44 PHILO'S POLITICS
mind, one greater than is associated with a private citizen" (<PP 6 VYHI<I
euyevk Kal \id£ov Y\ k<zt' iSigjt/JV) ; he devoted great care to the training
of Joseph so that his natural gifts might not smoulder, but might shine
forth.^6 That is, the ideal man, Jacob, here recognizes in a true politicus
a. very high type of individual.
The imagery at once suggests the hellenistic idealism of the kingly
office and person, which I have treated more fully elsewhere.^7 The con
ception is so important for Philo, and in general so little understood,
that a brief summary must be inserted here. The collapse of the Greek
democracy turned men's eyes everywhere to monarchy as a solution of
state problems. In local government the tyrant was often given advice
as to how his rule might become truly royal, and so the state be secure
(get ouT/jpia) and the ruler himself be stable and the savior (OUTY\P) of
the state. In general the ruler was to do this by becoming lawful (vopu
M°<0 or just (SiKaioc), words largely synonymous to the Greek. This
conception was developed in accordance with each of the current the
ories of law. So far as possible the king was to leave unmolested the tra
ditional law of the state, and so guarantee the liberties and win the
cooperation of his subjects. But the law of the state was itself of divine
origin, at least ideally, to any Greek, or rested on divine sanction,
whether from originally having been formulated by a divinely inspired
lawgiver, or from the fact that any new legislation was subject to appeal
to divine oracles. In accordance with this notion of law the king as leg
islator was to be in conformity with divine or natural law. In explaining
how the king might be, or become, so, the old traditions of Homeric
kingship, where the king had and gave the precepts (9qjior£c) and
- Jos., 4; on the ExA.ajiiln.c; of paadeia see Dio Chrys., I, 70 f.
- See my "Hellenistic Kingship." To the material there used should be added: a fragment of
Ecphantus in Stob., AnthoL, IV, vi, 22 (Wachsmuth et Hense, IV, p. 244 f.), quoted below,
p. 98; Schol. in Homer. II., A, 340, b; Iamblichus, Vit. Pythag., 31; Clem. Alex., Stromata, II,
p. 122 (Stahlin); Suetonius, Julius, 77; Cicero, Rep., I, 52; De Legg., Ill, 2; Themistius, Orat.,
I, 15 b. In the Studien zur Geschichte der griechischen Lehre vom Staat, by Hermann Henkel
(Leipz., 1872), 2-37, there is a large collection of interesting material. See also Kenneth Scott,
"The Deification of Demetrius Poliorcetes," American Journal of Philology, XLIX (1928), 137-
166, 217-239; "Plutarch and the Ruler Cult," Transactions of the American Philological Asso
ciation, LX (1929), 117-135; W. W. Tarn, "Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,"
Proceedings of the British Academy, XIX (1933), 123-166. The idea as it appears in Seneca
(see especially De dementia, I, i, 2-4, iv, 1) lacks a "clearly defined conception" of the divinity
of the king, as A. J. Carlyle has seen (History of Medieval Political Theory, I, 31), just as do
Stoic references to the king in general. It is in the Pythagorean material that the notion is most
clearly at home. This I still hold in spite of the arguments of H. M. Fisch, "Alexander and the
Stoics," American Journal of Philology, LVIII (1937), 59-82.