4 o PHILO'S POLITICS
appear upon the surface of our earthly and corporeal nature, when the face
is held loftily and the eyebrows are contracted. For there are some men who
come near to one with their feet, but with their chests and head and neck
lean back, and are actually borne backwards and bend away like a balance.
The result is that with one half of their body, in consequence of the position
of their feet, they project forward; but they project backwards with the upper
portion of their chests, drawing themselves back like people the muscles and
tendons of whose necks are in pain so that they cannot bend in a natural
manner. But men of this kind it was determined to put an end to, as one may
see from the records of the Lord and the divine history of the Scriptures.^71Certainly in the lost Greek original one of these words for pride was
TU<})OC, and the caricature Philo is drawing is likewise again recogniz
able. It is the Roman "arrogance" (TU^OC), the thing which through its
hateful representatives is destroying both divine and human laws,
against which Philo is raging. Every detail of this description of their
absurd stiffness is familiar from other descriptions of rulers, who studied
such rigidity in order to appear the superhuman king. Similar descrip
tions have come to us from a wide range of writers and periods.^72 The
Jews who read this passage must have known what rulers Philo had in
mind, and have gloated with him at their eventual destruction by the
God of the Jews. Philo is saying to the Jews that their Scriptures prom
ise them that the hated Roman "arrogance" is to be laid low.
These passages of Philo have told us what we might have expected,
but had no record of. The Jews of Alexandria, for whom Philo was
spokesman, hated and despised their Roman masters. To the Jew a Ro
man ruler was normally a wild beast with power, and often with incli
nation, to devour or crush him. As such the Roman had to be concili
ated in every way possible, since there was no hope of successfully
opposing him. And yet the Jew had not the first thought of surrender
ing his heritage to become merely a Roman subject. He would go on
unobtrusively observing his peculiar traditions, and defend them as best
he could. He would make himself appear to the Roman as so exemplary
a citizen in every other way that he was worth protecting in what
would have seemed to the Roman an unaccountably passionate alle
giance to the harmless but silly customs of a race. When the Roman at
tacked Judaism directly, then the Jew was willing to suffer to the
- QG, ii, 24.
- Xenophon, Cyropaedia, VIII, i, 40-42; Lucian, Cataplus, 16; Gallus, 12; Adv. Indoctum,
21; Hercules, 3; Ammianus, XVI, x, 9, 10.