by
those who hold him in admiration. You will find that many diseases lurk in
him, that he is entangled in many disasters, which try violently to throttle
his soul and imperceptibly wrestle with it and seek to overthrow it and to
cast it down, either because the multitude are dissatisfied with his leadership,
or because a more powerful rival is attacking him. For Envy (4>06voc;) is a
harsh enemy, hard to be rid of, who always fastens himself to reputed pros
perity, and whom one cannot easily escape.^45
This is the politician. Philo is again aware that, himself a politician,
he is impugning his own character. So his reaction is similar to those
we have already seen, when he cries out in the next sentence:
Why should we vaunt ourselves in the fact that the florid politeia is draped
about us like a costly garment, deceived by its manifest comeliness, but not
perceiving its invisible and dangerous ugliness, its covert insidiousness? Let
us then put off this flowery robe and put on the sacred one woven with the
brocade of the virtues.^46
But there is no reason to think that Philo ever did so.
In another treatise of the Allegory, De Mutatione Nominum, Philo
speaks of Joseph (and oddly with him of Benjamin) as similarly typify-
- Som., i, 220-223. 46. Ibid., 224 f.