62 PHILO'S POLITICS
disposition; he must actually have the ruling power, the active gift.
Many a man might look like a ruler, and be extremely intelligent, and
yet lack the power of leadership which lifted his words into commands.
This, Philo means, was Joseph's ultimate gift in the SuvaMic Xoywv. The
true ruler must be endowed with such a power of speech that he needs
no compulsion with it: the people are so captivated at his very words
that they rush forward spontaneously to obey.^74
By virtue of his possessing such a character, and having lived such a
life, Philo concludes, Joseph showed himself to be the ideal v)Y£Muv, or
prefect of Egypt.^75
De Josepho seems to me, then, to have been written from first to last
with a single purpose, namely to insinuate to its gentile readers the po
litical philosophy which Jews wished gentiles to believe was theirs. Ittook the opportunity to suggest that the real source for the highest po
litical ideal of the East, the ideal of a divinely appointed and guided
ruler, had had its truest presentation in Jewish literature, and highest
exemplification at a time when a Jew was, in contemporary language,
prefect of Egypt. In a sense the treatise presents at the same time an
other aspect of the familiar and fantastic claim of hellenistic Jews, that
the Greeks had some great ideas in philosophy because they had had the
sense to borrow them from their source, the Jewish scriptures. Here, in
political philosophy, Philo is accepting the kingly ideal of the age: he
even goes within a hair's breadth of admitting the current corollary of
the ideal, namely that the exalted king was really a divine person; but
he traces the notion back to the Torah of the Jews. Philo apparently felt
that it was very important that gentiles scrutinizing Judaism should
break down in their own minds the general prejudice that Jews were a
misfit in contemporary society: quite the reverse, he represents, the gen
tiles might well find the basic principles of politics clarified in Jewish
presentation as in no other.
The treatise is written with a finish of rhetorical form, a vividness,
which make it one of the most readable tracts from the period. It will
be recalled that Philo has himself given the receipt for this sort of po
litical indirectness:
The politicus must not just talk, but must have a two-fold manner of speech,
- On the significance of spontaneous obedience and of the king's logos see my "Hellenistic
Kingship," 88 ff. Cf., Cicero, De Legibus, III, 2: "magistratum legem esse loquentem." - Jos., 270.