36 PHILO'S POLITICSis Polybius' regular translation of the Latin legatus. It is known from
Livy that a group of ten men were sent out more maiorum to adjust
the legal problems of new provinces, men whose usual title was legati
iuridici,^61 and it was to do the same work in Egypt that the iuridicus
Alexandreae accompanied the Egyptian prefect. To this officer, it seems,
Philo is referring. For while the usual Greek title of the official was
SiKaioSoTiQc,^63 Philo preferred to use the more general term oujaPouXoc as
being sufficiently intelligible without being quite so direct. All through
these passages the indirectness of approach is obviously studied, and
with reason. Now it is notable that Philo represents such an officer as
trying to get the Jew, the "wise man," to give up his insistence upon his
own legal tradition, and to accept as an adequate substitute the Roman
official legal adjustments for the realm. This attack on Judaism seems to
have been much more general, and more dangerous, than the direct at
tempt of the prefect to make the Jews abandon their Sabbath. Philo
calls these legal adjustments men's contractual relations (oujj(36Aaia), to
bring out by the pun that they are the creation of the ounpouAoc, and at
the same time to belittle them in contrast with the divine laws of his
own race, which are "the principles of equality and the essentials of
life." Philo seems to be telling his readers that the judgments and legal
arrangements made by the iuridicus are, in comparison with the law of
Moses, conventions as contrasted with valid law, the profane as con
trasted with the sacred, the effect of which is to pervert any social rela
tionships between men. It is this type of general criticism of the Roman
system which Philo has been seen to bury deepest in allegory during his
discussion of Joseph's dream, for it would have estranged the most lib
eral governors from the Jews.
The iuridici do not seem to have been always so anti-Jewish. Since
Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, is also called in the Bible by the nameReu-el^63 which Philo translates "pastoral care of God," Philo can dis
tinguish the iuridicus who, full of "arrogance," tried to dissuade the
Jews from insisting upon legal distinctiveness, from the iuridicus who
upheld the Jews in their loyalty. For there is a story of Jethro in Exodus
xviii that on one occasion he came to Moses and found him overbur-
- xxxi, 11, 18 (202 B.C); xxxvii, 55, 4 (190 A.D.): see von Premerstein in Paully-Wissowa,
XII, 1149. - See s.v. "Iuridicus in Aegypten" in Paully-Wissowa, X, 1151 ff. (Rosenberg), and Momm-
sen, Provinces of the Roman Empire, II, 268. - Exod. ii, 18.